HOW NOT TO GET SICK IN THE IMPERIAL VALLEY
By David Bacon
New America Media
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/03/imperial-valley-residents-must-fight-for-right-to-breathe-clean-air.php
SEELEY, CA (2/20/12) -- Until his knee gave out, Ramon Villa
Jr. dreamed he'd be a soccer star. Across Seeley's pitted playing
field of dirt and grass, he and his friends would chase the ball
through the desert sunset every day after school. Seeley's de facto
town center is that field. With a fire station in one corner, it is
as much of a downtown as Seeley's ever likely to have.
Across the street on all four sides sit the sun-bleached
homes of Imperial Valley farm workers. Seeley, an unincorporated
community not far from the Mexican border, has only 1700 residents.
It's not a big place, not even a formal town.
For years the kids would play after school, when the broiling
daytime temperature dropped, but they'd have to stop when it got
dark. Ramon's mom Carolina would point her pickup at the field and
turn on the headlights, just to give them another half hour of play.
They'd get thirsty-- in the summer the thermometer can top
110 degrees. Sweating and out of breath, to get a drink the young
players would put their heads under the spigot for a garden hose,
just a few inches off the ground.
So Carolina Villa decided she had to do something. With her
sister Liz, she organized town residents to call on the Seeley County
Water District, which owns the field. After some discussion, they
won a few lights on tall aluminum poles. With the help of the
planning department, they also got a real water fountain, so the
players wouldn't get burrs from the grass in their ears when they
drank.
Ramon Villa Jr. shows he can still keep the ball in the air, with the
field's new lights behind him.
It was not easy for the Villas and other parents to get
simple amenities for their kids, like light and water, because Seeley
is one of the many unincorporated communities in rural California
that lack the most basic services, like sewers, sidewalks and
streetlights. According to Policy Link, a foundation promoting
economic and social equity, "Throughout the United States, millions
of people live outside of central cities on pockets of unincorporated
land. Predominantly African-American and Latino, and frequently
low-income, these communities ... have been excluded from city
borders."
Imperial County has ten unincorporated towns the size of
Seeley and its sister community Heber, and 59 other smaller colonias.
Three years ago, Policy Link partnered with California Rural Legal
Assistance to create the Community Equity Initiative, to find legal
and organizing-based strategies for dealing with the critical
situations confronting California's unincorporated communities.
CRLA attorneys Phoebe Seaton (who directs the Community
Equity Initiative) and Ilene Jacobs point to efforts by larger
neighboring cities to avoid responsibility for unincorporated areas
and their residents. Both Seeley and Heber are less than ten miles
from El Centro, the Imperial County seat. "Local governments,
desperate to protect their resources, perpetuated the political,
social and economic isolation of these communities. The local
governments, in turn, fail to provide basic services to these
communities that were intentionally excluded from planning and
infrastructure investment," the two charged in "Advocating for Equity
In California's Rural Communities."
The graffiti house.
Light and water on the field made it more attractive to kids
with little to do in this small community. But basic amenities for
the town's youth just scratch at the surface of the problems faced by
Seeley residents.
One alternative pulling at young people is the graffiti
house, an abandoned home across the street from the elementary
school. There the local mota smokers and mainliners get together and
party, leaving beer bottles and even syringes lying on the empty
floors. From partying, the craziness just escalates. Huge holes
have been punched through walls covered in graffiti. Electrical
conduits have been pulled out and ripped open, in search of copper
wire to sell for scrap.
Being a teenager in Seeley has its dangers. But an even
worse one isn't visible at all. It's in the air.
Joahn Molena with his dog and his grandmother's chickens.
As Joahn Molena sits in his back yard, hugging his pit bull
in front of his henhouse, dust coats everything outside his home.
Molena's proud of his white Honda Civic, with its mag wheels. It's
a few years old, but in primo condition. But of course, he has to
wash it almost every day because dust in Seeley is everywhere.
It blows in from the fields that surround the unincorporated
communities. In Heber, that dust comes from the empty expanses at
the edge of town, that used to house corrals for the El Toro Land and
Cattle Co. The hooves of the cattle housed there ground animal waste
into the earth in those empty lots. Neighbors worry now about what
the dust might contain. Manuel Gonzalez (who is retired, but asked
that his real name not be used) lives at the end of the street, where
it meets the field. "Every day my wife vacuums up the dust in the
house, but an hour later it's back."
Manuel Gonzalez looks at the empty field where feedlots used to be.
And just across Fawcett Rd. are El Toro's current feedlots.
Hundreds, even thousands of cattle are housed in dense pens, eating
their way to eventual slaughter. In the furnace-like heat of the
Imperial Valley summer, the smell of cattle waste wafts across the
town, giving neighbors a good idea of what the dust is made of. So
many feedlots cover the valley that the smell gets to Seeley as well.
Other air pollutants also come with the industrial
agriculture that has dominated the Imperial Valley since the
All-American Canal, and the Alamo Canal before it, brought Colorado
River water to its natural desert in 1900. Seeley and Heber
themselves were the products of the land boom that followed. The
post office in Seeley, named for developer Henry Seeley, opened in
1909. Heber is even older, and was founded by the Imperial Valley
Land Company in 1903, and named for developer A.H. Heber.
A cropduster sprays a field south of Seeley.
