January 28, 2000
By Mary Jo McConahay
PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
MALAGA, CA — Far from home,
a tight-knit group of Mixtec Indians has discovered they live
alongside a toxic waste dump.
The Indians, fieldhands for hire on harvests up and down the
Pacific coast, are caught among bigger players including Chevron
Oil, the EPA, and local government agencies.
"We didn't know anything about it when we came," said Margarita, 32, who asks to be identified by first name only.
Some 50,000 Mixtec have come to live and work on the Pacific coast in recent years, fleeing deforestation that has destroyed their life in Oaxaca. Mixtec Indians are now the backbone of harvests from grapes and melons here in California's Central Valley to Oregon berries. Yet they remain largely invisible, and typically lack the education and civic tools to engage authorities.
"They tell us something and we stand there staring," Margarita said. "We are people of few of the kind of words we need," added a 54-year old neighbor, Silvina.
Las Traileres consists of some 40 old trailers and ten modest wooden structures in a sparsely populated area two miles south of booming Fresno (pop: 600,000), amid junkyards and a fertilizer plant. Along its southern border is the 7-acre site of the Purity Oil Company, now bankrupt, where Chevron and about 150 other companies and government agencies dumped toxic waste, oily liquids and sludge for 40 years.
Now state property, the EPA first named the dump a Superfund Clean-Up site 17 years ago. Only two years ago, after being sued by the EPA, Chevron — in a secret agreement with other responsible parties — undertook to lead the multi-million dollar clean-up.
That process is now slowed by the need to make decisions about the community. Chevron wants only a few Mixtec families to move temporarily, to make way for cleanup equipment. Advocates say all should be moved. The Mixtec don't want to move far from work connections, or to split up. They have carried an ethic of living together from the close-knit villages they left behind.
A hen and newborn chicks run underfoot in the dirt yard outside the 25-foot trailer — bought used for $6000 in l993 — where Margarita lives with her husband and four children. Nearby are the flowery remains of a recent fiesta, an outdoor altar with a statue of St. Michael, patron of the village from which most residents come.
Bushy yerba santa and guaje plants
bloom in yards, brought as seedlings on the long journey from
Oaxaca to provide medicinal leaves and familiar flavors. Chiles,
tomatoes and radishes grow in gardens, despite warnings from farmworker
advocates that the ground may be contaminated.
Residents say when it rains, water pools in the dirt street,
smells bad and shines unnaturally "with colors." "But
you can't keep children out of puddles," says Margarita resignedly.
For years after the dumpsite closed in l974, kids played there unhindered by even a fence. In l981, routine health screenings in the area by the Fresno-based Sequoia Community Health Foundation Clinic, found an unusually high incidence of blood in the urine and "a significant number of stillbirths that raised a red flag," recalls Esther Padilla, a social worker then working for the clinic.
Municipal agencies and state officials were alerted, and the EPA stepped in. It reported soil samples from the site contained "significant concentrations of PCBs, lead, copper, zinc, and various volatile organics," and that an "unknown sludge-like substance is oozing from the filled areas" and had entered adjacent property.
No major clean-up ensued, and by l992 another EPA report listed "contaminants of concern," including benzene, toluene and xylenes, pesticides and arsenic. Meanwhile, Mixtec-speaking Indians were displacing those who had lived in the trailer park in l982. Communications from authorities to park residents ebbed, then disappeared.
In l998, advocates for farmworkers and indigenous discovered Las Traileres' history. The lack of action reflects the fact that the residents "are Indians from Mexico with no power or way to effectuate their desires," says Luke Cole, Director of Environmental Justice at the non-profit California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation.
The foundation is seeking to have residents permanently relocated, with EPA paying costs, possibly reimbursed by the companies at fault. Chevron spokesman Edward Spaulding said the company might give $100,000 toward a permanent relocation — a figure Indian advocates dismiss as completely inadequate.
For Chevron, Spaulding says, relocation is "part of a broader public policy issue" — whether people should be living there or not — best handled by the County of Fresno.
At Las Traileres, concern about toxins is mixed with hesitation about leaving at all. The spaces cost about $150 a month, and many can't afford more for rent.
In addition, big families live in close quarters, a habit which doesn't translate well to town. "My parents can't move because there are nine of us with my grandparents and brothers," said a 21-year-old woman named Olimpia.
CRLA Foundation Fresno field director Ephraim Cam-acho points out that residents own their own trailers, and prefer to live in a group. "To separate for them is devastating. They are afraid of having to live in an apartment complex, and don't want to mix their kids with gangs."
Rose Marie Caraway, EPA's Remedial Project manager for the Purity site, says the Mixtec want to stay because "There is a predisposition in America to go for home ownership, and that's what they're doing, going for the concept if not the structure." She adds, "And they're living within their means."
Caraway, Spaulding and Fresno county sources say there is no health danger from the Purity site. A partial cement cap is in place, wells which might draw from the underlying aquifer have been shut down, and the toxic materials are "fixed in the soil and don't migrate," in Spaulding's words.
There have been no thorough health studies of the residents of Las Traileres, but they pay a high emotional cost, wondering just how closely they are connected with the toxins next door. A cancer has destroyed parts of the structure of Olimpia's nose and mouth, and she wears a patch where doctors removed an affected eye.
Near the altar to St. Michael, Olimpia's cousin Sergio, 26, lifted a 2-year-old named Erwin to show the blackened cuticles on his fingers and toes, which he said doctors could not explain. Sergio himself has three fingers where nails have not grown for two years, and a long-standing skin eruption.
Such conditions could have any number of causes, but in a community that feels it has little control over its immediate destiny, Sergio thinks the worst. "What could be causing it but the poisons next door?"
Pacific News Service editor Mary Jo McConahay has reported on the Mixtec dia-spora in Mexico and the United States. McConahay writes for New California Media, PNS' collaboration of ethnic news organizations. NCM can be found on the world wide web at www.NCMonline.com.
Return to Frontpage