Society for Human Ecology

The Geography of Despair: Environmental Racism and the Making of South Phoenix, Arizona, USA Author(s): Bob Bolin, Sara Grineski and Timothy Collins Source: Human Ecology Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, Special Issue on 'Nature, Science, and Social Movements' (Winter 2005), pp. 156-168 Published by: Society for Human Ecology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24707530 Accessed: 19-03-2018 19:47 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide

range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and

facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

Terms and Conditions of Use

Society for Human Ecology is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Human Ecology Review

This content downloaded from 198.82.230.35 on Mon, 19 Mar 2018 19:47:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Research in Human Ecology

The Geography of Despair: Environmental Racism and the Making of South Phoenix, Arizona, USA

Bob Bolin

School of Human Evolution and Social Change and International Institute of Sustainability Arizona State University Tempe AZ 85287-2402 USA1

Sara Grineski

International Institute of Sustainability and Department of Sociology Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287-4802 USA2

Timothy Collins International Institute of Sustainability and Department of Geography Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287-0104 USA3

Abstract

This paper discusses the historical geographical con struction of a contaminated community in the heart of one of the largest and fastest growing Sunbelt cities in the US. Our focus is on how racial categories and attendant social rela tions were constructed by Whites, in late 19th and early 20th century Phoenix, Arizona, to produce a stigmatized zone of racial exclusion and economic marginality in South Phoenix, a district adjacent to the central city. We consider how rep resentations of race were historically deployed to segregate people of color, both residentially and economically in the early city. By the 1920s race and place were discursively and materially woven together in a mutually reinforcing process of social stigmatization and environmental degradation in South Phoenix. This process constructed a durable zone of mixed minority residential and industrial land uses that sur vives into the present day. 'Sunbelt apartheid'has worked to

segregate undesirable land uses and minorities from 'Anglo' Phoenix. Class and racial privilege has been built in a wide range of planning and investment decisions that continue to shape the human ecology of the city today.

Keywords: environmental justice, environmental racism, historical geographic development. Phoenix, Arizona

Introduction

Environmental justice studies over the last decade have explored the socio-spatial distributions of hazardous indus tries and have provided substantial evidence of a dispropor tionate presence of toxic industries and waste sites in many minority, low income communities in the US (e.g. Lester et al. 2001). Less attention has been given to the social process es that produce these environmental injustices over extended historical periods. Analyses of the historical geographic de velopment of environmental inequities, particularly the ways that race and class are imbricated in the production and uses of urban space, have begun to appear in the literature (e.g. Boone and Modarres 1999). As Pulido (2000) suggests, there is a need in environmental justice studies to consider the complex ways racism, capitalist accumulation strategies, and class privilege are entwined in the historical development of urban landscapes, including the locations of both residential areas and industrial districts. Understanding the ways racial categories are socially constructed and employed in the pro duction of space in the city, including the distributions of people and environmental hazards is a central part of under standing environmental racism (Pulido et al. 1996). As we discuss in this paper, the diverse ways race is constructed are tightly connected to the local social relations of production,

156 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2005 © Society for Human Ecology

This content downloaded from 198.82.230.35 on Mon, 19 Mar 2018 19:47:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Bolin, Grineski and Collins

configurations of power, and spatial practices (e.g. Pulido 2000; Soja 1989).

Our concern here is to examine the historical develop ment of a zone of pronounced and chronic environmental in equity in Phoenix, Arizona, exploring the effects of racism and class privilege in constructing this hazardscape. Phoenix today is the largest and fastest growing city in the desert Southwest of the US, a sprawling metropolitan area with a current population approaching 3.5 million spread out over more than 2000 sq. km of former Sonoran desert. At the cen ter of this urban complex is a contaminated zone of mixed land uses (see Figure 1) which currently hosts an assemblage of industrial and waste sites, crisscrossed by freeways and railroads, and under the primary flight path of Sky Harbor, the US's 6th busiest airport (Bolin et al. 2002).

Scattered throughout this district are the city's oldest African-American and Latino4 neighborhoods, places which have until recently contained the majority of Phoenix's mi nority populations. The environmental fate of this district, known locally as South Phoenix5, was cemented nearly a cen tury ago, linked to a complex of factors including pervasive racial exclusion, class domination, political disenfranchise ment, and a racially segmented economy. These factors, im bricated in a variety of historical combinations, have been materialized in distinct land-use and socio-economic patterns in the central city.

