Monolingual Spanish residents were excluded by an untranslated environmental review

Evidence

As part of the permitting process for the incinerator, Kings County issued an Environmental Impact Report (EIR). The Environmental Impact Report was about 300 pages long, with another 700 pages of appendices, for a total of about 1,000 pages. Kettleman City residents, 40 percent monolingual Spanish speakers, 95 percent Latino, said to Kings County, “Look, to include us in this decision, you need to translate these documents into Spanish.” Kings County was unresponsive. The County decision makers likely did not want to set a precedent; if they translated the EIR, they would have to translate documents in other situations, which is something the people of Kettleman City thought would probably be a good idea. Chem Waste, in a generous offer, translated a five-page executive summary and distributed that to every household in Kettleman City. English speakers in Kings County thus had about 1,000 pages of data to pore over, while Spanish speakers had five pages. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 72

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A court held lack of translation defeated meaningful participation — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 82; Segregating a hearing room mirrors the Jim Crow bus seating regime — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 76; Officials exploited the Spanish-language issue to eclipse dump permit scrutiny (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Environmental review documents omit or erase the communities they harm #exemplifies (0.95) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 1071
• Colonial archives excluded mixed-race experts even when their findings were valued #corroborates (0.75) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 114
• US English-only policies actively suppress linguistic identity #corroborates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2502
• Scientific language’s exclusionary conventions undermine democratic environmental dialogue #complicates (0.70) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1266
• Schools punished Spanish speakers by marking them as non-American #corroborates (0.70) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2502