Kierstin Wilkins, English + History, Class of 2022
Brief Summary: Houston is one of America’s fastest gentrifying cities. Throughout Bryan Washington’s Lot we see the dynamics of gentrification play out by how the central family all attempts to escape their corner of Houston literally or figuratively. This paper examines the implications of the narrator choosing repeatedly to stay in Houston.
According to a recent analysis done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Houston had the fastest rate of gentrification out of the four major Texas cities during the 21st century. The report shows that the median income of residents within three miles from downtown Houston has increased by 67% (Su). Economist Yichen Su, a researcher at the bank, speculates that this increase in gentrification could be attributed to the decreased crime rates of Houston’s urban core in comparison to the 1990s, the desire for shorter commutes, or a preference for a closer proximity to restaurants and nightlife. Regardless of the causes, the effects have included the displacement of black and Hispanic populations in Houston. The pervasiveness of the gentrification of Houston can be seen throughout Washington’s book Lot, which is a collection of short stories centered on different neighborhoods of Houston. Around half of his short stories feature the same family in the East End, whose members include the narrator, his siblings Jan and Javi, their Ma, and their father. They own and work at a restaurant serving mostly black and brown patrons of the neighborhood. Gradually throughout the book, members of the family leave Houston and the restaurant, and Ma even goes so far as to sell it in the novel’s titular story “Lot”. Most of the family members seem to be searching for various forms of escape in response to gentrification and poverty under capitalism.
In one form of escape, the father cheats on Ma and chooses to leave his area of Houston for a more “comfortable” woman in a “cleaner” neighborhood (Washington 35-36). When the narrator accompanies his dad to the woman, the narrator says, “The block we pulled onto was cleaner than ours. It had alleys and potholes, but there were blancos too” (Washington 35). Although we do not fully understand the father’s motivation for cheating on Ma, it is implied that life with this new woman is easier. One day, the father leaves and does not come back, and the remaining family members struggle to deal with the father’s abandonment, in addition to their economic situation. Interestingly, another member of the family seems to find her escape by abandonment. Jan, the sister of the narrator, is a periphery character for the majority of the novel because of this reason. Around three-quarters of the way through the narrative, Jan marries a “whiteboy” and has a baby with him, leaving the house and her family entirely. The short story “Fannin” gives the reader insight into Jan’s perspective on this leaving. When driving with her friend Yolanda one night, Jan says, “Yo was the only one who knew where I came from. I told her about my brothers, and our home above the kitchen. I’d tell her how Javi essentially ran a brothel out of his bedroom, or how, some nights, my mother woke up just to sit at the dinner table” (Washington, 150). Yolanda then responds, “Say, Weren’t you and I lucky to make it out of the crazy?” (Washington, 150). Jan seems to agree with Yolanda, thinking her life away from her family “was worth all of that shit. Javi and the rest of them. It happened, but I’m here–and where are they? I could not even tell you.” (Washington, 150). With Jan, physical escape from her old home is the only way she can move on.
Javi, who is the brother of the narrator, however, does not physically leave. Instead, he uses excessive masculinity as a coping mechanism. After his father leaves, Javi tells the narrator, “to be tough. That it was the only way a man did things in life” (Washington, 40). He then tries to fulfill the image of what he believes a man should be throughout the narrative. He deals drugs for the first portion of the novel to provide money to Ma because he adheres to the idea that men should provide for their family. When someone offers to lend him money to help with this task, he declines, telling the offerer “to chill” and later telling the narrator that to be a man means “You do what the fuck you have to for your own” (Washington 64). Javi clings to a mantra of ‘That’s what it is to be a man’ in response to his father leaving. Javi only physically leaves the family after he is kicked out after taking the blame for the narrator’s pickpocketing. After being thrown out, he enlists. The military serves as the ultimate masculine exit for Javi from his neighborhood. Along with appealing to Javi’s masculinity, the military also dresses itself up as an escape from the pressures of an impoverished life under capitalism, since it often offers things like “fast-tracked citizenship; relief from the financial pressure of attending college; real employment prospects” (Martin). Sadly, while Javi is in the military, he dies in a car crash. Javi is perhaps the most tragic of all escapes because he thought he was doing what was best for his family by following the ideal of what a man should be, but his escape led to his own death.
Unlike Javi and Jan, Ma and the narrator stay in Houston in their home. At least, Ma does so initially, fueled by a hope that “You all come back eventually” (Washington, 30). When Javi still lived with his family, he called Ma and the narrator “idiotas” for harboring this hope (Washington, 33). This hope of a better future fuels Ma’s desire to keep the restaurant going. For a long time, Ma holds out against selling it, having her children work in the back. The father was the one who first conceptualized the idea of the restaurant, and it serves as a symbol of the life they could have had. As a business owner, the restaurant gives Ma agency over her source of income, and Ma “planned on leaving the restaurant to the three of us” (Washington, 94). However, after Javi dies and Jan has her baby, Jan tells the narrator that “[Ma’s] got a plan… Property value’s going up… I saw at least two new buildings on the drive over. And some new families in the neighborhood” (Washington, 100) The narrator then thinks, “By new she means white. We don’t even have to say it anymore” (Washington, 100) The losses of Javi and Jan and the father, along with the pressure of gentrification erode the mother’s resolve. After selling the restaurant, Ma decides to go to Louisiana, where her family was, and she offers to bring the narrator with her, but the narrator refuses, despite having no one else in Houston. Before Ma left, the narrator could able to claim that he wanted to stay to support her.
