Latinas and the Politics of Urban Spaces

Sharon Navarro, Lilliana Saldaña

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000294309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This book illuminates the ways in which Chicanas, Puerto Rican women, and other Latinas organize and lead social movements, either on the ground or digitally, in major cities of the continental United States and Puerto Rico. It shows how they challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-immigrant policies through their political praxis and spiritual activism. Drawing from a range of disciplines and perspectives, academic and activist authors offer unique insights into environmental justice, peace and conflict resolution, women's rights, LGBTQ coalition-building, and more—all through a distinctive Latina lens. Designed for use in a wide range of college courses, this book is also aimed at practitioners, community organizers, and grassroots leaders.

1

Semillas de Justicia

Chicana Environmentalism in Chicago

Teresa Irene Gonzales

In Chicago, environmental justice organizing in Mexican immigrant and Mexican American communities is overwhelmingly led by women. These Chicana activists have implemented culturally relevant initiatives that empower residents to reimagine blighted, decayed, and contaminated land. To understand these creative processes, I attended a two-hour toxic tour of the La Villita (Little Village) neighborhood in Chicago conducted in the Fall of 2015. Led by guides from the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), these tours operate both as an income generator for the organization and an opportunity to educate people about the effects of environmental racism, which disproportionately affects low-income communities of color.

LVEJO routinely begins tours at 27th Street and Troy Avenue, where the community garden Semillas de Justicia is located (Figure 1.1). Once an industrial area that housed underground oil tanks, this 1.5-acre brownfield site¹ required extensive remediation. It was a colorless, contaminated eyesore, but the space now boasts several culturally relevant Chicana/o/x murals, including one titled Dedicación a las Mamás Semilleras, depicting flowers, produce, and local women and children. As we entered the garden through the wrought-iron gate, we were greeted by a small statue of the Virgin Mary. The area then opened to an outdoor classroom, complete with moveable chairs in a variety of colors. To the right was a small, tentlike structure that housed gardening materials. The garden included a mix of raised and ground-level beds with organic soil for produce and flowers. As we moved through the space, our tour guides encouraged us to interact with the collection of chickens, bunnies, and a rooster.

FIGURE 1.1 Semillas de Justicia garden entrance. Photo credit: Teresa I. Gonzales, June 19, 2018.

As a tool in local activists’ arsenal for environmental justice, toxic tours inform outsiders, who may not realize the extent of environmental racism, and locals, who may have normalized unhealthy conditions. They reveal the various environmental assaults that racially and economically marginalized populations encounter on a daily basis (Pezzullo 2007). Our three guides, Natalia, Cuauhtemoc, and Elizabeth, all in their late teens to early twenties, provided a brief history of environmental pollutants and brownfield sites in the neighborhood. We then walked through the community, down garbage-strewn alleyways toward an industrial area, and arrived in a newly developed park on a remediated superfund site. There, our guides engaged us in conversation regarding the effects of environmental assaults on poor communities of color.

Toxic tours provide information for both residents and outsiders regarding the complex systems that simultaneously structure and constrain impoverished communities of color. Within La Villita, these tours serve two functions. They highlight the work of locals seeking to address environmentally racist conditions – what we can understand as pollution oppression² – and they offer an avenue for insiders to reframe a common narrative about their communities. In recounting the ways that industry and city officials mark low-income communities of color as toxic dumping grounds, local Chicana activists shift the popular narrative of individual failure and neighborhood filth and to a new focus on state-level violence.

Within La Villita, the tour also highlights the ways local Mexican Americans, especially women, are redefining environmental justice through a culturally relevant, working-class feminist lens. What I call their Chicana environmentalism centers the histories, experiences, and epistemologies of both Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans. In Chicago, LVEJO and other Mexican American activists for environmental rights sought to address environmental goals through campaigns to influence physical redevelopment, increase access to healthy food, and empower local residents to reshape their communities. Here I analyze a range of evidence: ethnographic field notes from toxic tours and public meetings, local newspaper articles and development reports regarding greening practices, locally deployed documentaries regarding environmental pollution in La Villita, and interviews with 14 Chicana activists to consider the ways these women used feminisms based in the experiences of working-class women of color to redress ongoing environmental abuses. Extending the rich intellectual work of Black and Chicana feminists, alongside feminist community economic development scholars, I argue that Chicana activists in Chicago employed Chicana environmentalism to encourage resident involvement in addressing environmental racism at both the neighborhood and the city levels.³

Chicana Environmentalism and Asset-Based Activism

Scholars of social movements, community development, and women-of-color activism have highlighted the ways women have consistently mobilized to increase collective empowerment and create new spaces and opportunities for residents to combat racism, reimagine their neighborhoods, and maintain organizational autonomy (Combahee River Collective 1978, Gilkes 1994, Feldman and Stall 2004, Emejulu and Bornstein 2011, Grimshaw 2011, Isoke 2013). Activists work strategically to maintain agency over local decisions and provide a buffer against inherently racist and classist policies that disenfranchise marginalized populations. Women have consistently engaged in this work, both as mothers in the domestic sphere and as active citizens in the public sphere (Naples 1991a, Collins 2000, Emejulu 2011, Isoke 2013).

