Chapter 1 Social and Climate Heat in Epidemic County

For a Breath of Fresh Air 

Kern County is characteristically an arid valley, mostly stripped of its native vegetation by the extractive and agricultural industries that produce food and energy for the wider world beyond it. Industrial farming and oil and gas extraction produce commodities for national and global consumption, while locally they generate pollution. No one understood the pollution effects of the agricultural industry better than Valentina (known as Tina for short), whom I met at a nonprofit organization in Delano. She came from a lineage of mobilized Filipino aunts and uncles who became extraordinary advocates for their families, neighbors, and coworkers. Other relatives were active members of the farmworkers’ movement in Delano. Her relative participated in campaigning for the passage of the California Pesticide Drift Exposure Response Act (SB 391) of 2005, which not only sets funding aside for paying the medical bills of victims of pesticide drift exposure but also protects the dignity of the victims of pesticide accidents through improving communication and planning with first responders. Better communication enables first responders to treat the victims of pesticide drift disasters in a timelier and more accurate way. Tina’s family history of fighting for labor rights combined with environmental activism has trained her to become an expert on the many health risks that farmworkers and other rural residents encounter from the combination of pesticides and dust.

Our first meeting was at the organization’s office in Delano, the most northern city in Kern County. I sat facing a whiteboard in a dark empty room while she presented the top five pesticides applied in the county. Tina was preparing for a meeting with the agriculture commissioner. I was her first audience member with whom she would practice presenting her research. She wrote down a long list of the common pesticides applied in Kern County and elaborated on the quantity in millions of pounds applied annually, their equivalent in weight to school buses, and the health impacts they have for anyone exposed to them. In 2011, the farmers in the county saturated their fields with over twenty-eight million pounds of pesticides (28,160,997 lb., to be exact). Tina was working on explaining the need for a buffer zone against pesticides near schools. She emphasized the historic lack of communication between farmers and neighboring families, and how this impeded first responders’ ability to identify the exact pesticide that drifted and treat it adequately. It also led to an undercount of exposed residents.

Pausing from her presentation, Tina asked me if I had heard of pesticide accidents occurring. I nodded my head. I wanted to tell her about growing up in the Salinas Valley and how taking a breath of fresh air during school recess was impossible when growers were fertilizing their crops. But, instead, I referenced Jill Lindsey Harrison’s (2011) book Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice. Tina proceeded to explain recent occurrences in Tulare and Kern Counties. She detailed the horrors of exposure combined with the inadequacies of first responders to the calls for help for crying babies and children who were physically ill from exposure, the anguish of parents who were frantic about the health of their children because of accidents, and the indifference of police officers, firefighting personnel, and EMT and hospital personnel to their prolonged suffering. I would later learn more about pesticide accidents during a subsequent trip to San Francisco to a hearing at the state supreme court and from other interviews that I conducted, as well as from the sociologist Tracy Perkins’s (2014) published interview with the renowned activist Teresa De Anda, who recounted the herculean challenges posed by pesticide drift.

A pesticide accident in Earlimart (Tulare County) on September 13, 1999, was especially crushing for Tina because her friends and relatives were directly impacted. Hundreds of residents were exposed. Some were shuttled into a school where they were forced to strip naked and line up for decontamination. The fire department hosed down everyone with cold water. First responders were not informed about which pesticide had drifted, Tina explained, and the chemicals in this case became reactive when in contact with water. She described how some residents drove themselves to a hospital on their own at the first signs of acute illness. They waited long hours for admission, were not provided with any treatment, and were not informed about which pesticide had drifted. They were discharged wearing the same clothes they wore when they came in for treatment and were sent back to the same homes they left where they became ill. Even when many people were arriving at the same hospital with similar symptoms, the clinicians made no intervention related to the place of contamination. Other accounts of pesticide accidents in Kern County from Tracy Perkins’s interview with Teresa De Anda included officials barricading residents from exiting the site where an accident had occurred, making parents who called 911 dispatchers for help wait on the phone for forty-five minutes for the next steps of what to do, and intimidating individuals who raised concerns at related meetings. Many residents and their children developed asthma after the accident. Tina was now working with the residents of Earlimart and other small rural communities to mobilize against pesticide use.

Tina explained that pesticides applied over decades remain in the local drinking water. Traces of nitrate, arsenic, and the pesticide dibromochloropropane (DBCP) are regularly found in groundwater wells in Earlimart, Delano, and McFarland (see the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act Annual Report 2022). She referenced a recent study in which researchers determined that pesticides damage the cerebral nervous system, a finding consistent with the growing rate of autism and learning disabilities among Latino/a school-age children in the Central Valley (see Californians for Pesticide Reform 2014). Despite peer-validated research about the risks of pesticides to people’s health, Tina noted that agribusinesses continue to use millions of pounds of pesticides each year with no adjustments to applications near schools. Tina insists, “We are not against farmers,” but “We are against pesticides.”

According to the California Pesticide Regulation report, Kern County ranks as the county with the second most pesticides applied in California, exceeded only by Fresno County and followed closely by neighboring Tulare County. Over thirty million pounds of pesticides (30,109,635 lb.) were applied in Kern County in 2019. Pesticides and dust in the air exacerbate the already existing PM10 (particulate matter 2.5–10 microns) and PM2.5 (particulate matter less than 2.5 microns) pollution coming from the various industries in Kern County, particularly waste processing sites, chemical production plants, truck and automobile traffic, and oil processing facilities, among others. Particle pollution is measured as the sum of all dry and/or liquid matter suspended in the air either through direct release from a source or formed out of a chemical reaction in the atmosphere (Airnow, n.d.). Kern County ranks number one in annual particulate matter (PM2.5) in the United States (American Lung Association, n.d.). Pesticides also contribute to “bad” ground-level ozone, which comes from a chemical reaction of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and nitrogen oxide (NO_x) (EPA, n.d.d.). Kern County ranks as the fourth most ground-level ozone polluted county in the state (American Lung Association, n.d.a.). It follows behind the much more populated counties of San Bernardino, Riverside, and Los Angeles. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the health consequences of particle pollution include “irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat, coughing, chest tightness and shortness of breath, reduced lung function, irregular heartbeat, asthma attacks, heart attacks, and premature death in people with heart or lung disease” (Airnow, n.d.). Both particle pollution and ground-level ozone have devastating effects on respiratory and cardiovascular health, especially for people with preexisting medical conditions, for young children, the elderly, and outdoor workers.

In Kern County, the rate of emergency department visits for asthma complications among children 0–5 and 6–17 years of age far outpaces the rate of similar visits in the rest of the state (California Department of Public Health, n.d.b.). Young children may need more frequent hospital visits and specialized medical services overall, but the higher rates also indicate the likelihood of unmet health needs and difficulty accessing appropriate pediatric care, as was seen during the COVID-19 pandemic (McMorrow et al. 2020). Kern County’s air pollution problems stem from multiple industrial and traffic operations, which, together, stack the odds against good health, especially for the youngest and most health-compromised residents, affecting everyone.

