Race and Class in the Air: Asian and Latina Immigrant Women on Environmental (In)Justice and Moral Citizenship

In our global cities today, immigrants of color are increasingly suffering hyper-pollution and alarming rates of asthma and cancer due to their residence near diesel-spewing shipping ports, freeways, and rail yards, all so that consumers can buy goods at big box stores that hail from China and other far-flung manufacturing nations. Immigrants and other people of color also reside near hazardous industries like oil refineries that prop up the aforementioned goods movement apparatus. Indeed, Americans are consuming so much that, for years, there have been supply chain log jams that endanger and pollute (immigrant) neighborhoods of color even more than before. Over the last three decades, immigrant-led resistance movements against these environmental hazards have grown to be among the most dynamic in our global cities, yet we know little about them. In this vein, in her recent book Refusing Death, Kim chronicles how Asian and Latina immigrant women activists for environmental justice in Los Angeles—namely for cleaner, more breathable air—redefine racism and classism, and place one over the other, as a result of their struggles with environmental hyper-contamination, and their specific social locations as immigrant women and mothers of color under neoliberal capitalism and white American supremacy.