Pollution, Poverty, and Voices
Just off the 405 freeway, south of Los Angeles, a smoky skyline of oil refineries extends for miles along the coast. This industrial zone is home to the community of Wilmington, as well as the Port of Los Angeles, two rail yards, and the highest concentration of refineries anywhere in the state. For three generations my family – just one family in a vibrant Latino community of 60,000 people – has called Wilmington home. Growing up in a neighborhood with high rates of asthma, cancer, violence and poverty, it’s a place you basically work hard to leave.
When I was ten years old, my parents managed to move us to Garden Grove, where my asthma significantly improved, and where I received a good education in a safe neighborhood. However, what we gained in a safe neighborhood, we lost in social ties. We still spent most weekends in Wilmington visiting with grandparents, cousins, going to church, and buying Mexican groceries. Wilmington was still our hometown, where we couldn’t walk out of a store without saying hello to people we knew. Wilmington has a vibrancy that West Garden Grove could never replicate: the multicolored homes, the panaderias, and familiar faces.
Being the first in my family to attend college, my parents hoped I would become a lawyer or doctor, but I became interested in international issues of inequality and poverty. I spent many years working in international development, trying to combat the vast inequalities facing the urban poor in Central and South America. I worked hard to integrate myself into the communities where I worked, but I was always an outsider since I had the opportunity to leave. It wasn’t until returning home after college that I realized I didn’t need to work in developing countries to fight inequality. The place I needed to be and where I could make the biggest difference was in my own community.
I began getting involved in local politics as an activist, working with a group of friends on a blog called The Wilmington Wire to shed light on issues impacting our community. I felt overwhelmed by the health burdens unjustly placed on our community by these powerful, polluting industries. The refineries hoped nobody would pay attention when they tried to evade government regulations intended to make them clean up their facilities, or when they fired local union workers to replace them with cheap labor. They assumed that we could be easily bought with donations to the library and free asthma check-ups.
They were wrong. Our group made sure that the community paid attention to these issues, attending local community meetings and making sure that our interests and voices were heard.
As an activist I could articulate what the problems were, but I didn’t have solutions. I felt frustrated by nonprofits and academics coming to do work in our community, but not coming up with thoughtful solutions because they talked to the wrong people and asked the wrong questions. I realized that I didn’t want to be talked to, I wanted to be talked with. I decided to go to graduate school to study city planning and public health to gain a new set of tools and language to understand the complex problems facing our community.
I initially felt intimidated by all my intelligent and impressive peers in graduate school, but soon realized that I had an advantage: I’d not only studied these issues, I’d lived them. Being given the opportunity to attend graduate school, I realize that I need to represent my community. I am developing my skills and recognizing that I can be at the decision-making table, thanks to participating in leadership programs like the Greenlining Institute’s Leadership Academy and Urban Habitat’s Boards and Commission Leadership Institute.
I had many opportunities because my family was able to leave Wilmington, but many others do not have that option because of structural barriers that make it difficult for people of color to access higher education, keep us living in hazardous environments, and fuel discrimination against us. That’s why I am committed to fighting for environmental justice to make Wilmington a more equitable, safe, and healthy community.
The problems facing our community are not unique. Toxic waste sites, freeways, and polluting industries didn’t locate in communities of color by accident but as a result of the history of regressive land use policies that have taken advantage of our communities. We see this in Richmond, West Oakland, Bayview-Hunters Point, and many other communities of color. We must be included in the debates around climate change because we bear the brunt of the pollution generated by toxic industries and deserve to be listened to.
And we won’t stop till our voice is heard.
This post was originally published by the Greenlining Institute in Jan. 2015. Thanks to Bruce Mirken for his edits.