Reference no: EM133304903

Question: What was most memorable and what did you learn?

Leticia Renteria is a 30-year-old woman who-along with her husband, Marcos Vargas-is a parent to three young children, ages 4, 5, and 7. She lives in the Coachella Valley of California, which is a dichotomous region hosting both extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Leticia, unfortunately, fits into the latter category. Born in the border town of Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, Leticia grew up poor, in proximity to the United States and surrounded by American culture. As a youth, she enjoyed a renewable visitor visa, which allowed her to travel back and forth across the border to visit an aunt and several cousins (some of whom were born in the United States) who lived not far away in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys of California. Leticia's experiences in the United States gave her even more understanding of the differences in opportunities between the United States and Mexico and made her yearn for those available in the United States, especially as she grew to working age. Work in Mexicali mostly consisted of very long hours at the maquiladoras (U.S. factories producing products for export in a free trade zone) or in various other low-paying informal occupations, such as selling raspados on street corners. Mexico's minimum wage remained at less than US$5.00 per day, and actual average wages for industries in which she was qualified to work with her high school-equivalent degree only rose slightly to US$8.00 to US$10.00 per day. With prices in the border region growing steadily to match U.S. prices in some areas, these wage rates simply became unfeasible for Leticia, and she soon made one of the most difficult decisions of her life: At age 19, she entered the United States legally on her visitor visa and decided to stay past her permissible time of visit-she thusly became an undocumented immigrant.

Leticia moved outside of the heavier border patrol enforcement zone, a zone within 60 miles of the border, to the nearby Coachella Valley, where she was able to stay with a relative for a low amount of rent. At age 20, she met Marcos. The two married within a year. Marcos is a lawful permanent resident of the United States, having gained adjusted status many years ago after immigrating without papers from Mexico. Marcos works year-round in a landscaping company that provides services to the lush golf courses and country clubs of the affluent part of the Coachella Valley; Leticia toils in seasonal positions in produce packing houses and landscaping crews, those positions beginning and ending based on seasonal need. In between her periods of employment, Leticia is without income altogether due to her inability to qualify for unemployment benefits because of her immigration status.

Despite their employment challenges, Leticia and Marcos were able to get together enough money to buy a used mobile home in a nearby settlement, where they pay rent for the space upon which their home sits. Leticia has mixed feelings about their home ownership-whereas she is excited to accomplish this version of the "American dream," she is frustrated and disappointed by the conditions of their mobile home park. The park is located in a rural area, several miles outside of the nearest city, and is not connected to water and wastewater services offered by the local municipal water district. The park's owner pipes water to the spaces from a well independently dug on the site, and the water coming from the well has recently been tested and reveals impermissibly high levels of arsenic contamination. The lack of wastewater services means that all of the homes are relying on septic systems, which frequently fill or clog up, resulting in overflow, stench, and other problems. Moreover, not far down the street sits an illegal dump, which was created by the landowner "under the radar" without the knowledge of enforcement authorities and now causes unbearable stench and sometimes smoke in Leticia's settlement. To make matters worse, when Leticia is not working and Marcos has the family's only car at his work, she is stuck at home, given that the nearest public transportation stop is more than 5 miles away and the nearest grocery stores, services, and recreation are more than 10 miles away.

Leticia does her best to find childcare for the children with neighbors and acquaintances during the times she is able to work and continues working at night at home to complete the cooking, cleaning, and other tasks that Marcos and others expect her to as a woman. All three of the children suffer from varying degrees of asthma, which Leticia believes is related to the dusty nature of their desert mobile home park as well as the fumes and smoke that frequently come from the nearby dump. However, the community clinic where Leticia takes the children to be treated does not keep any data related to these kinds of causes and does not connect patients' health indicators to any environmental factors, so Leticia is left to rely on her own suspicions. The children receive medical care in the clinic, thanks to the state insurance program, because they are citizens of the United States. Leticia cannot qualify for any such assistance, given that she remains undocumented. Leticia and Marcos hope that their children will succeed in school, but they are not really sure how the system works, and they are really intimidated by the English-speaking teachers and big buildings and campuses, so they have mostly thus far refrained from getting involved with their children's school. Leticia tries her best to access some of the few other resources in the area for her children to help them supplement their education and get their minds off other stressors. The children particularly enjoy spending time at [Page 289]the new Boys and Girls Club in the nearby town of Mecca when the family has the time and transportation to get there.

