Introduction

IntroductionEnvironmental Justice in Chicana/o Communities Mary Pardo (bio), Rosa RiVera Furumoto (bio), and Stevie Ruiz (bio) Three Generations of Environmental Activism Three decades ago, Mothers of Eastside Los Angeles (MELA) mobilized one of the largest successful grassroots efforts to defeat dire threats to environmental well-being in a working-class Mexican American community. The political mobilization blocked the construction of the first California state prison to be constructed in a large metropolitan area, an underground oil pipeline, and the first of eighteen toxic waste incinerators proposed for the state of California. MELA no longer exists as a grassroots organization, but the legacy of the women’s political efforts continues to inspire activism. Eastside Los Angeles still battles environmental threats, but new community-based organizations informed by previous struggles have emerged. Concurrently, political and scholarly discourse about environmental justice as well as the central role of women in grassroots mobilizations has gained recognition. In the new millennium, social media facilitates rapid communication of environmental justice conflicts in Eastside Los Angeles and around the world. Clearly, gains have been made, but we know that land use decisions and policies are outcomes of class struggle marked by ethnic/racial and gender intersections and environmental activists often face violent repercussions. Alongside a history of environmentally unsound projects, gentrification in Eastside Los Angeles now threatens to displace low-income residents as land developers promote the area, given its proximity to downtown Los Angeles.1 Like ripples in a pond, the struggles and our scholarship have expanded over the years. [End Page 1] In Eastside Los Angeles mark! Lopez, the grandson of Juana Gutierrez, a co-founder of MELA, is now the Executive Director of East Yard for Environmental Justice in Eastside Los Angeles (EYEJ), a community-based organization established shortly after the new millennium. Lopez was instrumental in the organizing campaign that led to the shutdown of the Exide Battery Plant in 2015 after an investigation by the US Department of Justice.2 For over three decades, the battery recycling plant polluted the Eastside community’s air and soil with lead and arsenic, dangerous carcinogens. Exide staunchly refused to accept responsibility for the high lead contamination in nearby homes. By 2016, the grassroots community campaign using demonstrations and social media to publicize the travesty and pressure-elected officials won a state allocation of 176.6 million dollars for cleanup within 1.7 miles of the battery plant, one of the largest environmental cleanup allotments in California history.3 However, the fund fell short of fully addressing the long-term damage done to the health of the community given the many years of lead contamination on the homes and families living near the plant. Teaming up with USC’s Keck School of Medicine, EYEJ assisted in the “Truth Fairy Project” that analyzed children’s teeth and confirmed that lead contamination occurs before birth, not only through breathing contaminated air and touching hard surfaces.4 The Exide shutdown marked a victory and established EYEJ as an astute political force garnering the attention and respect of elected representatives and nearby research institutions, but ongoing community vigilance remains central for effective implementation of the cleanup. The case provides an insightful example of successful resistance to the continuing health threats in poor communities. Elsa Lopez, the daughter of Juana Gutierrez who was also a core activist in MELA, now works for the Department of Toxic Substances Control and continues to be engaged in environmental justice organizing. While the MELA case in the 1990s provides continuing lessons about the significance of women’s working-class activism in the United States, similar grassroots activism has been occurring in Latin America. For example in 1993, Berta Cáceres, daughter of a social activist mother and a member of the Indigenous Lenca people in Honduras, co-founded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) to defend the territorial and cultural rights of the Lenca Indigenous community. After the US sanctioned rightwing [End Page 2] coup in 2009, the Honduran government approved dam projects to facilitate cheap power for huge internationally funded mining interests; the dams would destroy the water, land, and livelihoods of Indigenous people as well as

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