"M(other)work of Survival, and the Pandemic as Teacher," for the University of Oregon Center for the Study of Women in Society 2020-21 Annual Review

I was generously awarded the 2020-21 Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Oregon Center for the Study of Women in Society. As their resident fellow I contributed a short piece about my research for their 2020-21 Annual Review published as a newsletter to their members and on their website.

Image of my son, Sebastián, providing critical feedback on a chapter of my dissertation in early 2021.

One spring morning in 2011 I left my home in the Los Angeles Harbor region to drive to a community meeting in Long Beach, California. I was to present on the “Bridge to Health” program, a promotora de salud-led asthma education program funded by the Port of Long Beach. Merging onto the 710 freeway my car became sandwiched between big rig diesel trucks hauling cargo from the Port of Long Beach. The 710 freeway is the main truck route from the Port to inland distribution centers in San Bernardino County. Together, with the Port of Los Angeles, more than 40% of imported goods into the continental U.S. come by way of the Los Angeles Harbor. As I crawled along the freeway, I took renewed notice of the landscape. I observed the sound walls blocking views of neighborhoods where I knew families who were enrolled in our program lived. I watched diesel exhaust mix with the heat radiating off the concrete. I sat there with the windows up, A/C recirculating in the car, giving me a false sense of security that I was breathing clean air. And, I had a devastating thought, this is blood money. I felt panic rise up from my gut. Was it? 

The federally qualified community health center that I worked for had been awarded an air pollution mitigation grant from the Port of Long Beach. These grants became available in 2010 as a small concession to the community on the part of the Port to expand their operations. Our clinic had promised a very wide and meaningful reach, dependent mostly on the labor of just two promotoras de salud, or community health workers, who would work with families one-by-one, to teach them how to manage their child’s asthma. Asthma, that, it was no secret, was caused by the concentration of Port pollution in parts of Long Beach and surrounding communities that were majority Mexican and Central American, as well as Cambodian, and African American. As I sat in traffic, I listed all of the good that this money was going to do: alleviate fear of “unknowing,” and educate parents about their child’s illness; help kids breathe easier, less painfully; fewer missed school days; fewer missed work days; fewer trips to the emergency room; less financial stress; and, help parents sleep better at night, less worried their child might stop breathing. The promotoras were making a big difference in so many aspects of people’s lives. But, yes, it was “blood money.”

My dissertation, ‘Survival First, Health Second’: Geographies of Environmental Racism and the M(other)work of Promotoras de Salud is driven by two overarching research questions: How are promotoras called upon by the state to remediate and resolve environmental racism in their own communities? And, What roles do promotoras perform in the regional response to environmental racism in Southern California? In the project I argue that the public health arm of the state is a “site of contestation, rather than an ally or neutral force” (Pulido, 2017: 1) for achieving environmental justice. The capitalist state reproduces the subjugation of promotora labor within a classed, feminized, and racialized framework. Promotora ‘essential’ labor is taken for granted by the state, and they are directed to implement an intervention that emphasizes personal responsibility that fails to acknowledge the spatiality of racism, sexism, and injustice. However, I also contend that promotoras enact geographies of care that exceed the state’s logics. They hold emotional and physical space for families, especially for the mothers of children with asthma with whom they most often work. They meet people in their homes and out in the community, where their education and community building efforts rebuff toxic geographies and serve as critical resistance to state-sanctioned (slow) violence of environmental racism.

This project was initiated by my professional experience working alongside promotoras de salud who had come to the work due to their own experience mothering children with asthma. While the original vision for the dissertation project included fieldwork, both the pandemic, and my own experience of becoming a mother in 2019, made that impossible. However, both sharpened my perspective on key aspects of my analysis. My experience of mothering my own child clarified lessons the promotoras had taught me years earlier, about the strength of mothers to fight for justice for their own children, and the community motherwork they do beyond the home. The marginalization of mothers and caregivers is an important lens to understand their positionality as capitalist-state essential laborers. This is emphasized by the CSWS’s own Caregivers Campaign, launched in 2020. As workers, promotoras are also constrained by the framework of health equity used by the U.S. state public health apparatus. Equity, according to the CDC, is the “opportunity” to attain good health, but equity does not equate justice, and justice is not in the state’s values, nor its vocabulary. Never has this been more glaringly obvious for the vast majority of U.S. residents than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I use Chicana and Latina feminist theory as a grounding both for my experiential theorization, methodology for research in the public record, and subsequent compilation of a digital archive on promotoras de salud. Promotora testimonio in news media, during public meetings, and on social media speak truth to power about what it means to raise children to survive environmental racism. I build on the five-in-one Chicana M(other)work framework (Caballero et al., 2018) to analyze the spatio-temporalities of promotora “hidden” labor in relation to their positionalities, and intersectional systems of oppression, as Chicana and Latinx, Mothers, racialized Others, Work, and Motherwork (Collins, 2000). Further, their hypervisibility in the public eye also leads to invisibility, with their labor taken for granted by the environmental justice movement and public health organizations, alike.

Ultimately, being so dependent on what I already “knew” from my experience revealed an expansive data set that I will continue to work through in my postdoctoral fellowship next year at the University of New Hampshire, while I also prepare to interview promotoras. My research “constraints” forced me to fully appreciate the years of labor promotoras have already put into the fight for environmental justice, and to tell their stories to the world. When I return to them in my role as researcher, I aim to do so in the least extractive way possible. My goal is to continue to produce scholarship that uplifts their work and contributes to their fight, if only in a small way. Promotoras are called to perform health education, but what they do is teach survival skills first, and ‘good’ health gets measured through consumerist frameworks of patient compliance. The method and mode of survival that promotoras engage in requires a constant putting-together of what has been broken, to create something new and meaningful from what would otherwise be devastating.

Sources

Caballero, C., Martínez-Vu, Y., Pérez-Torres, J., Téllez, M., & Vega, C., Eds. (2018). The Chicana M(other)work Anthology: Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolución. The University of Arizona Press. 

Collins, P. H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge.

Pulido, L. (2017). Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence. Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), 524–533. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516646495