Despite her marriage to a lawful permanent resident, Leticia has not yet applied for legal immigration status because she and Marcos cannot afford the immigration and attorney fees, which would cost more than $4,000. Even with their hard work, Leticia and Marcos remain at the minimum wage rate of $8.00 per hour and are only bringing home a little more than $20,000 per year. This is far from enough to support their family of five and to cover the $50 to $100 per month they try to send to family back in Mexico. Leticia does not apply for food stamps or other cash assistance for her children (though they do qualify because they are U.S. citizens) because she has heard that children who receive government benefits are the first ones sent to war when they turn 18 and that the children have to pay back all the benefits they received when they become adults. She wishes that someday there will be an increase in the minimum wage, so that she and Marcos could make ends meet on their own. From everything Leticia hears on television, though, a lot of companies and politicians really don't want to see that happen. She figures that nothing ever happens unless powerful people want it to happen, so she thinks her minimum wage will never change.

Leticia finds her low wage rate doubly unjust because of all the things she has to tolerate in her workplace. As is common in landscaping and agricultural jobs, Leticia frequently encounters supervisors and coworkers who make unwelcome sexual comments to her and who sometimes even touch her in uncomfortable ways. Though these interactions would constitute illegal sexual harassment, Leticia, like most other women, never complains for fear of losing her job, fear of immigration enforcement, and even fear of stigma among acquaintances as well as consequences in her own relationship with Marcos if he were to find out.

Early one morning, Leticia was detained by immigration authorities on her way to work after having been originally stopped by a sheriff's deputy for a supposed violation related to a frame around her license plate. In immigration detention, she is offered the right to stay in detention and present her deportation defenses to a judge-which could take months-or the option to leave the country immediately through voluntary departure. Leticia has heard horror stories about deported mothers whose children get placed into the state foster care system and lose connection with their families. She tries to reach a local nun who helps in the community to see if she can get any advice. However, even the nun isn't sure what to do or where to turn. So, even though Leticia knows that she can apply for status through her husband, she is scared to wait out the multi-month process and decides to leave voluntarily. She returned to the United States with her cousins by car with no papers only a few days later, simply telling the immigration officers at the border that she was a U.S. citizen just like her cousins. What Leticia wouldn't realize until much later, when she and Marcos finally went to apply for her status, is that her voluntary departure followed by her quick illegal return effectively disqualified her for any legal immigration status until she spends 10 years outside of the United States as a penalty.

-Megan Beaman

Case Study 9.2 Fighting for Our Water, Land, and Air

In the early 1960s, Latinx farm workers organized by Cesar Chavez fought for protection from harmful pesticides in the farm fields where they worked in California's San Joaquin Valley. In 1968, residents of the West Harlem community of New York City fought unsuccessfully against the placement of a sewage treatment plant in their community. In 1982, the state government of North Carolina decided to dump 6,000 truckloads of soil laced with toxic PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl) in a hazardous waste landfill in poor, rural, overwhelmingly Black Warren County. The community was concerned that the hazardous waste would leach into drinking water supplies. Community members and their allies stopped the trucks by lying down on roads leading to the landfill. This action was followed by six weeks of marches and nonviolent street protests. Although the people of Warren County lost this battle, their protest drew national media attention and got the attention of people in other parts of the United States who were living with similar environmental injustice (Skelton & Miller, 2016). The protest in Warren County is considered by many to be the action that sparked the environmental justice movement and identified the environmental racism involved in forcing poor communities of color to absorb the costs of environmental pollution (Pellow & Brulle, 2015).

In May 2007, activists in the southern China city of Xiamen were fighting the construction of a chemical plant in their city. They sent out text messages from their cell phones [Page 290]encouraging recipients to participate in a protest at a particular location on June 1 at 8 a.m. Discussion of the hazards of the chemical plant was taken up by bloggers. On June 1, tens of thousands of protesters marched against the project, uploading photographs, videos, and text messages to blogging sites as they marched. When one blogging site was blocked, another blogger would pick up the material and distribute it. In December 2007, the Chinese government announced that the plant would be moved to another city, Guangzhou. In March 2008, residents of Guangzhou and nearby towns engaged in three days of protest against the decision to move the plant to their city. In one nearby town, the protesters staged a sit-in to block traffic on a main road. The local government sent loudspeakers to the street to deny that the plant would be moved to Guangzhou. In 2011, thousands of people used text messaging to organize protests against a similar plant in another part of China, and that plant was closed by local authorities (Tilly & Wood, 2013).

On August 14, 2010, the Keepers of the Athabasca, a network of First Nations, Metis, Inuit, and environmental groups in the Athabasca River area of northern Canada, held a healing walk along the road that passes the tar sands, also known as oil sands, operation. The walk was meant to expose the dark clouds of emissions and toxic ponds. It was interspersed with speakers and included a ceremony in which First Nation elders offered prayers to help heal the earth. The Keepers of the Athabasca continue work to "unite the peoples of the Athabasca River and lake Basins to secure and protect water and watershed lands for ecological, cultural and community health and well-being" (Keepers of the Athabasca, 2020). They engage in community education and have produced documentaries to support that activity.