Working-class women and women of color are more apt to work collaboratively, focus on community building and self-transformation, and recognize structural barriers to equality as they strive for equitable access to power for everyone (Collins 1991, Naples 1991a, 1991b, Gilkes 1994, James 1999, Mele 2000, Abramovitz 2001, Brodkin 2009, Isoke 2013). Feminist scholarship has highlighted the long and varied tradition of community-based activism among women of color that centers on education, social service provision, economic empowerment, and neighborhood transformation (Collins 1991, Naples 1991a, James 1999). This form of empowerment evokes what Burns (1978), Collins (2000), and others call transformational leadership. Within this model, leaders empower those around them to change existing structures for the betterment of everyone. Recognizing times to step back from a leadership position, they seek to increase local skill sets through education and personal development (Burns 1978, Naples 1991b, Pharr 1996, Barker, Johnson, and Lavalette 2001, Polletta 2002, Pyles 2014, Gonzales 2017).

Within Chicago’s environmental justice movement, Chicana activists often create opportunities to enhance resident skills and increase civic engagement through an asset-based community development (ABCD) model (Gonzales 2017). ABCD models, derived from the work of Kretzmann and McKnight (1997), address local issues by identifying the strengths and resources of a community. This model contrasts with a clientelist approach, common in impoverished communities, which promotes resident dependency on external experts to solve complex local issues. Within the ABCD movement, development experts work alongside local community organizations to identify the “gifts, skills, and capacities” of “individuals, associations, and institutions” (Kretzmann and McKnight 1997, 6). Once identified, experts and local groups work together to strengthen ties between residents and organizations and work collaboratively toward mitigating or solving social injustices (Green and Haines 2012).

On the one hand, the ABCD model provides a framework for local activists to battle denigrative actions and narratives of developers, urban planners, city officials, and others claiming that poor neighborhoods lack the capacity to address ongoing social issues such as poverty, urban decay, violence, or low education levels. On the other hand, ABCD risks a boot-strap narrative that absolves the state from addressing structural inequities. The 14 women I interviewed understood these tensions. Addressing outside experts, they often balanced promotion of local strengths strategically and delicately with an invitation to help them realize their vision for the neighborhood. Rather than focus on dominant notions of development, women activists in La Villita rooted their goals in both feminist and culturally relevant ways. In Chicago, this asset-based organizing marks Chicana environmentalism as it embraces an ability to use the resources at hand to realize a local vision for the neighborhood.

These activist women do not naively assume that local knowledge is somehow freer or more attuned to the goals of eradicating social inequalities. As Chicanas and as working-class women, they understand that the local – people, place, and knowledge – is embedded within systems of domination and oppression (Crenshaw 1991, Escobar 2001). Wrestling with the contradictions of local need and structural inequality, however, provides them with an avenue for addressing structural barriers rather than individual pathologies. In the realm of community development, their efforts reveal, issues of pollution oppression and environmental justice become prevalent.

Women Activists and Community Development

How does Chicana environmentalism connect to local development decisions that aim to (re)envision and (re)vitalize poor communities of color? Community development is supposed to improve the quality of life for residents, particularly those with low incomes living in economically struggling neighborhoods. Part of development centers on empowering locals to better their communities by partnering with experts and engaging with government and nonprofit organizations. Experts in local economic development often assume that poverty persists because of locals’ lack of education and relevant skill sets. Local development plans can therefore reinforce racial and class-based hierarchies that privilege affluent Whites and stigmatize the poor, Latinas/os/xs, and Indigenous populations (Bonds 2013). As Emejulu (2011) highlights, this approach assumes that local residents, particularly historically oppressed peoples, lack agency and are “passive [and powerless] objects requiring intervention” by expert practitioners (386). This deficiency-based approach runs counter to feminist, antiracist, and women-centered models that recognize the value and power of the poor and local communities of color.

In Chicago, as elsewhere, environmental justice organizations are overwhe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributor Biographies
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Latinas/xs and the Politics of Urban Spaces
• 1 Semillas de Justicia: Chicana Environmentalism in Chicago
• 2 Brujas in the Time of Trump: Hexing the Ruling Class
• 3 Intersectional Synthesis: A Case Study of the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción
• 4 Place, Space, and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center
• 5 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Amigas Latinas’ Pláticas as a Site of Transformative Knowledge Production
• 6 Conclusion
• Index