Environmental-justice organizing often mobilizes only the directly affected ethnic group

Evidence

The turnout at the LAC meetings, sparked by Padres’ organizing, consisted almost entirely of Latino Buttonwillow residents. Padres initially tried to reach out to the whole Buttonwillow community. “We would make fliers for meetings of the committee, or meetings of the LAC, or meetings at the school of the community, we would make them in English and Spanish. We never defined ourselves, we never specified ourselves as a strictly Latino group. It’s just that whites and blacks do not go,” says Montoya. The lack of participation by whites and blacks—almost 50 percent of Buttonwillow residents—would later prove to be significant. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 404

Categorization

• SEED: Why don’t white and black neighbors of toxic sites join EJ struggles? Cross-ethnic reluctance to organize as a structural weakness in EJ movements.
• XREF: connects to: A language-rights strategy can narrow a movement’s coalition and divide a community. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 447