In 2011, Indigenous and environmental groups took the fight to the United States. On November 6, several thousand protesters formed a human chain around the White House to try to convince President Obama to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline project (Goldenberg, 2011). In 2015, both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives passed bills to allow the construction of the Keystone pipeline, but President Obama vetoed it, and the Senate was unable to get enough votes to override the veto. In 2016, environmental and Native rights activists moved the fight to North Dakota in an attempt to halt the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline routed to travel through sacred Native burial ground and underneath the Missouri River, the primary source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux. The original route, which had the pipeline crossing the Missouri River north of Bismarck, North Dakota, had been protested by white communities who argued that the pipeline would contaminate their water supply, and the Texas oil company adjusted the route. The activists, who called themselves the Standing Rock water protectors, argued that the pipeline would violate an 1851 treaty (Runge, 2016). They responded to the perceived threat with protests and litigation to slow, and eventually stop, the pipeline. As the protest picked up steam, thousands of protesters set up teepee and tent camps to block the construction. Celebrities such as actors Shailene Woodley and Mark Ruffalo, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, hundreds of religious leaders, and at least 2,000 military veterans traveled to the site in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux (Worland, 2016). Environmental groups supported this effort because of their concerns about the large role fossil fuels play in increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In late October 2016, police in riot gear used tanks, armored vehicles, pepper spray, and a sound cannon to attack and arrest protesters, locking activists in dog kennels (Runge, 2016). Standing Rock chairperson David Archambault II insisted that the protest would remain nonviolent. Soon after he was inaugurated as president in January 2017, Donald Trump signed executive actions that put both the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines back on the agenda. In March 2020, a judge ordered the U.S. Corp of Engineers to full review of the environmental impact of the Dakota Access pipeline (Kennedy, 2020). It is expected that the Indigenous people of North America will continue to fight for the protection of the water, land, and air that are so vital to health and well-being.

The protests in the San Joaquin Valley; West Harlem; Warren County, North Carolina; China; the Athabasca River area; and Standing Rock are local examples of a large, global environmental justice social movement, which has become known as the climate justice movement. The 350.org organization has become an important resource in that movement. It was founded by Bill McKibben and student activists in 2008, with the goal of "building a future that's just, prosperous, equitable and safe from the effects of climate crisis" (350.org, 2020). The name of the organization refers to 350 parts per million (ppm), which many climate scientists propose as the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. On October 24, 2009, 350.org organizers in 181 countries staged 5,200 demonstrations to demand action on climate change. The protests aimed to put pressure on international climate negotiators meeting in Copenhagen, but the negotiations ended in confusion. In 2012, McKibben traveled the United States on a "Do the Math" (about climate science) tour and again in 2013 on a "Summer Heat" tour with the goal of linking the global movement to local environmental justice issues. Along with author and activist Naomi Klein, he helped to launch a national fossil fuel divestment campaign to encourage individuals, pension funds, universities, and other groups and organizations to withdraw their [Page 291]investments from the 200 fossil fuel companies with the biggest carbon footprints. By 2014, more than 300 college divestment groups and universities began to divest, along with numerous cities and several foundations. A notable success was when the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a foundation created by the grandchildren of oil industrialist John D. Rockefeller, announced that it would divest its fossil fuel holdings (Jobin-Leeds, 2016).

On September 21, 2014, a People's Climate March, called by 350.org and sponsored by over 1,500 organizations, was held in New York City with companion demonstrations worldwide. Over 300,000 people participated in the New York march, with another 300,000 estimated to attend worldwide. In New York, the staging was divided into six sections, with "frontline" groups in the first section; these groups included people most impacted by climate change, including Indigenous peoples. Members of other social movements were also in attendance, including immigration, prison rights, queer liberation, workers' rights, Indigenous rights, and education rights, along with environmental justice groups. Over the weekend of the march, thousands of presentations occurred throughout the city, including talks by Indigenous women from North Dakota. Another event was a tour of the South Bronx, where the asthma rate is high, due in large part to the diesel fumes from trucks routed through the South Bronx-where the residents are mostly people of color-and away from the more affluent parts of the city. Storytelling was an important part of the march (Jobin-Leeds, 2016). Another People's Climate March was held in Washington, DC, along with 300 companion demonstrations on April 29, 2017. An estimated 200,000 people participated in the Washington, DC, march. Organizers proclaimed that they were protesting the environmental policies of the administration of recently elected U.S. president Donald Trump (Fandos, 2017). Many marchers chanted, "We're here, we're hot, this planet's all we got."

Leaders of the climate justice movement say it is a difficult cause because of an urgent time limit and economic and political machinery that moves slowly. In addition, they are fighting against an economic system in which it is extremely profitable to pollute and deplete the physical environment (Jobin-Leeds, 2016). "System change. Not climate change" has become a favorite slogan of the movement. Economic and political system change is a big goal.

1. After reading what was most memorable and what did you learn?