Jesse Marquez’s Fight for Wilmington’s Health
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the release of the second Multiple Air Toxics Exposure Studies. The South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) conducted five such studies to assess air quality and associated health risks in the South Coast Air Basin, the first one released in 1989 studying the years from 1986 to 1988. Each study has built upon the previous ones, incorporating advanced monitoring techniques and modeling to better understand and mitigate air quality issues in the region.
MATES II study, released in March 2000, however, is what kicked off the environmental justice movement and arguably its most powerful champion, Jesse Marquez.
In an interview with Random Lengths News last month, Jesse Marquez recalled the moment he and his Wilmington neighbors would get activated to protect the health of Wilmington residents for port emissions.
Between 2000 and 2001, the port hosted a public meeting at a gym in Will Hall’s Park in Wilmington to sell residents on the idea of putting up an ivy-covered, 20-foot tall chain-linked fence on C Street that ran 1.4 miles long.
“The port called it mitigation,” Marquez scoffed.
“Do you know what the mitigation was? It was to prevent some of the trucks from driving through there. And it’d be a little bit of a noise barrier,” Marquez said.
The reason they were doing this was because the port was going to expand, doubling and tripling in size over the next 15 to 20 years and that’s what caught his and other Wilmington residents’ attention.
This is March 2001.
Marquez and other Wilmington residents asked for a meeting the following month with port officials to get more information and confirmation of the information they just heard.
The answer to the question they wanted to know was: “Does the Port of LA have any plans to build anything on the other side of that wall in the next five to ten years?”
“The Port of LA said, ‘Well yes,’” Marquez recalled. “‘We’re going to build a six-lane truck highway that’s going to connect with the Harbor Freeway. The port railroad line is going to expand further north and the TraPAC Container Terminal is going to expand and move further north into Wilmington.’”
Marquez said that’s when he blew up and said, “Hell no. Not over my dead body. We will not accept that. We will fight it.”
Marquez turned to fellow residents at the meeting and said, “If anyone wants to come to my house this Saturday around lunchtime, we’ll have a meeting.”
Thirty-one people showed up, and those residents formed the Wilmington Coalition.
“Real simple,” Marquez said of the committee’s name. He said it wasn’t until about a year later that people said they need to apply for grants and they changed the committee’s name to the Coalition for a Safe Environment.
“You have to realize, none of the 31 of us knew anything about ports other than the fact that it was involved in importing and exporting goods,” he said.
In the group’s meeting, aside from talks about fighting the port, the organization’s members started talking about the refineries.
“It’s always on fire. … It smells like the terrible odor of chemicals.
“Then someone says, ‘Well, I have two kids and they have asthma. And then someone else says, ‘All three of my kids have asthma.’
‘My mom has asthma.’
‘I have asthma.’
‘Well, my mother has COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease].’ We started realizing there was a connection between port pollution, refinery pollution, and our health.”
“We knew zero about ports; zero about refineries. And so I started looking into it,” Marquez said.
Not long after this, at another port meeting involving the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, he was introduced to the president of the Harbor/Palos Verdes Sierra Club, Tom Politeo.
Marquez recalled the moment.
“‘It’s a pleasure. We’ve been reading about you. We see some Latino leaders in the community. We would like to work with you and share what we’ve learned and we can work together on campaigns and stuff.’
“Then he tells me to ask the Port of Los Angeles guy talking about the MATES II study.”
So Marquez raised his hand, “Can you tell us about the MATES II study?
“‘It has nothing to do with us,’ the port guy replied. ‘We didn’t do it. The Army Corps of Engineers did not do it. It was the South Coast Air Quality Management District. They did this study called the MATES study and it was completed a year ago.’
“Okay. Then why were we never notified? And why were there no public meetings? There was no story in the newspapers. Nothing has come out about this,” Marquez recalled saying.
Marquez recalls getting some unsatisfying answers before he asked the coupe de grace question: “Did the study find anything about Wilmington … conclusion or any type of bad thing, as well?”
Answer: Yes.
Out of the whole South Bay and Los Angeles Harbor Area, Wilmington had the highest risk of cancer due to exposure to diesel exhaust.
Marquez recalled Politeo telling him he needed to go online to look up the MATES II study.
“You have to remember, in 2001, no one had computers,” Marquez explained. This meant that computers with internet access were still largely confined to students on college campuses and workplaces.
No one owned a personal one, Marquez explained. “I knew what the internet was. I knew all about it.”
Marquez found he had a cousin who had a computer given to her by her job for home. He worked out a deal with her where he paid for internet access to use her computer.
His high school-aged sons taught him how to search for information on the internet.