We begin by offering a historical sketch of the early de velopment of Phoenix, considering the ways racist practices contributed to shaping land uses in the old urban core. We examine the ways public representations of minority neigh borhoods focus on filth, disease, and contamination, discur

sively attaching a persistent stigma both to people and place in minority districts of Phoenix. We next discuss the mutual

Source: adapted from Bolin et al. (2000)

Figure 1. Map of the Phoenix Metropolitan Area.

ly reinforcing relationship of these cultural representations to an ensemble of land uses and policies, ranging from industri al and transportation encroachment in minority neighbor hoods to bank redlining and neighborhood disinvestment. We consider a period that stretches from early 20th century de velopment to the post-war period when Phoenix entered its current 'boomtown' period of rapidly accelerating population and industrial growth. The socio-spatial processes that have shaped the creation of social and environmental conditions in South Phoenix have taken place in the context of an aggres sive pro-business and anti-democratic political culture, propped up by large federal expenditures on water projects and military production (Wiley and Gottlieb 1985). Lastly, we briefly note the emerging contestations of hazardous fa cilities sitings by environmental justice activists and citizen groups in South Phoenix, as initial steps toward mitigating a century of environmental racism.

Environmental Racism: Conceptual Issues

Perhaps the most contentious issue in historical environ mental justice studies concerns environmental racism and whether race-based discrimination can be invoked as an ex

planatory factor in environmental inequalities (Pastor et al. 2001). Because of the political and legal freight that the term carries, both for researchers and community activists, claims about the prevalence of environmental racism are contested (e.g., Pulido 1996). The term environmental racism gained currency after the UCC (1987) study highlighted the impor tance of race in predicting of the location of hazardous waste facilities, based on a national US study (see also Bryant and Mohai 1992; cf. Anderton et al. 1994). The environmental jus tice literature appears divided over what constitutes environ mental racism. A 'pure discrimination model' (Hamilton 1995) argues that environmental racism must involve racially moti vated, intentional acts against people of color by those making

facility siting and other land use decisions (Pulido 2000). Other researchers discount intentionality as a necessary

element in defining racism, instead focusing on the variety of

historical and current institutional practices that disadvantage

people of color and produce environmental inequalities (Bullard 1996). Proponents of this approach argue that insti tutional racism, in all its diverse ideological, discursive, and political-economic manifestations, operating at a variety of spatial scales, must be seen as the key in environmental dis crimination, whether explicitly intentional acts are involved or

not (Pulido 2000). As critics have noted, focusing on the issue of intentionality in siting unwanted facilities in minority

neighborhoods elides consideration of the succession of land uses, patterns of housing segregation, racialized employment patterns, financial practices, and the ways that race permeates

Human Ecology Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2005 157

This content downloaded from 198.82.230.35 on Mon, 19 Mar 2018 19:47:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Bolin, Grineski and Collins

zoning, development, and bank lending processes in urban areas (Boone and Modarres 1999; Cole and Foster 2001; Rabin 1990). The focus on intentionality in discriminatory spatial practices neglects the "simultaneous evolution of racism…, class formation, and the development of industrial landscapes" [emphasis in original] (Pulido et al. 1996, 420).

In a theoretically informed discussion of environmental

discrimination, Pulido (2000, 15) advances the concept of 'white privilege.' In her usage, white privilege denotes a hegemonic form of racism, deeply embedded in ideologies and practices, that works to (re)produce white advantage across time and space. Conceptually, it calls attention to the relationships of different racial groupings in urban space and the ways that 'whiteness,' as a cultural construct, confers eco

nomic and social benefits to those so marked, thus linking race and class. Applied to environmental justice research, it points to the need for comparisons of those who bear heavy environmental burdens with those who are able to avoid them

through residential and employment decisions (Szasz and Meuser 1997). In this context, the growth of racially exclu sive white suburbs, a pattern that predominates in Phoenix's century-long expansion outward from city center, is exem plary of the geography of racial privilege. It is a socio-spa tial process that has inexorably shifted both environmental and economic burdens toward those remaining in the central city (e.g., Pulido 2000; Bolin et al. 2000; Sicotte 2003).

In this paper, we use 'environmental racism' to denote a

complex of social and spatial practices which systematically disadvantage people marked by certain racial categories. In the case of Phoenix (and the US generally) until the mid 1960s, racist discourses were pervasive and racial divisions and inequalities were 'naturalized' to the point of being taken for granted. We consider environmental racism to include acts of omission, such as failing to provide urban infrastruc ture and acts of commission, such as the imposition of un wanted land uses, regardless of whether there was spe cific intent to harm people of color.

