These days the Kemah Boardwalk is a glitzy, overbuilt amusement park where competing pop songs blare from speakers and the smells of fried fish, children’s sweat, and Houston’s overripe air waft over throngs of visitors. But I have never heard Bruce Springsteen’s “Galveston Bay” played there—a tune that unlocks a shocking secret about this popular tourist trap.
California-based journalist Kirk Wallace Johnson was driving through the Sierra Nevadas in December 2018 to fish in a river when that “Springsteen song came on about a white shrimper planning to kill a Vietnamese refugee in Galveston Bay over turf. It was such