Tina believes that environmental conditions in the area are responsible for her daughter contracting valley fever at age six. Tina planned to drive us out to Earlimart to examine where she believes her daughter was exposed to the cocci fungus. During our drive on a narrow road that curled along almond and grape orchards, Tina stopped the car several times to identify important changes in agricultural technology. She distinguished between old grape vineyards and newer ones: “You can see that the newer ones have a V-shape post so that the vines grow up. The grapes fall with gravity. This is less work for farmworkers, and it protects workers from the sun. . . . This one [the old vineyard], notice how they’re just rows [the leaves grow along a wire]. The workers must get beneath the leaves to get the grapes, and they have no shade.” Then we passed a dairy farm with cows standing together beneath a large fan hanging over a stall. We drove by an almond orchard where several brown mounds near a metal shed stood as tall as a two-story building. “Notice that big pile right over there,” Tina called out, “those are all almonds. Imagine how many hours people had to work just to make one of those mountains!” Veering off the entrance to Earlimart, we stopped to take a picture of the welcome sign that read, “Earlimart, population 8,537, elevation 282 feet.” We were now officially in Tulare County. The ten-minute ride from Delano to Earlimart resembled much of what rural Kern County looks like: miles of agricultural production followed by the emergence of a small town. It also made clear that, despite new technologies, farming remains no less labor intensive, strenuous, and hazardous.

We pulled up to the house where Tina grew up and got out of the car to observe two vast fields aligned next to the quiet street. Across the intersection on our left were fields of almond trees flourishing with white flowers. In front of us was an endless view of vineyards that were sprouting leaf buds along rows of wire. Between the street and the fields was a narrow dirt path that farmers used to turn their tractors around into the next row. Tina pointed out where a neighbor, friend, and relative once lived who was diagnosed with cancer, identifying nearly every house on the street. This street was symbolic of the institutional strength of the agricultural industry, where farmers use every inch of land for production even when that means families nearby are exposed to the dangers of dust and chemicals.

Tina strongly believes that her daughter was exposed to valley fever while playing in the front yard of their house in Earlimart. The moving tractors operate just across the street, and there are few barriers protecting residents against the encroaching dust from the fields. Tina informed me that when these fields are doused with fertilizers, fumigants, and other chemicals, the residents shut their windows in hopes of reducing the amount of chemicals they would be breathing in.

Tina pointed to how air pollution has compelled the local public schools to participate in the Air Quality Flag Program, which alerts students about air quality by raising a color-coded flag. A green flag means that the air is “good,” yellow is “moderate,” orange is “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” red is “unhealthy,” and purple is “very unhealthy.” Monitoring the Air Quality Index guides teachers, coaches, after-school educators, and parents in their decision-making regarding the risks of having children play, exercise, and learn outside. Kern County had 103 days of “unhealthy air pollution” in 2020 (Wilson 2020). When Tina’s daughter was recovering from valley fever, the air quality was a deciding factor in whether her daily activities would take place indoors or outdoors. Restricting her participation outdoors, even during family functions on the weekends, was necessary to protect their daughter’s health and ensure her recovery, but “it was like she was being punished, while polluters kept doing their business as usual.” Tina attempted to protect her daughter’s recovery by remaining vigilant about the quality of the air. Both the elevated levels of ozone and particle pollution combined to make breathing outside hazardous, and it can also lead to restricting the physical movement of residents, a condition that is especially harmful to children.

Tina and I often sat together at community-led meetings. She sometimes informed me through whispers or written notes about what was meant by a particular comment. She identified for me the people who formed part of the EJ movement and their various achievements. Some of the organizers I came to know well formed part of the CBA. Arvin is located at the southernmost part of Kern County, with a population of approximately nineteen thousand residents; over 95 percent identify as Latino/Hispanic on the 2020 U.S. census. The late president of CBA, Sal Partida, found ways to support my research by making connections for me to other organizers and to farmworkers who had caught valley fever.

As I learned more about CBA’s past work, it became clear that collaboration with other EJ activists in Kern County was necessary to develop an alternative infrastructure to the state air monitors and reports, which did not fully capture the ways in which Arvin residents experienced air pollution. For example, the Community Recycling and Resource Center facility was known to release extremely foul odors resembling rotten eggs, a noxious gas classified as hydrogen sulfide. But the California Air Resource Board’s air monitor was located ten miles away from this site. The tragic deaths of the young and undocumented Ramirez brothers working at the waste facility in 2011 propelled CBA to activate the Bucket Brigade, a citizen science initiative designed to collect air quality data. The health consequences of breathing hydrogen sulfide include nausea, headaches, eye irritation, and coughing, even the loss of smell and permanent damage to the eyes; it also can provoke instantaneous death (U.S. Department of Labor, n.d.). Using a specialized kit consisting of a sterilized bucket, a plastic bag, goggles, and vacuum tubes, CBA volunteers engaged in air sampling near the waste facility. They kept a health log about what they saw, what they smelled, and how they felt. The air samples were mailed overnight to a special lab for analysis.

In a Valley Public Radio article explaining the Bucket Brigade, Partida describes his frustration with “experts” who express their underlying mistrust of the CBA volunteers and their methods. Partida states, “The air district is questioning the validity of the bucket. They say, ‘how do I know that you didn’t get that bad air contaminated somehow. Or how do I know that you’re qualified to take that sample? Or that you did take the sample where you said you took the sample and not somewhere else.’ They’re always questioning it” (Moore 2012). The regulators did not acknowledge that the Bucket Brigade method adopted by CBA was previously evaluated and accepted for accuracy by the EPA (n.d.b.) fifteen years earlier in 1996 (Louisiana Bucket Brigade 2023).  Critics also did not acknowledge that Partida was an aerospace engineer for NASA at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in Lompoc before retiring and starting his own accounting business and cofounding CBA. Partida’s training and expertise clearly equipped him with the kinds of tools and qualifications needed. The tools that Partida and members of CBA mastered in their collaborative work and that were missing in the regulators’ approaches included a collective capacity to monitor air pollution with local knowledge.

The lab results from CBA’s Bucket Brigade method revealed that the Community Recycling and Resource Center facility had four times the level of hydrogen sulfide than the level the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment sets as safe for acute exposure to the gas and eighteen times higher than the level set for chronic exposure (Moore 2012). The stark differences between regulatory agents’ reported findings and those gathered by CBA members encouraged EJ activists in Kern County to partner with organizers from Imperial County who had experienced similar disregard of their local observations. They launched the Identifying Violations Affecting Neighbors Kern (IVAN Kern) website. IVAN Kern provides real-time air monitoring reports (IVAN Kern, n.d.). It draws data from community-placed air monitoring systems around Kern County, some of which are in residents’ backyards. IVAN Kern also permits anyone to submit reports of noxious gas leaks, oil spills, and even suspicious explosions. Its website contains a log of all the calls made by residents about these kinds of events, documenting multiple issues and environmental threats across the county and around the clock, despite official reports of declining air pollution. Due to pressure from CBA activists, the Community Recycling and Resource Center facility closed permanently in 2013. It was replaced with the Recology Blossom Valley Organics composting site two years later. CBA organizers and Partida were instrumental in negotiating the plans for and permits given to Recology. They established the parameters of the community’s relationship with the composting site that would be set for generations to come.

Hot Geographies (Heat, Health, and Farm Labor)

Air pollution can feel especially unpleasant during the warmer months in Kern County. The summer temperatures rise to 90 degrees Fahrenheit or higher as early as May. In 2010, there were twenty-seven days of at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit between May and October in Bakersfield. In 2020, there were forty-nine days reported reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit (Extreme Weather Watch, n.d.). These rising temperatures occur in the context of hotter than average temperatures for the entire state in twelve of the past sixteen years, resulting in what is characterized accurately as a climate emergency (Edwards and Margolis 2021).