Today, the land surrounding the two towns is farmed in huge
tracts of hundreds of acres. To make the desert productive, ranchers
not only built the world's largest irrigation canal, but also
developed farming methods dependent on chemical fertilizers and
strong pesticides. Even with the recent advance of some large-scale
organic operations, it's still common to drive a local highway and
see a cropduster, a small airplane, make circular swoops and passes
over the green crops. From the nozzles on its wings, a fine spray of
pesticide coats the leaves below. Air moves, however, and with it,
the chemical spray from the plane - what's called pesticide drift.
Communities like Seeley and Heber, located in the middle of
the fields, can get that drift, even diluted by breezes and wind.
A tractor sprays pesticides on a field of green onions farmed by La
Brucherie Produce, south of Seeley.
In other fields, a more traditional way of spraying is often
visible. Tractors pull a rig with tanks of chemicals, and spray
nozzles that release them just inches from the plants. Less drift,
perhaps, but after many years, powerful pesticides and fertilizers
are omnipresent, not just in the fields, but in the small communities
they surround as well.
Then, when the crops are in, Imperial Valley farmers are
notorious for burning. Big mowers cut and collect the stalks left
from crops after they're harvested. Piles of dry plants are then set
alight next to local fields and highways. The smoke is often so
intense that roads are blocked to traffic, or at least they're
supposed to be.
Carolina and Liz Villa went from getting lights and water for
the soccer field to protesting burning of local fields, because smoke
is not just a danger to traffic, but to the lungs of the young people
out kicking the ball in the Seeley field.
Burning a field near Heber.
According to Maria-Elena Young, an adolescent health analyst
at the California Adolescent Health Collaborative, an estimated
200,000 young Latinos living in rural areas have been diagnosed with
asthma. A third of Heber's 4200 residents are under 18, and 98% of
its residents are Latino. The demographics of Seeley are about the
same. In both towns, one in every four families lives below the
poverty line.
"Geography, poverty and air quality all come together to
affect the health of young people in the unincorporated rural towns
of California," explains CRLA attorney Phoebe Seaton. "Health
dangers are compounded by things like agricultural burning, and then
exacerbated by lack of access to healthcare."
Policy Link's report, "Why Place and Race Matter," states,
"Health indicators dramatically illustrate the point. In every
instance, people of color suffer disproportionately from conditions
that shorten life or compromise its quality." The report concludes,
"Racially based inequities in local environments-the almost
immeasurable gulf in resources between a Brentwood and an East Los
Angeles, a Montclair and an East Oakland, a Carmel and a King
City-lie at the root of our gaping health disparities and the
alarming rise of preventable chronic diseases."
Seeley's one restaurant, the Taqueria La Pasadita, is famous for
homemade flour tortillas.
A January 2009 study by the California Department of Public
Health linked air pollution to asthma, and in mid-February another
study found that the Environmental Protection Agency had seriously
underestimated the amount of air pollution coming from particulate
matter.
According to the ARB, smoke like that emitted from
agricultural burning can increase the number of hospital visits by
children by 10%, and that looks only at those children with access to
healthcare. Imperial County, California's poorest, is home to
thousands of farm worker families without that access. Many of them
live in its poorest communities - unincorporated towns like Seeley
and Heber.
According to a 2005 Border Asthma and Allergies (BASTA) Study
conducted by the California Department of Public Health, 20.2% of
children in Imperial County are diagnosed with asthma. The national
average is 13.7%. Imperial County consistently has the highest asthma
hospitalization rates among all California counties. From 2000 to
2004, ten asthma deaths occurred in Imperial County.
Carolina and Liz Villa.
When Carolina and Liz Villa set up Seeley Citizens United,
they hoped that the activism that produced the lights and drinking
fountain in the soccer field might be harnessed to work on these
basic health and environmental problems. Seeley's organization, and
a similar one in Heber, began to look for ways to reduce pollution
and its health consequences on a valley-wide level, since they aren't
confined to just two small towns.
When Imperial County organized an Environmental Health
Leadership Summit to examine health disparities, the two sisters went
to make their case. Together, they partnered with Luis Olmedo and the
valley's Comite Civico to use public exposure to force attention on
farm workers' health problems. They helped set up the Imperial
Vision Action Network, and then the Imperial County Environmental
Justice Enforcement Task Force. They got help from Megan Beaman, a
lawyer in CRLA's Coachella office who'd worked on a similar program
earlier in the Coachella Valley. The two efforts together form the
first community-based environmental reporting site in California.
The El Toro Land and Cattle Co. feedlot, across Fawcett Rd. from Heber.
Acting on an anonymous report, this February the
Environmental Justice Task Force exposed a proposal to open yet
another cattle feedlot near Calexico, just a few miles from Seeley
and Heber. Carolina Villa and Luis Olmedo said an anonymous report
to the IVAN network alerted them to the plans for the operation. "I
want to have faith permits are not given out when the facilities are
not ready," Villa told the Imperial Valley Press. Olmedo declared
simply, "It's clearly an environmental disaster."
But disasters and health hazards are no long business as
usual in those two tiny towns. Ramon Villa Jr., his mom and aunt all
believe that the way not to get sick in the Imperial Valley is to
make sure their voices get heard.
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and
Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border
(University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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