In this paper, I will reconstruct the spatial history of Shargiyya (Eastern Province), from desert oasis to industrialized center of oil production. In so doing, I will counter official narratives of the exceptional US-Saudi alliance and its role in building Saudi Arabia. Mainstream scholarship on US-Saudi relations omits a big picture that is captured by only few writers. Robert Vitalis’s America’s Kingdom provides a well-researched and patiently-argued account of transformation and racialization of the landscape that began in the 1930s. Vitalis recounts the untold story of labor and human currency by using Aramco company documentation, public relations records, films, magazines and unpublished employee correspondence and documents. In Desert Kingdom, Toby Jones addresses the spatialization of al-Hasa and Qatif by focusing on central governance’s environmental impact on natural resources, revealed through the archive of critical local press from the 1950s through the 1970s. Finally, Mohammed Al-Saif’s biography of Abdullah Al-Tariqi, Saudi’s first oil minister, tells an alternative history of the kingdom through the life of one of the most important personalities of oil politics during the second half of the 20th century. My own work, however, subjects this alternative narrative to further visualization. By using found and archival still images and footage, including public relations material, radio broadcast archives, and TV news, my research is revisualizing the way that space was produced in the Eastern Province over the decades. This study will emphasize the labor strikes and resistance movements during the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s and their impact on labor laws and nationalization of oil. Such a history provides a stark visual contrast to the phantasmagoria of a so-called oil-independent Vision 2030, with its entertainment industry spectacle and fantastical promises of social progress and reform removed from civil discourse and a nonexistent civil society. Using a Lefebvrian theoretical framework, and extending the work of Vitalis, Jones, and Al-Saif with my own archival research, I will revisualize the production of social space in Eastern Saudi, highlighting the stark contrast between social spatial histories, questionable visions of sustainability, and the futuristic grandeur of modernization. Al-Saif, Mohammed. Abdullah Al-Tariqi: Sukhur an-Naft wa Rimal as-Siyyasa (Oil Rocks and Political Sands). Beirut: Jadawel, 2007. Jones, Toby. Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Vitalis, Robert. America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. London: Verso, 2009.