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Abstract
Environmental justice advocates have made visible the practice of disproportionately siting hazardous waste facilities in low-income communities of color throughout the USA. Typically, state-corporate actors decide where to place these environmentally undesirable projects, with an eye toward the bottom line rather than the health and safety of particular community members. Through an analysis of secondary data and archival materials, ranging from public hearings to court documents and newspaper accounts, a case study of state-corporate environmental crime and how one rural, historically African American town in Arizona organized to resist the siting of a fourth landfill in their community is explored. Theoretical concepts advanced by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, such as ‘forgotten places’, are put into conversation with the literature on state-corporate crime. An examination of the relationship between environmental inequality, state-corporate crime, and people’s capacity for resistance is presented.
Notes
1. Park and Pellow (Citation2011) define environmental privilege as ‘the exercise of economic, political, and cultural power that some groups enjoy, which enables them exclusive access to coveted environmental amenities such as forests, parks, mountains, rivers, coastal property, open lands, and elite neighborhoods’ (p. 4).
2. See Aulette and Michalowski (Citation1993), Chambliss (Citation1989), Clinard and Quinney (Citation1973), Kauzlarich and Kramer (Citation1993).
3. Following Gilmore (Citation2007), what is important to emphasize about the power of the state is its capacity to organize ‘various factors of production, or enable them to be disorganized or abandoned outright.’ This capacity is ‘based in relationship that also change over time and sometimes become so persistently challenged from above and below, by those whose opinions matter, that the entire character of the state eventually changes as well’ (p. 28).
4. For example, in the late nineteenth century, the USA initiated a ‘war of conquest’ (the Mexican-American War, 1846–1848) in the area that became the southwest (Barrera, Citation1979, p. 7). The American conquest of Mexico was motivated by a number of economic interests ‘closely tied to the dynamic expansion of [racial] capitalism’ (Barrera, Citation1979, p. 8; Gomez, Citation2007). Southern and northern elites supported the war, because they were looking to expand their slave empire westward (Gomez, Citation2007). Post-conquest, the white colonial elite also used all means at their disposal to ‘fit’ the Pueblo Indians, Mexican peoples, and Black slaves, who had been living in the area since the ‘original colonization’ by Spain, into a racial caste system (Gomez, Citation2007). These same ‘Anglo capitalists, speculators, and financiers whose interests had strongly motivated the Mexican American War’ also concentrated the land into their own hands (Barrera, Citation1979, p. 23).
5. For example: ‘Mr Farley wants 300 Negro cotton pickers for Gilbert, Eloy, and Tucson, Arizona’ (Whitaker, Citation2000, p. 199).
6. While beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note that African Americans have a longer historical arc in Arizona than outlined in this article. The Spanish colonizers brought Black slaves to what was then Northern Mexico in the 1600s and white slave owners often traveled with their slaves prior to USA colonization of the area (Gomez, Citation2007).
7. As Olson (Citation2011) argues, in Arizona ‘corruption was commonplace as [the white elite] manipulated the political system for their benefit. A group of these capitalists, called the Phoenix 40, controlled state politics until the 1970s, when the political establishment opened up some. But even after their rule, the state capitol has always been a place to lie, bribe, and scam your way to what you want.’
8. Ross goes on to note, ‘a 1999 analysis of Toxic Release Inventory Reports showed that one zip code in South Phoenix – 85040 – produced nearly 40% of all hazardous emissions in the city. It was the dirtiest zip code in the nation’ (p. 122).
9. For further studies of South Phoenix see Bolin, Grineski, and Collins (Citation2005), Grineski, Bolin, and Boone (Citation2007), Ross (Citation2011), Sicotte (Citation2003, Citation2008); for further studies on environmental injustice in Arizona more broadly see Lauderdale and Sefiha (Citation2008).
10. This heading is borrowed from the title of Bolin, Grineski, & Boone’s (Citation2005) article on environmental racism and South Phoenix.
11. The history of Mobile has proved harder to excavate. To date, I have not located a comprehensive recorded history of the town. The following account was pieced together from newspaper accounts, documents from the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, and a few books that mention Mobile in passing.
12. State officials later retracted this version of Mobile’s founding, arguing instead that their original report was mistaken and Mobile was not in fact founded and named by Black sharecroppers, some of whom migrated from Mobile, Alabama, but rather, the area became known as ‘Mobile’ as early as 1879 when the Southern Pacific Railroad established its first transcontinental route through the town and referred to the area generally as ‘Mobile’ (see Nilsen, Citation2004).
13. This information comes from a document provided to me by Attorney Howard Shanker.
14. Several of the quotes from Mobile residents that appear in this section have been culled from public testimonies in front of the MCBS and by public hearings held by SES and ADEQ. Some of the testimonies were given in person, while others were submitted in writing and read aloud during the hearings. I was generously given access to the transcripts from these hearings by attorney Howard Shanker.
15. Wilcox ended up being the only ‘No’ vote in the 3–1 decision in favor of SES’s request.
16. Further investigation revealed that over 44% of Maricopa County’s current landfill capacity is in Mobile, while only 0.0000325% of the entire population of Maricopa County resides in Mobile (Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, Responsiveness Summary, October Citation2004).
17. Without the SES landfill those figures drop to 52.27 per person in Maricopa County and 72,134 per person in Mobile – still an astonishing disparity.
18. For a more thorough discussion of ADEQ’s pattern of protecting the interests of capitalists rather than upholding its mission to protect public health and the environment, see Andrew Ross’ recent book Bird on Fire (Citation2011).