Construyendo Conexiones Para Los Niños: Environmental Justice, Reproductive Feminicidio, and Coalitional Possibility in the Borderlands

ABSTRACT

Familias Unidas del Chamizal is a community organization in El Paso, TX that works to increase awareness around the issues of education, environmental racism, development, and public health. In 2019, the El Paso Independent School District launched an initiative to close several schools due to low enrollment, forcing students in Barrio Chamizal to relocate to Frederick Douglass Elementary, which borders a designated industrial zone and is surrounded by two major recycling plants. In response, Familias Unidas has organized to reverse the decision and call attention to the discriminatory practices of the school district. We take the public advocacy efforts of Familias Unidas as an instrumental case study to trace the intersections of health communication, Latinx communication, and environmental racism along the U.S.–Mexico border. Utilizing an intersectional borderlands health communication approach, we draw on publicly available texts to trace the argumentative strategies employed by Familias Unidas to mobilize community members. Familias Unidas rhetorically constructs a public health crisis in the borderlands by connecting the school closures to larger coalitional struggles concerning the environment, citizenship, race/ethnicity, language, and class. We identify three rhetorical strategies – familia, comunidad, and (in)justicia – employed by Familias Unidas to shape their public argument(s).

Disclosure of potential conflict of interest

We have no known conflict of interest to disclose.