The rising heat has special implications for the social and physical geography of Kern County because the largest employment sectors are farming, fishing, and forestry, making up approximately 14 percent of the total labor force (Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d.). During the time of my research, signs warning of the dangers of heat were posted on billboard advertisements across the county. A poster of a farmworker sitting under a canopy and drinking from a paper cup read “agua, sombra, descanso” (water, shade, rest). The message encouraged workers to drink water, find shade, and take rests to mitigate the heat. It was part of the “beat the heat” bilingual campaign paid for by the state government’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, better known as Cal/OSHA. This image provoked flashbacks to the summer of 2007, when I was working for the Migrant Education program in Fresno County. That summer, I felt the symptoms of heat illness as I was recruiting migrant farm working parents in the fields to sign up for educational and health services for their children.  At that time, I was gathered in conversation under the sun with farmworkers when my vision began to blur and my stomach became uneasy. I awkwardly recused myself from the vibrant discussion and headed toward the parked car where my coworker waited with the AC on full blast. As I attempted to measure my distance to safety, the image of the car faded into a cloudy white and then a white screen. Blinded by the sun, I felt my way into the car confessing to my coworker that I was unwell. That summer, the beat-the-heat campaign was in its second year. There was much critique of its shortcomings among farmworkers. Seeing the billboards on Kern County roads signaled to me the perpetuation of suffering that climate conditions produce for outdoor workers.

Heat stroke and other heat-related illnesses are on the rise for farmworkers. Most heat-related deaths in California have been concentrated in and around Kern County (Edward and Margolis 2021). Heat illness refers to the medical condition when the body is unable to cope with a heat load. Its symptoms include cramps, exhaustion, syncope (loss of consciousness), and stroke (California Department of Industrial Relations, n.d.). The Cal/OSHA safety order, Heat Illness Prevention in Outdoor Places of Employment, requires employers to adopt protective strategies, including shade and drinking water, training all workers to identify the signs of health illness, and allowing workers to take breaks and call emergency medical services when necessary. Yet, despite these mandates, heat-related deaths doubled in the three years after the state of California first adopted the emergency regulations in 2005 (Horton 2016).

The adaptive strategies that Cal/OSHA requires of employers are difficult to meet. Sarah Horton (2016) finds that access to shade and drinking water are constrained by the rigid structure of the industry. For farmworkers, water stations are sometimes too far away to enable taking breaks as needed. When employers provide shade, it is often not enough. Large canopies inadequately block the heat, and some provide too small of a shelter for large cohorts. Many workers are forced to find respite from the sun in the cool dirt under crops and cars. Stopping or slowing down due to the heat might mean a reduction in pay. Although reports indicate that the cases of heat-related illness are declining, the exact number of farmworkers suffering from heat-related illnesses are inadequately recorded and often misclassified or simply not reported. Heat is not always recognized as the cause of illness or death because many of its symptoms overlap with more common illnesses. Additionally, workers’ documentation status can play a role in refusing to seek and receive treatment.

Farmworkers face social as well as climatic heat. Approximately 50 to 75 percent of all California farmworkers are immigrants and hold an undocumented status, though the exact percentage of unauthorized workers is difficult to confirm (University of California Merced Community and Labor Center 2022, n.d.). Contractors put pressure on all farmworkers to meet the demands and deadlines of the companies that employ them (Wadsworth, Courville, and Schenker 2019). One way to pressure workers is to pay by piece rate rather than hourly wages or salaries, which allows contractors to encourage speedups as a precondition for better take-home pay. Being paid by the number of filled buckets, boxes, or baskets forces workers to accelerate their pace to make up for lost time spent driving to distant fields. Workers are also vigilant about vehicles entering fields or following close behind them, in part because Kern County law enforcement has a history of collaborating with federal and state officials, including the FBI and ICE. Approximately eighty thousand immigrants were detained in California under the Secure Communities program between 2008 and 2013 (“Immigration Law” 2014). The program was designed to identify immigrants in jails who are deportable. When an officer made an arrest, the participating jails sent fingerprints to an immigrant database that is accessible to ICE. This program allowed the local law officials to hold detainees for an additional forty-eight hours after their release date to coordinate deportation with ICE officials. This practice raised questions about whether local officers were enforcing federal immigration law.

The Secure Communities program prompted community response. Transparency and Responsibility Using State Tools (TRUST) Act, signed and put into effect in 2014 in California, challenged the federal government’s Secure Communities program because there was “no requirement for a warrant and no established standard of proof, such as reasonable suspicion or probable cause, for issuing an ICE detainer request” (“Immigration Law” 2014). The TRUST Act limited law enforcement from prolonging detention at ICE’s request. At the time of my field research, the Kern County sheriff, Donny Youngblood, came under public scrutiny for allowing ICE officials into the jails and to access arrest records. In protesting against these strategies, farmworkers’ rights organizations banded together and demonstrated in front of the federal ICE office in Bakersfield to remind officials that immigrants are legally protected by the TRUST Act against these backdoor practices (Romero 2014; “Immigration Law” 2014; Chang, Esquivel, and Lau, n.d.). A young EJ activist, whom I call Justicio, or Justice for short, brought to my attention how closely EJ and farmworker rights activists collaborate. On one of our drives, Justice pointed out the location of the ICE facility in Bakersfield and recalled that the protest chants from the people gathered on the outside were eerily echoed by detainees’ drumming on windows on the inside.

Crimmigration policies, the politics and practices that conflate immigration with criminality, can coerce some people into enduring unlawful conditions. This social heat has encouraged some contractors to leverage strategies that evade the vigilance of ICE and Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) police at work (Xia 2018; Horton 2016). ICE and HSI are authorized to conduct random worksite I-9 inspections and deliver civil fines to employers who are knowingly employing unauthorized workers (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, n.d.) The HSI police investigating worksites can arrest and deport unauthorized workers, including those who are driving to work. Some workers are mistaken and said to “match the description” of a person they are looking for (A. Castillo 2018). Immigration arrests are surging. These agencies purport to pressure employers to meet the federal employment eligibility requirements, but they also encourage contractors to implement clandestine systems (Horton 2016). Approximately 1 percent of all the social security numbers reported for farm labor were numbers that were frequently used by multiple employers in California (Martin, Hooker, and Stockton 2019). Many workers do not claim the benefits associated with using a social security or tax identification number, including workers’ compensation insurance and the various retirement benefits that accrue from paying into a social security account. (For use of unemployment insurance among farmworkers, see Martin, Hooker, and Stockton 2019.) Clandestine systems can further create conflicts of interest when workers need to submit formal complaints about exploitation, threats, sexual harassment, or wage theft, since they will likely face termination for their reports and must confront the uncertainty of securing work without valid credentials. When the harvest has ended, it leaves undocumented employees with few options, forcing many to accept exploitative job offers that are dangerous, underpaid, and uninsured.

Of the many challenges that farmworkers face from social and climatic heat, among the most dangerous is the consolidation of agribusiness. Kern County employs the greatest number of farmworkers in the state, with approximately 150,300 in 2015, during the statewide drought and rising temperatures (Martin, Hooker, and Stockton 2019). Nearly two-thirds of them (approximately ninety-eight thousand) were employed by labor contractors rather than by growers directly. The five-year drought resulted in agribusiness consolidation, with the number of farms decreasing but the average size of farms growing by 10 percent in California (National Agricultural Statistics Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, n.d.). The growers who managed to stay in production experienced an increase in net cash and a decline in farming expenses (Martin, Hooker, and Stockton 2019). Philip Martin, professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis, explains that industrial farming is heading toward concentration. Martin describes this as the prosperity paradox or the “80–20 rule,” which means that most farms (80 percent) account for the smallest percentage of farm outputs (20 percent), while the largest farms (20 percent), those that manage 1,000 acres or more, produce the vast majority of food and fiber (80 percent) (Martin 2020, 7). The costs to mitigate the impacts of the drought are driving out the smaller growers who could otherwise provide more stable and safe employment opportunities.  They are also more likely to hire year-round farmworkers directly, not through a contractor.