Historical Overview

Unlike other cities of the Southwestern US Sunbelt

(Albuquerque, El Paso, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Tucson), which began with centuries old Spanish colonial and Mexican settlements, Phoenix was founded by Anglos and had no pre-existing Indian or Mexican settlements to displace (Sheridan 1995). Established in the late 1860s as an agricultural center in the Salt River Valley of central Arizona, early land speculators used the rem nants of 14th century Hohokam Indian canal systems to

bring water to the otherwise parched Sonoran desert. While the Hohokam had abandoned major settlements in

Table 1. Maricopa County Population Statistics, 1900-2000.

Maricopa County 1900 1950 2000

Total population 20,457 331,770 3,072,149 Latino -3,000 -50,000 763,341 Black 210 14,409 108,521 White 13,783 289,402 2,034,530

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1900, 1950 and 2000

Note: Latino figures for 1900 and 1950 are estimates based on Luckingham 1994

the valley some four centuries earlier, for reasons not well un

derstood (Abbot 2003), the new settlers optimistically named the nascent city Phoenix, assuming it would not share the fate of the earlier settlements. With the revival of the ancient

canal system, the 'worthless desert' gained value as agricul tural land and established the central role water would play in the political economy of Phoenix.

By the late 19th century, Mexicans and Mexican-Amer icans were the largest 'minority group' in Phoenix (Table 1), joined by smaller populations of African Americans, Chinese,

and American Indians (U.S. Census of Population 1900, 1950, 2000). While all racial/ethnic minorities were the sub

jects of discriminatory discourses and practices, those direct ed at Latinos and Blacks had the most persistent effects on land use and place construction in the city. Residential seg regation and unregulated land uses in minority districts began shaping social and environmental conditions in what would become South Phoenix by the 1890s, when Phoenix's popu lation numbered fewer than 5,000 people. Even at this early stage in the development of the city, the dividing line between

Anglo Phoenix and the southern subaltern district was begin ning to be established, demarcated by an east-west rail corri dor first established in 1887 (Myrick 1980). This corridor soon began serving as both the physical and symbolic bound ary between two developing urban worlds (Figure 2).

Legend ;

— City Limits ~~Sr

E AfricanAmerican Residential Area

Latino Residential Area

E ■ n

12 St 16 St

Source: Adapted from Roberts (1973)

Figure 2. Minority Neighborhoods in Phoenix, 1911.

158 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2005

This content downloaded from 198.82.230.35 on Mon, 19 Mar 2018 19:47:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Bolin, Grineski and Collins

Mexicans were, almost from the city's founding in 1870, marginalized and excluded in most economic sectors, being relegated primarily to field work in local

agricultural production (Dimas 1999). This reflects general patterns of agricultural production in the Southwest US, which had come to rely on low-wage Mexican labor by the 1870s. This pattern of employ ment segregation persists today in California and Ari zona. In the hegemonic ideology of the period, Mexi cans were viewed as 'naturally' predisposed to stoop work in fields picking fruits and vegetables and cultur ally adapted to low wages and poverty (Walsh 1999). Mexicans and Mexican Americans were systematically disadvantaged in the early political economy of the city. By 1900, wealth, political power and property were controlled by a growing Anglo business and po litical elite, a factor critical in shaping race relations and the production of space in the emerging city. As Luck ingham (1989, 8) notes, "Phoenix, from its founding was run by Anglos for Anglos," a consequence of which was the pro duction of a persistent north-south geography of uneven de velopment across the city.

An unapologetic pro-growth 'boosterism' has been a central ideological feature of the ruling class in Phoenix from

its earliest days and has shaped innumerable planning and in vestment decisions over the last century designed to ensure growth, profitability, and capital accumulation (e.g. Mawn 1979; Wylie and Gottlieb 1985). Critical in Phoenix's early growth was the establishment of railroad linkages to external markets, and it is the railroad that gained a primary role in shaping the industrial ecology and patterns of racial segrega tion in the urban core (see Figure 2) (Kotlanger 1983). The rail corridor transecting southern Phoenix became, by the 1890s, a magnet for industrial, warehousing, and stockyard activity. Some of the city's earliest industries located 'south of the tracks': these included meat packing and rendering plants, foundries, ice factories, flour mills, brick factories and

food processing facilities, giving the district a durable indus trial presence (Mawn 1979). The railroad also anchored a growing warehouse district, as the city rapidly emerged by 1920 as a regional distribution center (Russell 1986). The east-west line of the railroad served a relatively impermeable residential barrier between the poor Black and Latino dis tricts of South Phoenix and Anglo Phoenix extending from the central business district, northward. Today, the rail corri dor remains a zone of environmental justice concerns (Bolin et al. 2002) (see Figures 2 and 3).

