Dr. Michael Méndez, assistant professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California, Irvine and former Pinchot Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of the Environment, spoke at Occidental March 6 about how wildfires and other climate disasters have worsened existing inequalities for undocumented Latino and Indigenous migrants in California.
Méndez said his passion for environmental justice, particularly concerning migrants, is rooted in his personal experiences growing up in the northeast San Fernando Valley in communities made up predominantly of low-income, Latino, African American and immigrant populations. He said he witnessed significant environmental injustice in his community with pollution, contamination, freeways and landfills negatively impacting people’s health and wellbeing.
“[Seeing] that really drove me to try to understand why some communities [are] containment zones for environmental pollution or sacrifice zones for all the negatives from the industrial processes,” Méndez said.
Méndez said low-income communities do not have these pollution burdens by accident or coincidence.
“These were intentional political choices that governments, elected officials and policymakers made that provided all the environmental benefits and privileges to wealthy, largely white communities and all of the environmental bads to communities like where I grew up that were largely Latino immigrants,” Méndez said.
Méndez’s research focuses on how climate change affects communities of color and is informed by his experience working for the California State Legislature, Sacramento City Planning Commission and the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s workgroup on “Climate Vulnerability and Social Science Perspectives,” among other organizations. He recently published “Climate Change from the Streets,” in which he expands on the need for environmental justice to inform contemporary global climate change policy.
His presentation focused on how the 2020 wildfires in Sonoma County had inequitable impacts on farmworkers. Méndez said about 12,000 farmworkers in Sonoma County were Indigenous people from Mexico who suffered cultural and linguistic isolation. According to Méndez, during the Tubbs fire that impacted Sonoma County, they were often asked to harvest grapes in regions that were deemed mandatory evacuation zones to the general public. He said climate change is extending and intensifying wildfire season, amplifying inequalities.
According to Méndez, undocumented Latino and Indigenous migrants are particularly vulnerable to disasters such as wildfires due to their marginalized status before disasters, often facing racial discrimination, language barriers, exploitation, economic hardships and fear of deportation in their everyday lives.
“Try to imagine being a farm worker,” Méndez said. “Those that even got an N95 mask, many of them took it off because many of them are paid […] by the box [and] it’s something slowing you down, and you’re going to do the most you can to make money for your family. When a disaster like wildfires occur, they breathe in more toxic smoke that can create further health disparities or what the field of public health calls a syndemic, as existing health disparities collide with other environmental or health conditions and crises.”
According to Méndez, although harvesting grapes during wildfire and smoke events harm the respiratory health of farmworkers, people are more concerned about the “smoke taint” that grapes have developed through the wildfires, making grapes taste like an ashtray.
“The wine industry contributes billions of dollars to our state’s economy. California wine is award-winning,” Méndez said. “There’s this strong economic imperative to protect those industries, protect that product, even at the expense of migrant farmworkers, particularly those that don’t have legal status in this country and can be exploited and abused of their civil and labor rights.”
Méndez said there are several policy and equity gaps for wine industry farm workers, including no post-incident accountability, improper monitoring of the air quality index and no post-exposure health screening or hazard pay.
“If we really want to tackle disaster risk reduction, it starts with the social integration of migrants before that disaster hits, including them in our social safety nets such as health care, unemployment insurance and other resources that make people thrive in our society,” Méndez said.
Assistant Professor of Urban & Environmental Policy Karla Peña invited Méndez to speak as part of the Critical Environmental Justice series. Peña said she organized the series to showcase the work of scholars who implement a critical environmental justice standpoint in their research on a variety of current issues.
In response to the presentation, Dante D’Amico (junior) said during this time when welfare is uncertain, it is important to see how wildfire events can worsen the conditions of immigrants and generally underserved communities.
Payton O’Hara (junior) said Méndez’s presentation brought up a particularly important conversation in light of the recent LA fires that have affected the community.
Méndez said he hoped his presentation would encourage students to consider the workers behind major industries.
“We see mansions, vineyards, fancy properties getting burned and think it’s only the wealthy, but there’s people behind that who don’t own the homes — they’re the workers, the caretakers,” Méndez said. “Undocumented migrants are the invisible population […] struggling to survive in a region of wealth and prosperity.”
Contact Lilia Tanabe at ltanabe@oxy.edu