The concentration of large farms moves the industry farther away from providing work with livable wages. According to the National Agricultural Workers Survey (2018), all the farmworkers who participated in the survey and were over eighteen years old worked forty or more hours a week between 2015 and 2016. Male workers reported an average of forty-six hours, while females reported forty hours. Some workers reported fifty-six hours worked per week. All these extra hours worked were paid in overtime wages. The consolidation of farms means that production is physically larger but not longer. More people are needed to harvest the season. Kern County pulls in more farmworkers at a faster rate than most of the state. California’s farmworker population grew in 2019 at a 17 percent increase in employed farmworkers over previous years, and Kern County saw a 25 percent increase (Martin, Hooker, and Stockton 2019). The average annual earnings reported for workers were $9,000 at the minimum wages or about $10 an hour; some earned $12 an hour if they worked 750 hours throughout the year (Martin, Hooker, and Stockton 2019).

The rise in part-time workers contrasts with a national narrative about a shortage of farm labor. While driving through the agricultural fields in Kern County, wooden planks were posted directly in the fields with messages announcing farm work opportunities. This was an unusual sight, because the names of those who owned or leased the land were typically revealed only on a need-to-know basis. News outlets, such as the Los Angeles Times (Lifsher 2012) and the San Diego Union-Tribune (S. Smith 2014), reported the ongoing crisis of shortages of farmworkers despite declining unemployment rates nationally. In 2010, following the Great Recession when unemployment was at its highest, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) launched its “Take My Job!” campaign. The campaign challenged the racist beliefs that unauthorized workers were “taking American jobs.” The UFW encouraged unemployed Americans to apply for farmwork and provided connecting services for these applicants. That year, the comedian and political commentator, Stephen Colbert, testified before the U.S. congressional subcommittee on his experience as a farmworker for a day. Fast-forward a few years later and the political narrative and the signposts in the fields seemed to signal that most Americans did not want to work in the farms and that growers could not find enough workers to fill the demands of industrial farming even in the postrecession period. The message was not wrong, but it was misleading. Behind that national spotlight on the farmworker shortage, large growers and private contractors were recruiting more exploitable part-time workers than ever before. They have effectively involved the public in an alleged national food security crisis that is otherwise a hidden labor and economic strategy.

One of the main ways large growers are meeting the demand for part-time workers is through the H-2 Agriculture Visa (H-2A) guest worker program. This program’s solicitations are increasing nationally. California is among the top four states with H-2A workers (Rural Migration News 2022). Approximately 32,333 of the 317,000 H-2A guest workers arrived in California in 2021. Kern County sees fewer H-2A farmworkers than coastal counties, but the rate of H-2A workers continues to grow each year. Known as the “guest worker” program, the Department of Labor (DOL) offers the H-2A visa certification, allowing agricultural businesses to recruit seasonal or temporary laborers from foreign countries when U.S. workers are not available. Ninety-three percent of workers in the H-2A program are recruited from Mexico, making Mexican immigrants the primary agricultural labor force in the United States (Rural Migration News 2022).

Private contractors and growers who are certified to bring in guest workers must both reimburse H-2A guest workers in the first week of labor for the costs associated with obtaining the visa and also fund border crossing fees, reasonable transportation costs, lodging, food expenses, and the costs for returning to their home country. If an H-2A worker is fired by the sponsoring contractor or grower, they must exit the country. Despite the bureaucratic protections available to workers, many violations are reported including wage theft, labor abuse, and substandard housing. The number of growers that the DOL certified to recruit H-2A guest workers nearly doubled between 2013 and 2021 across the United States.

The reports of labor abuses resembling debt bondage perpetrated against H-2A workers are growing. According to the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, which conducts random investigations of the one thousand farm employers investigated every year, nearly two-thirds of them have violated workers’ right to wages. The DOL has ordered farm employers to provide back pay for approximately ten thousand U.S. and H-2A workers each year. In the Blaine Larsen Farms Inc. investigation, the DOL found that the potato grower had denied full wages and overtime pay to over five hundred H-2A visa and domestic workers (U.S. Department of Labor 2022). These crimes accounted for $1.3 million in back pay. Other violations included hiring unlicensed drivers to transport employees. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Larsen Farms further violated Occupational and Safety Health Administration’s temporary labor camp standards by failing to report the outbreak of cases.

Operation Blooming Onion is among the most egregious examples of H-2A visa program violation. The state of Georgia indicted twenty-four growers and contractors who committed abuses against H-2A visa workers. The clandestine group known as the Patricio Transnational Criminal Organization (TCO) fraudulently elicited seventy-one thousand H-2A visas and received thousands of certifications to hire foreign workers from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. But, upon the laborers’ arrival, the Patricio TCO held workers’ identification documents hostage, “requiring them to perform physically demanding work for little or no pay, forcing them to live in crowded, unsanitary, and degrading living conditions, and threatening them with deportation and violence” (United States v. Patricio TCO 2021). One reporter writes that “foreign workers were regularly forced at gunpoint to dig up onions from the ground with their bare hands, for which they were paid a mere 20 cents per bucket” (Lahoud 2021). The California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation reviewed 280 job offers that were used to recruit over twenty-two thousand H-2A visa workers to California. They found that over 60 percent falsely claimed that employers did not have to pay travel time, 51 percent denied workers tenants’ rights, and 46 percent claimed falsely that workers could not receive outside visitors in company housing (D. Bacon 2022). The director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute agrees that the abuses entail debt bondage and human trafficking, “but since these U.S. work arrangements are being set up abroad, it is difficult to regulate the behavior of recruiters” (D. Bacon 2022). While best practices get debated, the staggering impacts remain.

Labor violations do not just create problematic employment trends; they also generate hidden health challenges. Exploitation, wage theft, and physical and emotional abuse can lead to psychological distress, depression, and vulnerability to disease (Garcia Quijano 2020). These issues are not limited to H-2A workers. Both domestic and immigrant farmworkers, regardless of their authority to work, become vulnerable to a structure of labor that can easily exploit and expose them to dehumanizing conditions, all of which violate the concept of dignified work. 

Geographies of Hope

I met Justice through Mr. G. They are close partners in the EJ movement and share similar visions for their families and friends in Kern County. Justice organizes meetings with state regulators, research scientists, professors, first responders, politicians, residents, and many other stakeholders seeking to hold industries accountable for polluting the environment in Kern County. Justice has witnessed how the logic of regulations, practices, and policies shifts the health burdens to workers, rural residents, and young children who are vulnerable to the industries’ various polluting operations. He plays a key role in the collective mobilization of people to secure resources for social change.

Justice organized several toxic tours while I was conducting research. I accompanied him to a clandestine oil wastewater pit outside of Bakersfield where Justice had been informed of an illegally placed oil waste site. We drove north on Lerdo Highway surrounded by agricultural fields to check it out. As we drove through an abandoned property littered with scrap metals, a jet engine, and mounds of tires, we stopped the car near a pit that was flushing a corrosive orange pool of water and emitting a physically nauseating gas. Our eyes and throats burned from the fumes emanating from the water. We watched how the iridescent orange water flowed downstream from a pump into a second pit and then into a canal. We followed the canal by car as far as we could to the entrance of Camp Hamilton Veterans Park. Stopping at a bridge, we could see that the water was speckled with oil. A white truck blocked the road and our exit soon after we arrived. Two men approached us on foot and asked us about our intentions. Justice responded frankly and confidently. Then, we left unscathed. At that time, we did not identify the end of the flow. But, a few weeks later, Justice informed me that he and others used an aerial drone and found that the water led to a local water district, and, there, it was diluted for irrigating crops.