His motivation for staying becomes less clear after Ma leaves. Many characters, including Ma, ask him to figure out “why [he’s] staying” in Houston (Washington, 215). The narrator has experienced a lot of pain in Houston. Along with his father leaving and his brother dying, his first love, Robert, was evicted when the narrator was young, and then his second love interest, Rick, was killed. Jan seems to think the narrator is staying in Houston because “You think… that [Javi’s] coming back. Like, if we all stay in one place, that he will stick his head up from six feet under”(Washington, 108). The narrator tells his third main love interest, a whiteboy who asked for Spanish lessons, that “if somebody gave [him] an out, they wouldn’t have time to finish their sentence” 134. Interestingly, though, after the whiteboy gets a promotion to somewhere in Dallas, he offers the narrator an out, and the narrator refuses. The whiteboy tells the narrator, “there was nothing left for [him] in Houston, he said that [the narrator] didn’t have to punish [himself], and he said [the narrator’s] name, [his] actual name” (Washington, 140). After this, the narrator walks out on the whiteboy and stays in Houston.
For a while I, like the whiteboy, believed that the narrator stayed in Houston as a form of self-punishment, and I believed like Jan that he was somehow deluding himself into thinking that staying where Javi had been would somehow keep him closer to his brother’s memory. At one point the narrator says, “With Ma gone, the house is an album. A literal Greatest Hits. Here’s where Javi got bopped for talking big…. Here’s where Javi taught me how to box, where he told me I’d never be anything…” (Washington, 197). However, Washington is interested in more than just the narrator’s grief for his brother–although that is certainly present. In an interview with NPR, Washington makes clear that he cares about the community in Houston and the effects of gentrification on those communities. He says,
“And even in the past two or three years, you can see the destruction of neighborhood institutions in favor of glossier buildings, glossier cafes, glossier bars. And it’s really sad because the communities that have made a life in that part of town and in other parts of town across Houston have literally been through everything that you can throw at a community” (Washington).
The narrator of Lot thinks about these issues, as well, commenting on gentrification in his neighborhood:
“But after the storm, they pushed the rest of us out, too: if you couldn’t afford to rebuild, then you had too. If you broke the bank rebuilding, then you couldn’t stay. If you couldn’t afford to leave, and you couldn’t afford to fix your life, then what you had to do was watch the neighborhood grow further away from you. The Hernandez twins are gone. Tatian’s son is gone. Larissa is gone, Santiago is gone, the Garcias are gone, and the Pham family, too. Then there’s Griselda’s place, this dance studio she runs with her moms. But instead of selling, or letting someone come in and flip it, she lets yuppies from wherever host their yoga in the back. She’s in there every morning, checking them in, and every other night she’s posted up to kick them out.” (Washington, 202)
This quote suggests that staying in Houston means more to the narrator than holding onto memories of his brother. This is made even clearer through the interactions the narrator has with a man named Miguel who seems to be the narrator’s new and final love interest. Unlike all of the people in his life, Miguel asks the narrator to think about what would happen if he stayed in Houston. Miguel says, “What if you stayed… You could leave… I know that. And I know you know. Pero you don’t have to… We could try … I want you to think about it… I want you to think about what could happen. Because I think it could” (Washington, 220). It’s implied that Miguel is talking about staying in Houston, but Miguel is also talking about the narrator staying in a relationship with him. Miguel is the first boy that the narrator lets stay the night in his home, and offering to stay seems to be the key to connecting with the narrator. The whiteboy wanted the narrator to leave his home, but Miguel wants to embrace the narrator’s past and be a part of his future in Houston.
During this exchange, Miguel says the narrator’s full name, Nicolàs. Although the whiteboy also said the narrator’s full name, the narrator did not share it with the reader at that time. In letting Miguel name him and letting the reader know his name at this time, it seems that staying is a crucial part of Nicolas’s identity. Houston is his home, it’s “[his] city”, and if he left then “that would be the end of [his family’s] story” (220 and 221). Despite the financial pressures to leave his home caused by the gentrification in his neighborhood, the book ends on an ambiguously hopeful note that the narrator will stay with Miguel in Houston. For Nicolàs, staying means much more than self-punishment or delusional grief — it means history, community, and family, and Nicolàs’s decision to stay in Houston is its own form of empowerment.
Works Cited
Martin, Nick. “The Military Views Poor Kids as Fodder for Its Forever Wars.” The New Republic, 7 Jan. 2020,
Su, Yichen. “Gentrification Transforming Neighborhoods in Big Texas Cities.” Dallasfed.org,Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Washington, Bryan. “Author Bryan Washington Tells Some Of The Many Stories Of Houston In ‘The Lot’.”, NPR, 15 March 2019.
Washington, Bryan. Lot: Stories. Riverhead Books, an Imprint of Penguin Random House, 2019.
