During my most recent visit home to Tulsa, my partner and I were driving north on Denver Avenue downtown when something caught my eye as we cruised past—a small park on the west side of the street. Although it was already dark, something about the block seemed familiar, even though I was confident I had not set foot there anytime recently. “Oh wait, I know that place,” I exclaimed, pleased to be able to summon up a deeply archived memory. “My middle school Spanish class went there for this huge event with the president of Venezuela.”
My partner has become familiar with the oddities of Tulsa through over a decade of visits, and he was thus equally intrigued and unsurprised by this memory, unearthed many months before the politics of Venezuela—and its oil industry—would be thrust back into the international spotlight. Of course, we chuckled, a tiny neglected park downtown had hosted the president of Venezuela when I was in eighth grade. But in the next instant, with the hindsight of more than three decades, I quickly repositioned that spring day in the educational geography of my childhood. “Oh jeez, of course—Venezuela—that whole thing must have been something about oil.”
The small patch of concrete that had caught my eye was the Plaza of the Americas, an odd corner of downtown Tulsa, which like the Center of the Universe you would not necessarily know was there unless someone told you. The grand name of the plaza is not commensurate with its current condition of urban anonymity, given a bit of new life recently thanks to an installation by Tulsa Artist Fellowship alum Richard Zimmerman. As Ellen Ray recently observed in her appraisal of the collection of green fiberglass trees that make up Assembly, the plaza is today almost the opposite of a destination, where folks waiting for the bus or without anywhere else to go can simply sit in peace: “a place that’s rarely noticed is also a good place to be left alone.”
But there was a moment when the eyes of not just Tulsa but much of the nation and the world were trained on the Plaza of the Americas: May 3, 1991, when a delegation from Venezuela, including its sitting president, presented a bust of South American liberator Simón Bolívar to Mayor Rodger Randle, who accepted the sculpture on behalf of the citizens of Tulsa, and in the process rededicated this small parcel of downtown as a symbol of hemispheric unity. Improbably, I along with my eighth grade Spanish teacher and a dozen classmates were present for this moment, a rare visit by a foreign head of state to our city.
Like many young people who are unwitting witnesses to history, I did not really understand the significance of the proceedings that day. But this unlikely event in an improbable corner of my hometown became top of mind as I awoke to the news in the early days of January that the United States had chosen to involve itself in the political life of Venezuela through the diplomatically and legally dubious capture of Nicolás Maduro.
As I have come to learn, the ceremony I attended on May 3, 1991 was indeed all about Tulsa’s ties to the petroleum industry, or rather the “energy” industry as I have been taught to euphemize it in polite company. But the event holds more complex significance as I reflect on it today, a relic of a more benevolent and orderly mode of politics and business and a reminder of how much the vibes of Chamber-of-Commerce capitalism have shifted in thirty years.
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