Neither the oil waste pits nor diluting wastewater for crop production were new practices, although both were highly controversial. The EJ groups that Justice worked with sought to pressure local water boards and elected officials to conduct accurate tests of the safety of using diluted oil wastewater for crops because none were available at that time. The uncertainty of the effects of these practices, particularly to human and ecological health, signaled yet another instance where industries manipulated risks. Selling wastewater to water districts and then to growers reduces everyone’s liability for and accountability to the public’s health, natural ecosystems, and underground aquifers storing future drinking water. It dilutes the public’s understanding of how oil wastewater is processed. No one can really see how the food they eat is grown with oil wastewater.

The extent of the problem is exacerbated by the size of the oil industry. Kern County ranks as the seventh-largest petroleum-producing county in the nation, generating about 11 million barrels of oil and 128 million cubic feet of gas annually (Kern Economic Development Foundation 2021). Oil extraction wells have operated in Kern County for over one hundred years. Dumping oil waste into open agriculture irrigation canals was once a common (albeit illegal) practice (Cart 2015). A more recent illicit practice, which was made illegal in April 2019, includes injecting high-pressure steam and water into wells that can cause accidental above-surface oil spills (known as surface expressions) (see Gross 2022). The Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, charged with regulating pesticides, metals, and other harmful substances in water, investigated where the Kern oil industries processed their waste. In a 2015 report, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board describes both that more than one-third of the region’s oil wastewater disposal pits operated without permits and that oil companies diverted toxic waters to more than three hundred previously undisclosed waste sites in Kern County (Cart 2015). While lining wastewater pits could prevent the leakage into aquifers of the chemicals used for fracking and oil drilling operations, regional water official Clay Rodgers stated that waste pits are unlikely to be lined because lining is not required (Cart 2015). Rodgers disclosed that oil wastewater in Kern County reached over eighty billion gallons in 2013 (Cart 2015). McKittrick Oil Field located west of Bakersfield, the largest oil field in the county, produces over 4.5 million gallons of wastewater daily. Approximately 11 percent of crops use diluted wastewater today in Kern County (Gross 2022).

The Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board came under pressure from legislators, local activists, and scientists in 2015 for allowing oil field wastewater to be used for irrigation (see Gross 2022). The regional water board contracted GSI Environmental as an allegedly unbiased consultant company to study the controversial practice. What the board did not disclose and failed to acknowledge until much later was how GSI Environmental closely aligns itself with the interests of Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Occidental Petroleum (Gross 2022). GSI Environmental’s previous record includes defending the Texaco and Chevron oil companies’ operations in the rainforest of Ecuador. The investigative reporter Liza Gross (2022) reviewed the scientific literature published by GSI Environmental and found that its researchers had regularly accepted “research funds from chemical and fossil fuel industries, and [that it] collaborates on research with scientists who work for these industries.” After their five-year study, GSI Environmental reported that there was “no identifiable increased health risk” from irrigating crops that are meant for human consumption with oil waste. The California Independent Petroleum Association trade group welcomed the news and warned, “When we shut down local oil production, we are also shutting down agriculture” (Gross 2022).

Given the priorities of GSI Environmental, it is no surprise that independent studies find otherwise, that soil health has been devastated chemically, biologically, physically, and nutritionally and that oil wastewater could further contaminate underground water sources and threaten consumers’ health (H. Miller et al. 2020). They find that there are devastating effects on the remaining natural ecosystems. The illicit practices of industry officials and regulators are sobering reminders of how some places form what Devon Peña (2005) describes as antiecologies, or places that create seemingly disconnected problems and where solutions are reduced to site-specific remedies rather than responses to widely observed cumulative ecological destruction.

The communities in rural areas have come to bear the disproportionate burdens of social, labor, and environmental uncertainties. Approximately 40 percent of Kern County’s population lives in disadvantaged unincorporated communities (DUCs)—densely settled places located outside of the city limits that have little to no governmental representation (Flegal et al. 2013; Hernandez 2018; Fernandez-Bou et al. 2021). DUCs are more likely to rely on dirt paths than on paved asphalt or concrete for sidewalks. Exhaust fumes and dirt stirred up by the passage of vehicles and semitrucks go unregulated. Medical and community services are difficult to secure. Drought coupled with divestment exacerbates the existing health burdens. It can also lead to dangerous circumstances that cause pedestrian accidents because there are no crosswalks or stoplights.

The Community Equity Initiative study found 525 “legacy communities,” by which they mean remote and small settlements, places where farmworkers are likely to have settled (Flegal et al. 2013). Many of the residents of these legacy communities rely on underperforming public or private infrastructure systems (Fernandez-Bou et al. 2021). Their population size ranges from five to five thousand residents (Flegal et al. 2013). Another 135 legacy communities have fewer than five residents and were not included in the study. More than one-third of all DUC residents live below the federal poverty line. Approximately 43 percent of the residents in DUCs are nonwhite. While the challenges of DUC residents are experienced differently depending on how race, age, citizenship, income, and gender intersect, there are many similarities in terms of political representation. DUCs offer fewer opportunities to participate in democratic governance in ways that enable voicing the concerns of residents to protect their health, their interests, and their needs for essential services (see London et al. 2018). This can be especially harmful in terms of the sudden or slow impacts of climate change, decisions about reducing state budgets, demanding accurate tests in the face of rising political power among industries, and accessing rights to clean water. While living in remote places can provide a sense of cultural cohesion and opportunities to build meaningful social relationships across generations, the combined social ecological conditions of DUCs can also cause great harm to rural residents, the surrounding ecosystems, and future generations. Residents are exposed to environmental injustices and offered limited democratic participation and representation to ameliorate them.

I met Consuelo (known as Connie) through Justice during a toxic tour in Fresno County. We sat across from each other on a bus ride to Oakland for a climate justice demonstration. Connie is a credentialed scholar activist with a loving personality. She and I met at her home in Bakersfield on several occasions to talk about our work. At that time, her focus was on water access for the residents of a rural town known as Lost Hills. Lost Hills’ population was 1,768 in 2023. Over 97 percent of the residents identified as Latino/Hispanic in the U.S. census of 2020. The median household income is under $40,000. Approximately 27 percent of the children of Lost Hills live below the poverty line, a rate that is 1.5 times greater than the state of California (U.S. Census Bureau 2023). According to Connie, most residents in Lost Hills work for a big agricultural company known as the Wonderful Company. This company is one of the largest, wealthiest, and thirstiest companies producing almonds, pistachios, pomegranates, lemons, and mandarin Cuties, among others. They market their products as loaded with healthful and nutritious benefits. When farm working residents who pick these products need medical attention, however, many cannot count on seeing a physician. Connie’s work experience in the area allowed her to witness how residents who contracted valley fever were forced to use emergency hospital services in the city of Bakersfield (a thirty-minute drive) because the local community clinic was unable to secure a licensed physician for almost two years. Connie noted that this situation exacerbated the adverse effects of valley fever because patients were unable to obtain a diagnosis quickly, efficiently, and affordably. Many farmworkers who rely on company transportation or carpooling must pay an additional fee to neighbors for transportation to the hospital.