The northward movement of Anglo residential develop ment began after major flooding on the Salt River in 1891 showed the hazardousness of living on the floodplain. This left the area between the central business district (CBD) and

Source: adapted from Roberts (1973)

Figure 3. Minority Neighborhoods in Phoenix, 1940.

the Salt River channel as a liminal zone hosting the rail corri dor and an expanding industrial presence, in proximity to the

agricultural fields which were the mainstay of the city's econ omy in the early 20th century. The barrios and ghettoes of South Phoenix languished in the interstitial areas between factories and fields, well isolated from the expanding white only neighborhoods to the north (Dimas 1999). Public ex penditures on water lines, sewage, paved roads and urban ser vices were directed toward neighborhoods north of the down town, while those south of the rail corridor did without, in some areas well into the 1960s (Russell 1986). The lack of basic urban services south of the rail corridor throughout this

period contributed to the increasingly unhealthy living condi tions prevalent in its low-income neighborhoods. Indeed the city's storm water rains, first constructed in 1890, directed runoff and untreated sewage of Anglo neighborhoods into the

minority neighborhoods of South Phoenix, "…victimizing] the lower areas with filth and stench" and causing "… the tran

sition of a desirable residential neighborhood into a depressed area" (Mawn 1979,140). Because much of South Phoenix re mained outside the city limits and political jurisdiction of Phoenix until annexations in 1959 and 1960, land use regula tions were lax and urban services were minimal (Konig 1982). The low land values in the district made the area at

tractive to continuing industrialization into the 20th century,

which in turn, engendered continuing environmental blight in residential areas adjacent to the industries (Mawn 1979).

South Phoenix, by the 1920s, was indelibly marked in the

Anglo controlled media as an undesirable district of industry, stockyards, and minorities not suitable for the privileged class es (Luckingham 1994). North of the CBD, a new urban trol ley system provided transportation to growing suburban White

neighborhoods springing up (Russell 1986). This growth, in turn, was promoted by a the Salt River Project, a federal water

Human Ecology Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2005 159

This content downloaded from 198.82.230.35 on Mon, 19 Mar 2018 19:47:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Bolin, Grineski and Collins

project which by 1920 was providing reliable water supplies for urban and agricultural uses in central Arizona (Reisner 1993). Indeed, as Reisner (1993) notes, the availability of fed erally subsidized water promoted rapid increases in land val ues in desirable parts of Phoenix leading to a frenzy of land speculation and housing development in the early 1920s.

By this time, clear effects of 'white privilege' (Pulido 2000) can be seen in the city's development patterns, with Anglo middle classes increasingly distancing themselves from the degraded environmental and residential conditions of South Phoenix as city limits were extended northward in a series of annexations (Luckingham 1994). Unlike cities of the US industrial heartland, with distinct patterns of 'white flight' to suburbs as central cities deteriorated (e.g. Harvey 1996), Phoenix's split of a minority urban core and expand ing white suburbs on the periphery has been in place for the last century. A Chamber of Commerce report in 1920 articu lated the desired image of Phoenix when it characterized the city as "a modern town of forty thousand people, and the best kind of people too. A very small percentage for Mexicans, Negroes, or foreigners" (quoted in Kotlanger 1983, 396). For Phoenix boosters, the "best kind of people" were Anglo and middle class, the social class that promoters historically have

sought to attract as tourists and as new residents to the city (Luckingham 1994).

Irrespective of city boosters' visions of a racially pure desert Utopia, the region has attracted people of color since its founding. Initial African American settlement in the Phoenix area began in the latter part of the 19th century as migrants escaping racism in southern states came west. Phoenix, how ever, offered little refuge from segregation and discrimina tion, and by 1912 African Americans were subject to a vari ety of laws enforcing strict residential, schooling, and em ployment segregation, practices that persisted well into the Civil Rights era of the 1960s (Harris 1983). A net socio-spa tial effect of racial control and exclusion in this period is the concentration, even today, of much of Phoenix's proportion ately small Black population in a few census tracts of South Phoenix (Sicotte 2003). Both African Americans and Latinos were segregated and racially controlled by a wide variety of formal and informal practices that remain inscribed in the city's current spatial form.

Race and Place

Race and class inequalities were deeply entwined in the process of place construction in Phoenix, as was typical of US cities of the period (e.g. Harvey 1996). The hegemonic racism that held sway among Arizona's political elite and the

planning and investment decisions that were shaped by it in sured that South Phoenix's early industrial trajectory would

not be stopped in deference to the growing residential popu lations in the district. Racist discourses fused race and place as embodied characteristics by ascribing 'hazardous' tenden cies to bodily characteristics and cultural practices, thus jus tifying the segregation of 'races' (Brunk 1996; cf. Craddock 2000). As Young (1991, 126) notes, when a dominant class "…defines some groups as different, as the Other, the mem bers of these groups are imprisoned in their bodies. Domi nant discourse defines them in terms of bodily characteristics

and constructs their bodies as ugly, dirty, defiled, impure, contaminated, or sick." It also rationalizes and justifies their separation in space.