“That was my first time on the computer,” Marquez said. He tells his sons, “Well, I want to look up air pollution. Okay, type in air pollution. They start laughing and giggling. You see, they already knew, since they were learning how to use computers in school, the results can be overwhelming when you type in a search.
“There wasn’t that many. It was still a lot for that time. It was in the thousands. Search for it now, the results numbers in the hundreds of thousands.”
Marquez bought reams of paper and dozens of printer cartridges to print as much as he could to learn as much as he could about pollution and the ports.
The year 2001 is very historic. Not just here locally, but the impact became worldwide. Marquez started CFASE in April 2001.
Marquez highlighted another activist, Angelo Logan, who was active in East LA and the City of Commerce and co-founded his organization, the East Yards Communities for Environmental Justice, to fight the railyards. Today, Logan serves on the boards of directors for the Harbor Community Benefit Foundation and Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs and is the co-chairperson of the California EV Charging Infrastructure Strike Force.
Marquez also highlighted the work of Andrea Hricko, an associate professor at USC, who had gotten grants to open up a community center to inform communities and community organizations about public health research. Today, Hricko is professor emerita of preventive medicine at USC Keck School of Medicine.
During her career, she directed several NIH-funded Centers’ outreach and engagement programs at USC. Her program at USC is concerned about environmental exposures that might affect children’s health … though increasingly, their investigators have been looking at mothers, seniors and others.
Hricko read about Marquez and his group and others in the media and convened a meeting in Long Beach.
“About 150 of us showed up,” Marquez explained. “There were activists from all over who came to that thing.”
Politeo invited Jesse to become co-chair with him on the Harbor Vision Taskforce — a task force that was focused on matters regarding the ports. Marquez accepted the invitation at the beginning of the year.
Then the San Pedro Peninsula Homeowners Coalition was formed and filed the China Shipping lawsuit in 2001. That changed the whole history of the Port of LA, California, the United States, and even the world.
“All those things happened in 2001. Andrea Hricko came up with the idea of forming a special task force to deal with the ports. And so, I was part of it and Angelo Logan was part of it. And then we found out that in Long Beach, there was LBACA [Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma], a community organization that worked with asthma. They didn’t deal with port issues, just asthma as a health problem.”
Then in Riverside, there was Penny Newman and the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice. They became part of it. And then there was Bob Gottlieb, Professor Bob from Occidental College who worked on studies with Andrea Hricko at THE (Trade, Health, Environment) Impact Study.
Together, this collection of activists and researchers became like a think tank. Within three years, they started writing policy briefs.
Marquez wrote one on importing harm, and another on freight transportation he co-authored. Then Newman wrote regarding warehouse distribution centers; Logan worked on one regarding the railyards.
Marquez and fellow environmental justice powerhouses won a grant to host a conference, three in all — hosted at the Carson Community Center. About three to four hundred people showed up for the first conference. The next conference came a couple of years later, and 500 came. The third one was about six or seven years ago and about 700 people came.
“Then we asked the attendees, where would you like to go from here? And then they said we’d like for you to help create a national organization,” Marquez recounted.
In the last decade, the Moving Forward Network was founded with more than 50 organizations belonging to it nationwide — port communities, railyard communities, and distribution center communities.
MFN centers grassroots, frontline-community knowledge, expertise and engagement from communities across the U.S. that bear the negative impacts of the global freight transportation system. MFN builds partnerships between these community leaders, academia, labor, big green organizations and others to protect communities from the impacts of freight.
A Quarter Century Later
Jesse Marquez believes he’s won the war he started in 2001.
“We have defeated the ports. We’ve defeated the shipping industry. We defeated the political structure, and we defeated the government agencies,” he said.
Marquez, a survivor of the 1969 Fletcher Oil Refinery explosion (he lived across the street); the Banning High School track star, and too smart for his own good community activist knows a thing or two about relentlessness.
When he started CFASE, the Baby Boomer generation revolutionary noted that no one wanted to support him.
“The Boys Club [The Boys and Girls Clubs] said, no,” Marquez said. “Even my own Teen Post center said no. Why? Because they all had an office for $1 a year and they all received $50,000 plus every year for all their projects. No one’s going to give that up.
So Marquez started going door to door, passing out flyers, and engaging everyone who was not beholden to community dollars port businesses were doling out.
“Our campaign was to stop that wall,” Marquez explained. No one thought we could stop the port. Well, we did stop it.”
“Our committee of 31 people asked our families and neighbors, we interviewed everybody: What happens if we were to take back that land? What would you want?”
Marquez recounted a young woman in one of those sessions who said, “We need to have like a patio so we can work out and do exercises.”