Connie’s experiences made her especially wary of the case of East Porterville, a small city located in Tulare County, which bordered the north end of Kern County. East Porterville was among the worst hit communities without water throughout the first year of drought in 2014 (Hernandez 2018). Nearly one thousand people located outside of the city limits of East Porterville were without water (see also Grossi 2017). Access to the city’s clean and treated water system was just one street away, but the elected officials claimed it would be too costly to install the proper pipes for this unincorporated side of the city. When I visited East Porterville, there was a five-hundred-gallon tank parked on a side street from where the affected residents hauled buckets of water for cooking, cleaning, and bathing needs. Trucks were driving through the city hauling beds full of five-gallon jugs. Long lines were visible at the self-purchase water dispensers. Lawns were dried to a crisp and sidewalks were absent. The daily challenges of drought are exacerbated by environmental racism. East Porterville’s residents are not only disproportionately nonwhite and low income, but they also fall in the 85th percentile of pollution burden score of the CalEnviroScreen 2.0 mapping tool. Residents face high particle pollution and groundwater threats, high rates of poverty and unemployment, and linguistic isolation, as well as asthma, low-weight births, and cardiovascular disease. These combined challenges are not isolated issues. They stem from the interconnected, complex, and systematic decisions about incorporation.

Like East Porterville, many other DUCs in Kern County are also faced with environmental racism. Connie described the dire situation in Weedpatch, an unincorporated community with a population of twenty-six hundred residents. Over 93 percent of residents identify as Latino/Hispanic on the census (U.S. Census Bureau 2020). If you drive south of Bakersfield on Highway 184, you might not even know that you pass Weedpatch because there are no major retail stores, banks, or community centers. Despite its lack of physical projection, it has historical prominence. Weedpatch was one of the sites to which the white residents from Oklahoma migrated in droves during the dust bowl in the 1930s Great Depression. They received protection as refugees under the Works Progress Administration with housing, running water, and wooden platforms for tenants. Dorothea Lange famously photographed the site and the determined human resistance to economic and environmental desolation in it. John Steinbeck referenced the Weedpatch Camp in his novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

Connie pointed out that a private mobile home community surrounded by lush agricultural fields was now without a drop of potable water from the property’s private well due to the drought. Most of the residents are Mexican immigrant farmworkers and renting. Because this was considered private property, however, there were no secured public funds for drilling a deeper well. This left the low-income community dry and exposed to the most extreme dusty conditions because there was no plumbing, no sidewalks, and no one to represent their needs. Connie reported that the residents had no choice except to spend their wages on bottled water for daily consumption and personal use like bathing and cooking, since no political representative had secured water for them. The cost for water was hefty for residents, costing more than 10 percent of their wages. Connie understood the severity of this private issue as a public concern. With the help of Justice and other community organizers, she collaborated to collect and donate gallons of drinkable water to mitigate the political casualness to poverty, dust, and dried up wells.

The lack of basic infrastructure and services are unfortunately common characteristics in DUCs.

In Lamont, an unincorporated community five miles north of Weedpatch, the residents have long worked to obtain access to basic services. In 2015, I attended the grand unveiling of three potable drinkable water filling stations at Lamont Park (see Camacho 2015). A coalition of community partners secured funding and logistical support to build water stations for the public, mitigating the use of murky and contaminated water offered in former drinking fountains in public spaces. Among the organizers was the Clean Water Center team who supported the effort to help children quench their thirst safely. Additional projects in Lamont were organized with “Parent Partners–Padres Socios” and other residents in the community. Parent Partners Padres Socios secured $2 million in state funding for the Active Transportation Project to build sidewalks. Sidewalks reduce the potential risks of pedestrian accidents, encourage walking and biking to schools and other high-use venues in town, and reduce dust exposure. Approximately half of the town was without sidewalks when the grant was awarded.

In Kern County, the unincorporated areas are places of home building and making for many immigrant and nonimmigrant residents (Hernandez 2018). Yet, home is nestled in places shaped by extreme poverty and acute pollution, often in sites where pesticide drift enters through windows, while arsenic leaks from faucets. Residents of unincorporated communities are not only racially and economically segregated away from resources (Anderson 2008) but also forced to meet criteria for infrastructural development that is otherwise not required of wealthier and whiter communities (Tumpson Molina 2014). DUCs in Kern County and nationally have undergone patterns of exclusion that the sociologist Emily Tumpson Molina attributes to municipal underbounding or “the process by which municipalities draw their boundaries to exclude particular communities from municipal services, typically based on their racial or economic composition” (182). They are places where racial and spatial subordination converge, according to Tumpson Molina, places where the inability to accrue wealth “is cemented for generations to come” (186). In these places, capital accumulation and expansion shape the meanings of race and space. One consequence of underbounding is that poverty and pollution become naturalized and keep profitable operations going.

Environmental Racism of the Carceral State

As I accompanied Tina, Justice, and Connie in this research journey, the carceral state emerged in different ways. Sometimes, crimmigration policies exacerbated labor practices. At other times, cumulative pollution burdens unfolded in places where hyperpolicing occurred. Justice clarified that pollution, policing, and immigration policies work in concert. The same groups of people become targets for subordination. The many arms of the carceral state grip the people who are denied dignity at work, who lack safe and healthy housing, and whose low wages, on the job injuries, and environmentally caused health problems subsidize profitable industries.

Carceral facilities and polluted places are part of the same socioecology. Justice and I revisited the oil wastewater pit on Lerdo Highway to gather further information about a leaking storage well that was visible in between piles of abandoned metal rubbish scattered on the property. We found the well of interest and documented the tank number, and I took a photograph of it. Once we gathered the data, we continued heading east. Justice described that on his trips through these backroads, he often gave rides to people just released from the county jail who were walking to the city of Bakersfield or Oildale, a near nine-mile hike.

We stopped the car at Larry J. Rhoades, Kern Crossroads Youth Facility, less than one mile away from the waste pit. The Kern Crossroads was located on the same block as four additional carceral institutions: Lerdo Minimum Security, Pre-Trial Facility, Maximum-Medium Facility, and the Kern County Sheriff Lerdo jail facility. Unlike the youth facility, these other carceral institutions were guarded with chain-link fences and an entry booth where a police officer checked credentials. The Kern Crossroads building was new and modern, with a welcoming wide glass entrance and a driveway for buses and vehicles to drop off students.

As a youth residential institution, Kern Crossroads holds 120 beds for young men fourteen to eighteen years of age from the local area. The youth facility operates a two-tiered program for youths sentenced to commitment under the Department of Juvenile Justice. But rather than be locked in a DOJ facility with young men as old as twenty-five years of age, detained youths could instead spend either 168-days or 252-days at the Kern Crossroads facility. Kern Crossroads offers a variety of intervention and prevention services, including medical, educational, and vocational. The goal is to provide a full menu of services in hopes of changing the lives of young individuals who are having problems. The institution, however, is not meant to address the social environmental conditions that have denied these young men safe, stable, and healthy lives.

