This story was originally published by Grist and is republished here through the Climate Desk partnership.
The hot, dry Santa Ana winds that whip through Orange County’s Logan barrio are fierce and temperamental. In the mid-20th century, they’d deliver gusts forceful enough to wreak havoc throughout the Southern California region, destroying orange crops, uprooting trees, downing power lines, and upending lives. But in the Logan neighborhood, one of the city of Santa Ana’s poorest barrios at the time, children like Cecelia Andrade Rodriguez eagerly awaited the wind’s arrival in the fall.
On days when the winds rushed through Logan, Andrade Rodriguez and her friends would race to gather carton barrels discarded by a business in the neighborhood, which at the time was squeezed between a pair of railroad tracks and adjacent to the Interstate 5 freeway. She remembers how she’d drag a barrel to the fence in the Logan Elementary School yard, then crawl into the tube and wait for a gust of wind to blast her across the playground. The children sailed as far as the winds would take them, letting their imaginations carry them to places that they couldn’t go, outside the boundaries of this tiny barrio, home to generations of Mexican Americans who helped build the city.
Logan has been described as the Plymouth Rock of Santa Ana, a predominantly Latino city now home to about 335,000 people, because it’s where the city’s earliest Mexican and Mexican American residents settled. But it’s also an apt analogy for a barrio that has weathered many storms — political battles that the Andrade family and generations of Logan residents have fought in order to defend their homes against the industrialization that surrounded and eventually infiltrated their neighborhood. They would eventually win many of those battles, against the odds. Despite those efforts, the development of the barrio would leave a toxic legacy that still plagues them to this day.
There was a time, in the 1970s, when a proposed extension of one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, Civic Center Drive, was slated to cut through the heart of Logan and split the barrio in half. Led by Andrade Rodriguez’s mother, Josephine “Chepa” Andrade, who was born and raised in the barrio and served as spokeswoman and president of the Logan neighborhood association, residents went to war against the city and eventually blocked the extension. A parcel of land that was saved by the effort was subsequently christened “Chepa’s Park.”
It was the first of many battles — fought first by Chepa and then by her son Joe, Andrade Rodriguez’s younger brother and the current neighborhood association president — where residents faced off with the city to preserve the soul of their community.
So firmly rooted in the life that the barrio offered its residents, families like the Andrades lived and died on this land — in some cases literally on Logan’s streets, where Chepa’s father suffered a fatal heart attack while walking home from work. Logan offered not just familial ties, friendship, and support, but also a respite from the racism and discrimination that Mexican Americans faced in other parts of Santa Ana, which was once segregated across social spaces like movie theaters, where Mexicans were forced to sit in the balconies. Uptown neighborhoods used racially restrictive covenants in residential deeds to prevent Mexicans and other people of color from living in the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods.
Located on the easternmost edge of Santa Ana, Logan was often overlooked when it came to city services. While the city’s strictly residential tract home neighborhoods had ample backyards and wide, paved streets, these were largely absent in Logan and other working-class Latino barrios in the industrial sections of town. Neighborhood residents relied on ingenuity to make neighborhood improvements — for example, covering Logan Street with apricot pits in the early 20th century to tamp the dust and cover holes in the road. Then, in the early 1930s, the barrio petitioned the city to pave its two primary thoroughfares, Logan and Stafford streets, but was forced to raise the money to cover the cost. The residents ultimately celebrated the paving of their roads with a street dance.
Most Logan families survived on meager earnings, and life along the railroad tracks was never peaceful. Picture frames hung askew on living room walls due to the constant rattle of the trains. Over the decades, Logan’s residents confronted racism and discrimination by creating a self-sufficient world within the barrio that offered opportunities for community members: hosting festivals to raise money to build a church, convincing the city to convert vacant lots for the creation of Chepa’s Park where children could play, and calling on the school district to provide busing so students wouldn’t have to cross major intersections to get to class. Parents proudly enlisted their sons in the military during World War II and planted victory gardens to survive the war’s food shortages.
That tradition of neighborhood pride was on full display on a clear, sunny Saturday morning last September, when Logan’s current and former residents trickled into Chepa’s Park for their first reunion since the COVID-19 pandemic began. The reunions have been held annually for more than two decades, and they are above all a celebration that the community has survived the city’s attempts to eliminate the barrio altogether. “We’re Back!!” declared last year’s reunion flyer, which described the barrio as a place “where memories are made and history is cherished.”