Jesse noted that AYSO, (the American Youth Soccer Organization) would not support them, but there was the Hispanic version (Liga Latino soccer clubs) that had like 30-40 teams throughout the South Bay Area that would.
“Señor Marquez. Mas campos. We need more parks and places we could practice and have our games. So we’ll support you,” Jesse recalled.
Keeping in mind all the things his neighbors desired for Wilmington, the ‘60s fashioned activist applied pressure by opposing all Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach projects. By the time Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger went on his China trade mission, he got beat up over there.
“They told him, you’re the governor, how can you allow residents of communities to sue you against our China shipping projects, and then you lose? You go back and get your country together, your state together.
“Schwarzenegger calls a cabinet meeting and he tells his cabinet, ‘All you cabinet people, you go find out in the harbor. Who the hell are all these activists and organizations that are stopping all the projects? I want to bring them to a meeting and I want you guys to draft a goods movement plan for the State of California.’ So, the hard core of all of us were part of that committee to draft that plan.”
Marquez and fellow activists learned something else at the time: All our elected officials were elected to their offices receiving campaign donations from all these polluters and refinery guys.
“So we told everybody, ‘We got to run for office. It’s got to be us!’ So every run for city council, run for mayor … and after that, the assembly, the state senate, then run for Congress,” Marquez rattled off.
Twenty-three years later, there are a lot of environmental justice-aligned assembly members and state senators who have started passing laws to bypass part of our problem, Marquez explained.
The first piece of legislation came in AB32 in 2006. The Global Warming Solutions Act is intended to reduce greenhouse gases from all sources.
Marquez explained that the law had done something none other had done before: it created an environmental justice standing committee and a technical advisory committee. Marquez was a member of both. The law also called for the AQMD to research and within six months, adopt early action measures that could begin reducing greenhouse gases immediately, while they’re working on the 5, 10, and 30-year plans.
The environmental justice committee wrote 31 measures. This is also where Marquez made history. Citing the example of China Shipping and their application of electric shore power, he called for all the major ports in California to apply electric shore power.
“I am the godfather of the at-berth shore power rule,” Marquez said. “Ask anybody today, CARB made it law and regulation. But that came from me.”
The career activist and moonlighting archeologist noted that CARB, AQMD, and the federal EPA have lost to him and his allies in the courtroom for violating the law. It was in those battles Marquez said environmental justice activists couldn’t trust politicians or regulatory agencies.
“A lot of people graduate from college and go straight to a regulatory agency,” Marquez explained. “So like 50, 55 years old retired, 20 25, 30 years, they’re looking for another job and they go work for industry.”
So what’s happened in the past 23 years is that he and his allies have elected people to office. The result was the signing into law three years ago, AB-32 and AB-617, legislation aimed at reducing emissions from all stationary sources and all mobile sources.
“The regulatory agencies didn’t pay attention to the fine print,” Marquez noted, because that law took power and authority away from them and gave it to the communities.
Now they had to identify environmentally disadvantaged communities where they now have to do several things, such as creating a committee with the AQMD in that area; writing a community air monitoring plan with the community; and a community emissions reduction plan with the community from all sources.
What has also happened over the past 23 years is that environmental justice activists encouraged their children to graduate from college and get them into government regulatory agencies, and other key positions.
“That’s what’s happened under President Biden,” said the godfather of shore power. “He appointed Martha Guzman to be the Region 9 administrator. We knew little Martha when she was in college. She is an environmental activist as well.”
Then, “The second thing that happened: Gov. Newsom selected Jana Garcia to be the cabinet secretary over California EPA,” he recalled.
“We knew Jana when she worked for CBE (Communities for a Better Environment), during her internship for law school,” Marquez explained. “Also, the worst racist managers, directors, and supervisors within all the agencies 23 years later are retired and gone. So now, new staff has come in. And even if they’re not Hispanic or a part of an ethnic minority, they have grown up in a better world, with civil rights, equal rights and equity.”
In addition, “Another committee organization was created — California’s Clean Freight Coalition. It was a mixed environment group statewide and we were fighting for clean transportation. We then decided to ask Gov. Gavin Newsom to issue an executive order.
“We made a draft and then our committee met with the governor’s staff and with him. Then he issued an executive order that California will transition to zero emissions freight transportation by 2035. All trucks, all cars, and all trains must be zero-emissions.”
Then Marquez’s friends in the EV car world went to him to issue another executive order saying that by 2030, no new car could be sold in California that’s gas, diesel fuel, or fossil fuel, which means all electric.
“So when I say we have won the war,” Marquez said with a smile. “We have won the war. We’re just fighting for the implementation and to get it done as soon as possible.”
