Green Is Brown
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor

     A hundred years ago, American politics was transformed by a wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe that impacted virtually every issue of the day. The massive pro-immigrant demonstration in Los Angeles on March 24, and the widespread walkouts before and after it have given some another dose of the false impression that today’s Latino immigration politics is much more one-dimensional. But nothing could be farther from the truth.
     From health care, to education, to labor issues, Latino immigrants and their children are transforming every aspect of public policy in California—an influence that’s spreading nationwide as well. Not least of all, they’re transforming environmental issues, reconnecting them with a wide range of inter-related concerns—especially a clean and healthy environment for their communities—that have previously been peripheral to the Anglo-defined environmental agenda. The end result is much more closely connected to how people live their everyday lives.
     Wilmington activist Jesse Marquez—Executive Director of the Coalition for A Safe Environment—is a prime example of this new environmentalism in action. Antonio Gonzales—President of the Willie C. Velazquez Institute (WCVI)—has a birds-eye view of the development of multi-faceted Latino politics from the think tank that is leading the way on developing an integrated vision for the future. Together, their two perspectives illustrate the growth of organizing across boundaries that have previously divided people and concerns, leaving them substantially less able to have a meaningful say in their own lives, and the future of their children.
     Marquez traces his activism to two events when he was 16. One was a first-hand brush with death. “The Fletcher oil refinery blew up across the street from my home on Lomita Boulevard. Two workers were killed,” he remembers. Three tanks exploded that day, about 5 o’clock in the afternoon. He and his family barely escaped alive, some still scarred to this day.
     The second event that shaped him that year was a summer leadership program at UCLA—a very unusual one whose trainers were members of the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, SNCC, MEChA and the American Indian Movement. It was an introduction not just to organizing and political activism, but to reading a wide range of books, and developing a critical historical consciousness sensitive to complex racial implications.
     Marquez went on to become a student organizer, to work on numerous political campaigns, and develop a strong connection to his Native American roots, before expansion plans by the Port of Los Angeles (POLA) in 2001 brought environmental issues back to the fore of his concerns. Step-by-step his activism grew, from neighborhood-level organizing in Wilmington to the international stage in just a few short years.

Planning For the Future

     Named after the late founder of its sister organization, the Southwest Voter Registration Project, WCVI is now 20 years old, having progressed from “first doing polls, then doing leadership development, then policy,” Gonzales said. It takes the challenge of political policy leadership very seriously. Demographic projections show that the US will be a minority majority nation by 2050, just as California is today.
     “If you think of us as I think of us, we’re going to rule America. But by the time we get power it’s going to be all messed up,” Gonzales explained. Hence the need to develop policies now—ones that make sense for everyone, not just Latinos, so they will begin to be implemented now.
     “We have to think on a 50-year continuum. We already know what it’s like to do it the wrong way. The black community inherited the Rust Belt when whites were abandoning it. So they had to dig out and revitalize and restore urban messes, as whites moved to suburbs and the Fortune 500 said ‘forget it, we’re leaving.”
     “We don’t want that to happen to us. We don’t want that to happen to anybody.”
     How this applies to environmental concerns is simple: they are an integral part of a community-centered agenda, an ecosystem of issues.
     “We’re organizing socioeconomic policy initiatives, trying to show our leadership how to craft this hybrid agenda. Working across sectors, across issues, not organizing housing and education apart from the environment,” Gonzales continues.
     Locally, the revitalization of the LA River provides a prototype for how these issues inter-relate. “By restoring the Los Angeles river, if you do it right you bring Los Angeles together in a way it hasn’t been since the 1930s,” Gonzales says. “Habitat restoration and water upgrading are big piece of this. But also the revitalization and transformation of environmental brown-fields into not only clean water and restored habitat but also commercial robustness and access to affordable housing, and schools, and parks.”
     The LA River was once a joke. But now it’s a focal point of renewal, running through the heart of the river basin’s communities of color.

Greening of Wilmington

     Another pathway through the heart of those communities is the heavily-polluting goods movement infrastructure, beginning at the ports of LA and Long Beach, flowing up the 710 Freeway and the Alameda Corridor into East LA, and east into yet more communities of color in the Inland Empire. The task of greening this second pathway—overlaying earlier, continuing clusters of industrial pollution—is even more challenging. But that’s the task Marquez has taken on.
     Marquez, too, talks about a 50-year perspective, particularly when investing in infrastructure and technology for clean ports and goods movement. The standard view, that 20 years constitutes “long-term” planning, is simply too short-sighted, too limited by today’s assumptions. But his first concern—along with other Wilmington residents—was a proposed 20-foot wall that was seen as a graffiti magnet, a guaranteed source of blight for an already blighted community.
     “What we want is to improve the education and health care and economic position and so forth, of our communities,” Gonzales adds. And these lead inevitably to “issues that flow from environmental degradation.”
     The more Marquez investigated and organized, the more apparent such connections became. The first leap was from the wall to what lay behind it—plans for massive Port expansion: a 6-lane diesel highway between C Street and Harry Bridges Boulevard, railroad tracks moved farther north, and expansion of the Tra-pac terminal.
     “That’s s when we declared war,” Marquez says, telling the port, “No way are we going to support you expanding into Wilmington.”
     It was an impossible battle, given the history of how POLA had gobbled up Wilmington’s. But, remarkably, Wilmington won a prolonged battle, and the Coalition for a Safe Environment (CSE) was founded during this fight. The crux of his organizing method was clearly established. It was one part independent, critical scholarship, learning about the Port’s plans for himself, questioning everything that was told to him; one part organizing the community, informing and enabling ordinary people to speak out for themselves; and one part collaboration with other organizers, in this case the already-existing Wilmington Citizens Committee to begin with, and the larger network of activists brought together through the Port Community Advisory Committee (P-CAC), which had not yet formed when the struggle began.
     Around this time, he had his first contact with San Pedro activists, such as Noel Park and Janet Gunter, involved in the China Shipping lawsuit. “By the end of 2001 we were tracking it,” Marquez recalled, and from there, “we got really involved with everything to do with ports.” Although the suit was filed before he became involved, when it lost at trial, Marquez played a key role in prevailing on appeals, providing panoramic before-and-after photos showing how quickly the Port’s 24/7 construction schedule was working to build the disputed project, bringing busloads of Wilmington residents to the hearings, and providing a written record of community comments in opposition.
     In the next few years, Marquez forged strong alliances with established organizations, such Communities for a Better Environment, helped found the Sierra Club’s Harbor Vision Task Force, and expanded his port activism to repeatedly challenge the Port J project in Long Beach. He also branched out to begin dealing with oil refineries, most notably in a successful two-front confrontation with Kinder-Morgan refineries in San Pedro and Carson, and became engaged in the regulatory process at both the regional and statewide levels, forming a widening network of alliances with activists and organizations along the way.
     Through this process, patterns of historical exploitation and injustice became patterns of organized community resistance. Working-class communities of color—increasingly Latino—have been disproportionately exposed to manufacturing-based air pollution, pollution from oil refineries, and most recently, the dramatic expansion in port-related pollution, from ocean-going vessels, to cargo-handling vehicles, to diesel trucks clogging their streets and highways.

