A Struggle for Life!: Latinos/as, Structural Violence, and the Politics of Environmental Justice in an Industrial City

At least since the 1960s, Latino-majority communities have been affected by increasing levels of environmental degradation (Pulido, 1996, 2000; Diaz, 2005). This situation has generated great environmental suffering as a... [ view full abstract ]

At least since the 1960s, Latino-majority communities have been affected by increasing levels of environmental degradation (Pulido, 1996, 2000; Diaz, 2005). This situation has generated great environmental suffering as a result of an expansion in respiratory problems, cancer, and other environmental health illnesses among Latino/a populations (Pastor Jr., Sadd, and Morello-Frosh, 2004; Quintero-Somaini and Quirindongo, 2004). Although contemporary research on environmental justice has empirically demonstrated a strong correlation between race, class, and environmental inequalities (Taylor, 2014; Agyeman, 2005), the scope of Latino-focused research continues to be limited (Peña, 2003), particularly regarding urban and suburban environmental inequality issues and politics.

We seek to meet this research gap. In this paper, we employ a ‘structural violence’ theoretical framework (Galtung, 1969; Farmer, 2005) to explain Latino/a environmental inequality, and apply the framework to a case study of Commerce, California; a majority-Latino suburban city in Southern California with a long history of environmental suffering produced by industrial, rail, and other transportation-generated pollution (Boone and Modarres, 1999). We note that unlike personal or direct forms of violence in which the violence is episodic and the actors and the objects of violence are readily identifiable, structural violence is constant, systemic, and produced by social, political and economic institutions and processes. Thus, we argue that environmental inequalities in Latino/a communities are the product of structural violence; that is, “the consequence, direct or indirect, of human agency” (Farmer, 2005: p.40) and the uneven distribution of “the power to decide the distribution of resources” (Galtung, 1969: p.171). Moreover, we posit that structural violence in Commerce has been gradual; part of a process of “slow violence”’; that is, “…a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all" (Nixon, 2013: p. 2).

Building on our theoretical framework, we ask the following research questions:

1) how does the concept of structural violence help us explain environmental inequality in U.S Latino/a urban and suburban communities, such as Commerce, California? and, what types of structural violence have the City of Commerce and its residents endured and why?; and

2) what political strategies, tactics, and campaigns have residents of Commerce developed to challenge environmental inequalities? what have been the governmental responses to this community’s mobilization? and, what lessons does Commerce’s experience provide for other Latino/a industrial areas?

Data for this paper come from interviews with environmental justice organizers for Eastyard Communities for Environmental Justice, the leading environmental advocacy group in Commerce, and content analysis of organizational documents, governmental data and policy reports, and news media articles examining environmental violence. This study extends current research on environmental justice by examining the political struggles for environmental quality in Latino/a-majority suburbs. Our preliminary results suggest that residents of Commerce have achieved some environmental justice in their city by employing a multi-pronged political mobilization approach. However, for these efforts to ultimately end structural environmental violence, residents must now demand the adoption and implementation of just and sustainable economic development alternatives to current business practices.