Justice and I drove on the roads around the Kern Crossroads facility and the carceral complex behind it. Our tour demonstrated the links between carceral geographies and environmental pollution. Directly south of the facility is a solar panel farm with gridded photovoltaic power stations that are bolted to the ground, kept free of plant life, and chained up. In front of that are endless rows of vineyards. East from the residential facility are orange fruit orchards. In the same direction but less than one mile away is a concentrated animal feeding operation center where hundreds of cattle and their excretions are penned. To the west of the youth residential facility are four large voluminous pools of wastewater. These various industries rely on the application of pesticides, release hazardous air particle pollution, and threaten the safety of groundwater. The Kern Crossroads facility was quiet, but industries were operating at maximum capacity. The most noticeable aspect of the carceral complex is that north of the cement walls (across a street) sat the lusciously green North Kern Golf Course, a four-mile locus of palm trees that is managed by the County of Kern Parks and Recreation division. Golfers can ignore that they are in the vicinity of hundreds of caged-up men if they just putt northward with their backs to the enormous cement and windowless buildings.

The chances of incarceration are high for rural and nonwhite residents, especially in places where higher concentrations of poverty and pollution are found (Golembeski and Fullilove 2005; Widra and Gomez 2022). Kern County is among the lowest populated counties with high rates of residents being incarcerated. The neighboring and even less populated Kings and Tulare Counties far outpace the rates of incarceration of residents in Kern County, but it is worth noting that the chances of being incarcerated in these less populated areas are much greater than for residents in Fresno, Los Angeles, and Sacramento Counties (Widra and Gomez 2022). Kern County residents are exposed to hypersurveilled systems when crossing county borders for work, school, family gatherings, and religious or recreational activities. Native Americans living in the area, for example, are disproportionately incarcerated and jailed at rates that are five times that of the white and rural populations (Widra and Gomez 2022). Native Americans also serve longer sentences than any other group. Black and Latinx people are overrepresented in county jails and state and federal prisons compared to their population size, a trend that spans throughout the United States. In a focus group study with Black and Latinx youths from the Central Valley, the youths identified policing, poverty, and pollution among the top three threats in their communities (Braz and Gilmore 2006).

While Justice and I could observe where race, policing, and pollution overlap, the population data on this relationship are artificially limited by the lack of access to the reporting systems tracking both demographic and geographic data related to carceral facilities. Few published documents identify the demographics of the detained juveniles and adults, as well as immigrants in private facilities. Less data are available about the quantity, quality, and location of the carceral facilities in Kern County (for exceptions, see the California Sentencing Institute, n.d.; Prison Policy Institute 2020).  These data could importantly demonstrate the ways in which carceral institutions (county, state, federal, and private) are sites of environmental racism (see Bullard 2005), and how these sites fare with regard to the EPA’s policies and rulemaking and regulatory analysis (see Mascarenhas 2021).

Driving through Kern County with Justice, Connie, or Tina revealed that the punitive carceral and detention centers in Kern County are vast and scattered both in urban and rural areas. Most of the rural facilities are placed out of the public’s view because the roads leading to these facilities are not primary transportation arteries of their hosting towns. These rural placed facilities are managed by the state, private contractors, sheriff departments, and local governments. The urban carceral facilities located in the city of Bakersfield hide in plain sight, usually in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty and houselessness. These facilities include transfer sites, transition homes for soon returning citizens, and temporary immigration detention centers. Some facilities are nestled on busy streets, often in neighborhoods with disproportionately nonwhite residents. Because some of these facilities operate under private contracts, they were unmarked or marked only by general signs naming the private contractor. Only by stopping at the site could I notice that the buildings were locked and topped with concertina wire. For the casual observer, these were difficult to distinguish as carceral facilities.

The combined list of rural and urban facilities that I identified while in the field included juvenile detention centers, multicomplex detention holding centers, medium security facilities, deportation facilities, and federal prisons. At the time, sixteen carceral facilities were operating in Kern County. Today, there are nineteen (Prison Policy Institute 2020). Finding demographic, health, and geographic data for all the smaller nonstate, nonfederal, and unmarked operating facilities is extremely difficult, if not downright impossible. There are no known reports of valley fever rates among these carceral facilities, for example.

Thanks to the work of prison abolitionists and community advocates, however, some data are becoming more accessible. Prison abolition studies shed light on how the carceral facilities are also places of environmental racism. The researchers found that the prisons contributed to sewage spills into the groundwater that serviced local communities and prisoners between 1990 and 2015 (CURB, n.d.). People who are incarcerated are also subject to pesticide drifts, chemical waste evaporation from oil well water ponds, ammonia gases from dairies, and dust that contributes to the development and dissemination of valley fever (CURB, n.d.; Abolitionist Law Center 2013; Gilmore 2007; Braz and Gilmore 2006; Cole and Foster 2000; Pardo 1998). Unlike other residents of the region, the people who are incarcerated are stripped of their right to use water. They are restricted to bathing three times a week, and there are limits on their daily flushes of the toilet, even though more gallons of water are consumed for maintenance than for personal use by inmates (Dannenberg 2007). Abolitionist-centered research reveals the complexity of determining the cumulative health impacts of incarceration.

Much more data are needed. I attended an EJ roundtable meeting organized by Justice for the agents from the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The agents who arrived presented the mapping tool CalEnviroScreen 2.0, which they were launching as a new and improved version for tracking cumulative health burdens. Activists and regulators discussed how to interpret the data further and their limitations. This informative meeting shed light on how the carceral facilities in Kern County and across the state are not calculated with the CalEnviroScreen mapping tool due to missing information or data. When I used this site on my own, it became evident that carceral facilities showed up as empty white grids on an otherwise dynamic map tracking cumulative pollution burdens. Many versions have emerged since this early meeting in 2015. There have been significant improvements, which include the expanded burdens listed in CalEnviroScreen 4.0. The current version calculates groundwater threats from concentrated animal feeding operations, odor from dairy operations, children’s lead exposure from housing, housing burden, border pollution, and a drinking water contaminant index. Despite these important improvements, this valuable mapping tool remains devoid of the ability to calculate how the cumulative environmental health hazards might affect people who are forced to serve a sentence isolated behind walls for extended periods of time.

Most of the facilities are surrounded by pollution burden scores that range from the 70th to the 90th percentile according to CalEnviroScreen 4.0. This means that fewer than one-third of the census tracts in the state face a far worse cumulative pollution burden than the areas surrounding the prisons in Kern County. Wasco State Prison has a perimeter cumulative pollution burden score in the 90th percentile. The perimeter cumulative pollution burden score, however, does not paint a fair picture. Less evident is how the combination of confinement and the prison health care system affect the impacts of environmental pollution.

The prison industrial complex is well represented in all the places and spaces in Kern County as it is in the greater state of California. It shows up in the form of criminalizing, detaining, surveilling, jailing, bailing, trying, convicting, and sentencing. The great harm caused by the carceral system has taken root in the physical places and spaces, but they also propel violent policing patterns (Davis, n.d.). At a meeting that I attended, local police officers were invited to listen to the grievances of community members who had become unwilling to call them for emergencies due to the great threat of harm they posed. Rather than making the community feel safe, the police officers made residents feel concerned for their safety. Some of the issues raised included the cultural insensitivities of a then majority white police department in a predominantly nonwhite city and the failure of officers to connect with the growing Oaxacan Indigenous population who spoke neither English nor Spanish. Some members recounted how children became pressed into service to speak to the police on behalf of a parent who was a victim of domestic violence. Some referenced that 911 dispatch calls in a time of crisis required waiting on the phone for extended periods because of the lack of Spanish language interpreters, let alone interpreters of Indigenous languages. EJ members were attempting to stave off community disintegration. They sought to connect the concerns of private residents to the responsibilities and behaviors of public safety officers.