Health, Race & Environment

     This exposure has drawn widespread awareness from health care professionals, researchers and activists, such as Martha Arguello, Director of Health and Environment Programs for Physicians for Social Responsibility’s Los Angeles Chapter. Arguello came to her current post from working on Latino health issues most of her life. Her previous job dealt with breast cancer issues, where she “saw younger and younger black and Latina women getting there more aggressive cancers,” which lead her to researching the role of the environment. Her work now could be seen as preventative medicine on a mass scale—always focused on the health/environment connection.
     “From climate change to conservation to parks to environmental justice, I tend to see it through the lens of a longtime activist from the Latino community,” she says. It’s an orientation that drives a concern for “sustainable green practices,” particularly in jobs where Latinos have long worked, being exposed to dangerous chemicals.
     “The guy that paints my house—how does he learn about non-toxic paint, so he can integrate that practice into what he does every day?” Arguello asks, as a typical example of the questions she seeks to answer.
     Arguello is typical of a broad range of health care workers and activists who’ve become invaluable allies for Marquez and other community activists. While the concepts of environmental racism and environmental justice were first articulated in the 1980s, it is only within the past few years that organizers like Marquez, joined with professionals like Arguello, have dramatically accelerated the process of making environmental justice a rallying cry that can literally stop port, freeway and refinery expansion in its tracks. As his increasing focus on innovative clean technology makes clear, Marquez and his counterparts are not opposed to progress—only to “progress” at the cost of sacrificing the health and life of the most vulnerable among us.

Wider Connections

     Governor Schwarzenegger’s Goods Movement Plan is yet the latest example of how a process conceived to serve the interests of powerful special interests has been steadily forced to slow its progress, expand representation, and shift its focus to take serious account of the previously-ignored costs that have been shifted onto primarily working-class communities of color. Although he and other community activists were brought in late in the process, they quickly organized, taking advantage of the process to form new alliances with each other. As one spin-off benefit, Oakland activists are now using a blueprint from Marquez to negotiate their own community advisory committee with the Port of Oakland.
     Marquez has also become active on the international level. Last July, he traveled to London to submit testimony to the Internal Maritime Organization, the UN body responsible for setting international standards for oceangoing vessels. Capping off his contributions was a Port Community Bill of Rights, which he drafted using the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a blueprint, and soliciting advice from a wide range of activist contacts. It was another example of combining creative vision, scholarship, first-hand organizing experience, and collaboration with other activists to advance the sort of multifaceted agenda -setting that Gonzales talks about.
     At the same time, Marquez has also gotten involved in organizing in Baja California, where plans are afoot to build a new port to bypass California’s congestion limits—as well as her labor laws and environmental standards. Again, the aim is not to prevent development, but to prevent exploitation, and the use of that exploitation to build pressure for concession back here in California—both from labor and from the health of communities.
     This sort of cross-border organizing is crucial for the future, as is domestic policy that takes international impacts into account as a central concern. Gonzales cites recent work collaborating with Environmental Defense on farm bill reform.
     Among other things, “We care about it because it’s ruining the rural economy and environment in Mexico. Then they migrate to America where they have no rights,” he explains. “So for us, it’s an immigration issue, as well as an environmental issue.” There’s also a concern that workers and small farmers—who are disproportionately minorities—get little help, and may actually be harmed by current practices. “Black and brown farm owners have virtually no access to subsidies,” he notes, while “only 10 percent of subsidies go to green practices.” This is a big Latino issue, Gonzales points out, since, “We’re the guys that get the pesticides dumped on us.”
     In short, wherever you turn to look at environmental issues, a Latino perspective finds a convergence of several other issues as well. And visa versa: wherever an issue impacts Latinos particularly, there’s bound to be an environmental aspect involved—perhaps two or three.
     While these connections are increasingly coming to the fore across the nation, and across borders as well, a major center for making those connections is right here in our backyard, right here in the person of Jesse Marquez, and an activated community he has helped to empower.