In the shadow of a steel recycling plant in these neoliberal times: health disparities among Hispanics in a border colonia

Abstract

Neo-liberal principles and practices of limited government and market economies prevail in many global regions, especially at borders. This research examines health outcomes in Westway colonia, immediately adjacent to a steel recycling plant owned by the largest steel corporation in the world and in the Texas–Mexico borderlands, posing the questions and testing hypotheses about the incidence of cancer and respiratory and mental illnesses in an economically and politically impoverished region of Mexican Americans and immigrants. Using community-based participatory research and drawing on sources from mixed methods – ethnographic presence and both descriptive statistics and stepwise multiple regression from a random sample of 104 households, with 400 individuals within them – we demonstrate that years living in Westway (statistically significant in multivariate analysis) and closer location (in descriptive analysis) are related to negative health outcomes. Poor mental health is related to respondents’ worries about the plant, odours, noise, soot, and continuous emissions on a three-shift basis. The border location offers insights into the impact of a relatively unregulated global economy on local people in a world of considerable migration across borders. Our findings are potentially relevant in the many unequal borderlands worldwide.

Keywords:

• environmental justice
• community-based participatory research
• health
• disparities
• neo-liberalism
• border studies

Acknowledgements

We thank Oscar Morales and Dr Sara Grineski for their assistance at earlier stages of this research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The routine official US registry reports minimise the total numbers of people who had, are undergoing multi-year treatments for recovery from, and/or might have recurring cancer in the future. In our survey and analysis of findings, we ask about household members with cancer – whether they had it in the past, are undergoing treatment, have emerged cancer-free, or have died from cancer. This is a more useful way to understand how household members experience cancer.

2. The borderlands consist of space 100 km, or 62 miles, north and south of the borderline, based on the 1983 La Paz Agreement.

3. We are thankful to support from the Hispanic Health Disparities Research Center (HHDRC), (Award Number P20 MD002287-0581) from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities-EPA funded core. The Institutional Review Board approval number for this research is 299734-1.

4. For 20 years, the lead researcher lived a mile from these dirty industries and observed and smelled billowing smoke from several fires, from which the family evacuated the area once.

5. The lead researcher has been a participant observer in Border Interfaith since its inception in 1998, including its addition of ICM/Westway as an institutional member in 2005.

6. Rather than ask directly about citizenship, Legal Permanent Residency, and/or undocumented status (in an area of former Border Patrol-sheriff deputy harassment over status), we compiled a composite variable of several indicators from respondents’ answers to questions. However, most households contained a mix of people of different statuses, with many children being US born and thus citizens in a country with birthright citizenship. Ultimately, that composite variable offered limited use in the multivariate analysis.

7. We examined normal distribution and found flat kurtosis, and it was positively skewed. In logistic stepwise regression, multi-collinearity is not reported in SPSS, but in calculations by hand we found the highest correlation between the variables income and US born at .142 (the tolerance statistic is .985).

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by Award Number P20 MD002287-0581, Hispanic Health Disparities Research Center (HHDRC), from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities-EPA funded core. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Environmental Protection Agency, or the National Institutes of Health.