The residents’ experiences of being overpoliced and underprotected also occurred in the urban areas of Bakersfield. One prisoner advocate described how Martin Luther King Jr. Park became the site to drop off drug addicts. They called the process an “informal agreement” that keeps roaming drug users off the streets and out of jail. This strategy also reflects the decline in drug rehabilitation programs nationally. Less than one-quarter of the people in prisons and jails access daily drug treatment despite having higher rates of drug addiction than the public (Taxman, Perdoni, and Harrison 2007). Dropping off people with drug addiction at the park purports to allow police officers the ability to better monitor the surrounding neighborhood for returned offenders or gang and drug activities. Yet, stopping and frisking is often a search for technical parole violations, channeling a significant number of the returning inmates back to prisons (Petersilia 2003). Other prisoner advocates described experiences with racial profiling while driving, with excessive violent force from police officers that led to personal injuries and suffering from untreated health conditions while behind bars in county jails or prisons.

Violent policing patterns create a long-term health emergency. Marisela Gomez (2016) argues that violent policing fragments communities because people’s freedom of mobility is jeopardized. Combined with racial discrimination, and unfavorable social conditions, chronic stress can bring about illness (Gee-Payne and Sturges 2004; Gee 2002; Krieger and Sydney 1996). Stress levels are mitigated by how one evaluates situations and attends to one’s physical health (Lazarus and Folkman 1984; McEwen 1998), but this is often dependent on having a reliable support system and the availability of social resources in neighborhoods to access for mitigating those risks, which can be limited due to social control surveillance that strips residents of valuable kinship and social networks (Phillips 2012; Israel et al. 2002; Kretzman and McKnight 1993). When these social and environmental factors are compromised, the body becomes more vulnerable to chronic disease and illness (Gee-Payne and Sturges 2004), potentially leading to conditions that are more likely to cause health problems than genetic and individual behaviors (Ansell 2017). The underreporting of police brutality and police-related deaths nationally suggests the need for a public health initiative that accounts for the injuries caused by local police, data that should be available in every county (Krieger et al. 2015). Police violence manifesting on the streets, in back alleys, and in the private homes of the overpoliced and underprotected neighborhoods is as much a public health matter as an environmental racism problem. Policing shapes the walkability of neighborhoods, the safety of families, and the solidarity of family and social networks.

Conclusion

The roads that Tina, Connie, and Justice walk are, in many ways, new. They pave paths that connect individual problems to public health matters. Their evidence and ideas are challenged at times as uncertain and untrue, and they, in turn, challenge regulators to think more critically about their approaches, regulations, and methods of proof. For them to “make sense” to regulators who are charged with making decisions, activists at times separate and isolate an issue. Yet, their collaborations, the informal conversations we had, and the documentation of the sheer size of the problems they face shed light on a larger and more complex socioecology. Activists both establish clear links across industries that pollute and cast light on how regulatory agencies and their processes connect with the urgent health needs of the most vulnerable residents. They forge new community-based monitoring strategies when data are absent or inconclusive. Activists search for reliable alternative methods for collecting information, working collaboratively and collectively across organizations, partnerships, volunteers, and even regulatory agencies. They accompany people who are vulnerable to the hypersurveillance of the carceral state and acknowledge the disproportionate environmental health burdens they face. The result of these efforts is the formation of a transformative geography that sheds light not just on the existence of cumulative vulnerabilities but also on the collective strategies and tools needed for establishing healthy social ecologies.

It is never just valley fever. The clustering of the 3p’s brings into view how physical geographies are bound up in, rather than simply a backdrop to, the social and environmental processes that shape health. Diseases are materialized and intertwined with the contemporary and historical precedents of what is aptly described as the racialization of people, places, and health. The higher rates of valley fever along racial lines follow the patterns of “human geographies occupied by the colonized, the enslaved, the incarcerated, the disposable” (McKittrick and Woods 2007, 4). These racialized geographies produce an excess of health emergencies that make it difficult to distinguish the culprit(s). The industries that produce hazardous by-products and waste materials omit their impacts and discount how they affect places where many Brown, Black, and other nonwhite people are likely to live their everyday lives. Yet, the people who are subject to these circumstances cannot overlook the glaring evidence. They trace the origins of valley fever and other diseases to sites of resource extraction, agriculture production, fracking, pesticide drift, carceral institutions, and the logic that sustains them.

The nexus of the 3p’s produces great harm, but it also generates a local knowledge system of collective self-defense that is based on descriptions of the interactions unfolding in the home, on the road, in clinics and hospitals, and in neighborhoods (McKittrick and Woods 2007). These circumstances are all too familiar for residents like Tina, Justice, Connie and others who work to achieve more just possibilities and a more dignified way of life. As Mr. G alluded to in his story while behind the wheel, the police in the Central Valley have long had a reputation for dismissing people of color, for mistaking cultural and linguistic differences for defiance, and for physically displacing the poor and people of color through forceful strategies. Restoring both the land and restoring the lost power, agency, and dignity of people living in proximity to toxicity requires re-storing the origins of poverty, pollution, prisons, power, and people. A counter-language and bold forms of activists’ transformative collaborations are needed to reverse their effects.

Drawing on Doreen Massey’s analysis of space, Mary Pat Brady (2002) argues that language can powerfully shape how space is experienced and felt through hierarchical articulations of social relationships that serve the interests of capital. Capitalist ventures produce what Massey describes as “power-geometries,” which are the operationalizing mechanisms of connecting and dividing, including and excluding, empowering and disempowering differently situated groups of people (Werner et al. 2018). Immigrants who do not speak the English language and who are racialized as nonwhite have disproportionately carried out the agricultural industries’ dangerous tasks. Those who work the hardest receive the fewest benefits of agricultural production because of their exclusion from landownership, fair wages, safe living and working conditions, and access to unimpeded travel and communication (Ngai 2004; Walker 2004). Early California prisons contributed to this power-filled articulation as the punitive arm of the state, often deployed in the service of creating a tractable nonwhite workforce and dispossessing immigrants of any acquired land (Gilmore 2007; Ngai 2004; Petersilia 2003). The spatial formations of capital have almost always designated nonwhite and noncitizens—and, particularly, non-English-speaking residents—into statuses deemed displaceable, disposable, and deportable, never quite belonging. The land that immigrant workers tend but do not own, the segregated places in which they dwell, the policing of their travel by law enforcement, and the fugitive places they must commandeer to hold union meetings all testify to the lasting spatial dimensions of their racialized identities.

In these powerful yet uneven articulations of social relationships, the creation of linked fates among some aggrieved groups generates new racial and spatial discourses and practices. As Massey argues, a sense of place is never quite as static as the eye first sees. The sense of place and options within it coexist with a “constellation of social relationships,” where “experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself” (as cited in Werner et al. 2018, 31). Multiple meanings and diverging social relationships are constantly unfolding because people are never completely bounded by the spatial confinements created by the dominant articulations of capital (Werner et al. 2018).

Labor union organizers work with EJ organizers in search of new possibilities that promote, protect, and prolong dignity and life. They collectively pose creative spatial and social critiques that generate possibilities for living with health.  They find ways to manage the materialized inequalities facing them, albeit at varying and always precarious levels of success. They narrate their struggles for survival to reveal transformative systems of knowledge and new cartographies that challenge the dominant place-bound models of health. The creative space they establish, wedged between their denigrated status as “criminals” or “illegals” and their insistence on the sacredness of human life, is often not understood by public health agencies and officials. Yet, it is this space that provides the most feasible, effective, and tangible solutions to social problems while also generating a needed sense of hope among the aggrieved social groups. Valley fever needs to be considered in relation to these socioecological connections.