Such discourses were present from the earliest days in Phoenix as an 1879 newspaper account illustrates:

[Mexicans] do their washing and cooking on the sidewalks, and all manner of filth is thrown into the [irrigation] ditches. They have no outhouses, and the stench arising from the numerous adobe holes is

simply fearful… Some portions of our town surpass that of the Chinese quarters6 in San Francisco for filth and stench (quoted in Luckingham 1994. 18).

Signifiers like 'dirt,' 'filth,' and 'disease' were all used by the media to stigmatize residents of South Phoenix for decades, helping to reinforce their Otherness to the 'right kind of peo ple' in Anglo Phoenix. The colligation of racial stereotypes and degraded living conditions of the inhabitants of South Phoenix legitimated, in turn, a wholesale official neglect of the region, expressed both in unregulated industrialization and an absence of urban services for the residents of the area

well into post-war boom period (e.g. Mawn 1979). Racism was not evenly applied. Blacks and Latinos

were subjected to different patterns of discrimination, and, further, were internally segregated along racial and class lines within South Phoenix itself (cf. Figure 2 and 3). African Americans were subject to formal segregation typical of much of the US through the 1960s. In Phoenix, a variety of laws and strict social rules of deference to Whites in public spaces produced near absolute residential, employment, health care, and educational segregation (Luckingham 1994, 1989). An active Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s enforced racial

discipline on African Americans in the city although their vigilantism attracted far fewer followers than it did in the Southern US (Harris 1983). Unlike Latinos, Blacks were re stricted by Arizona law to Black-only schools. When none was available, Blacks had to endure the humiliation of micro

segregation at White schools in so-called 'colored rooms.' In Phoenix, a 'colored cottage,' a small outbuilding where Black high school students were isolated was used, as if they were carriers of contagious diseases. This form of micro-segrega tion continued until the city's first segregated 'colored' high

160 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2005

This content downloaded from 198.82.230.35 on Mon, 19 Mar 2018 19:47:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Bolin, Grineski and Collins

school was built in 1927 (Hagerty 1976). Federally mandat ed school and housing desegregation, however, would not begin until the 1960s, permitting continuing racial segrega tion in Phoenix in a variety of spatial scales, from the class room and workplace to entire zones within the urban core. Indeed, deed restrictions and housing covenants, as well as lending practices kept African Americans out of all-White suburbs until fair housing laws began to be enforced in the 1970s (Harris 1983; Gammage 1999). These forms of spatial and social control reinforced the economic marginality of most of the city's African American population, restricted as they were to service work and as agricultural laborers through the 1920s (Horton 1941). US Census7 reports cover ing four decades from 1900 to 1940 show the overrepresen tation of 'Negroes' in domestic work and unskilled laborers (primarily farm and railroad work) as well as among the un employed (US Census 1922, 1943). While income figures are not given, surrogate indicators including mortality rates and housing conditions (discussed below) suggest pervasive poverty among Blacks.

Socio-spatial discrimination against Latinos was more pronounced in Phoenix than other Southwestern cities in the region that originated as Spanish colonial and Mexican set tlements (Dimas 1999; Sheridan 1995). While the barrios of Phoenix provided settings for the continuation of Mexican cultural traditions and practices, they were contained there by

an all White police force (Dimas 1999). As Dimas notes (1999, 32), the internal segregation of the Catholic Church, with Latinos restricted to the basement for services in the

1920s was "perhaps the most profound indicator of the prej udice and discrimination that the Mexican population faced…in the Valley." In addition to spatial control, cultural control took the form of efforts to 'Americanize' Latinos in

the 1920s and '30s, including teaching young women how to be domestic servants in Anglo households of north Phoenix (Mawn 1979). While Latinos were not subject to the apartheid-like conditions of Blacks, they were equally re stricted in employment and to residential locations in South Phoenix, circumstances that persisted until US housing and employment laws were changed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As Dimas (1999) reports, labor markets were clearly racial ized, with the primary occupations for Latinos prior to World

War 11 in very low wage agricultural field work and as labor ers in the warehouse district adjacent to the rail corridor (Luckingham 1989).

The sequestration and spatial control of people of color in Phoenix is an exemplar of what Sibley calls 'spatial pu

Related Tags