“Being born here, right down the street, your heart’s always in it,” Joe Andrade told me last fall. In 2004, Andrade was taken under the wing of one of Chepa’s long-time fellow activists, Logan native Sam Romero, now 87. Together, Romero and Andrade began mapping and tracking neighborhood businesses that they saw as environmental nuisances, calling on Santa Ana to take a tougher stance against firms that violated city ordinances. For example, they fought to regulate an auto paint shop that operated late into the evening, overwhelming the neighborhood with noxious paint fumes as residents tried to sleep.
It was the first of many battles the two men would fight together.
At the reunion, one of Chepa’s best friends, Helen Parga Moraga, sat at a picnic table with Andrade at her side as he ticked off a list of recent victories he and Romero had secured from the city, including installing speed bumps residents had been requesting for 50 years for along several highly trafficked streets. Soon, Lincoln Avenue, near where the Santa Ana winds once swept Cecelia Andrade Rodriguez away in her carton barrel on the Logan playground, will get a major facelift with new sidewalks, curbs, and sewer lines, as well as artificial vines to cover the chain-link fence that now serves as a barrier between the street and the railroad tracks.
Nothing could have pleased Parga Moraga more than to see her best friend’s son take over where his mother had left off in the battle to save Logan. “He’s a fighter,” she said as Andrade described an effort to eliminate congestion on Lincoln Avenue, one of the barrio’s main thoroughfares.
“Oh, I hope I’m alive! I want to see that,” Parga Moraga exclaimed upon hearing the plan. “Really, God give me life until then!”
Andrade told her that every time he fixes a problem in Logan, he remembers his mother and — his eyes glancing upward toward the sky — says: “Another one, mom.”
It’s been nearly a century since the city zoned the already-established residential barrio of Logan for industrial use. Today, the neighborhood’s soil bears the cost of that decision. It absorbed the environmental degradation of each era that thrust Logan into modernity. As the neighborhood’s agricultural roots gave way to industry, products like petroleum, aviation gasoline, lead ore, heavy metals, chemicals, herbicides, and pesticides came and went on the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroad lines — but a part of them never left.
The soil would become a repository of proof illustrating how generations of a Mexican barrio were poisoned by lead and other noxious pollutants. Residents knew little about this soil contamination, despite the city’s environmental assessments calling for a deeper exploration of potential lead exposure in the neighborhood in the late 1970s. Comprehensive citywide soil test results were not publicly available until 2017, when I published an investigation that found hazardous levels of lead in the soil in neighborhoods across Santa Ana, which today is Orange County’s second-largest city. To follow up, I conducted hundreds of additional soil tests over the course of 2018 and 2019 in neighborhoods that, like Logan, carried the burden of the city’s industrialization.
More than half of those tests returned lead levels that the state of California considers unsafe for children.
Today, the Logan census tract is identified as a “disadvantaged community” by the state Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental health screening tool because it’s among California’s most pollution-burdened areas. While generations of Mexican Americans battled the encroachment of industry in the Logan barrio and won several major victories, Romero and Andrade concede that they’ve yet to achieve their ultimate goal of restoring Logan to what it once was: a residential neighborhood untainted by industrial contamination. The neighborhood remains filled with scrap yards, recycling centers, auto repair shops, and other industrial and commercial businesses that continue to take their toll on the neighborhood.
“A lot of these businesses don’t care if you get any sleep or not,” said Romero, who recently moved elsewhere in Santa Ana. “You had the big cement trucks running all over the neighborhood, and they’re still doing that. So the quality of life went down the tubes.”
The transformation of Logan from an agricultural, residential hamlet to a barrio surrounded by toxic emissions was no accident. It was determined by city leaders who made zoning and land use decisions throughout the last century that purposefully changed the very nature of Logan and its surroundings. For years, however, the ramifications of those decisions were buried in the dust, leaving residents exposed to soil lead particles that are perpetually resuspended in the air the residents breathe. For years, Logan’s residents have celebrated their history as a barrio, but many never imagined that their past could also come back to haunt them.
As in other urban centers across the country throughout the 20th century, city leaders’ decisions transformed Santa Ana’s built environment, leaving a cumulative legacy of lead contamination in neighborhoods where Mexicans and Mexican Americans were forced by segregation, discrimination, and historical social norms to live during the first half of the 20th century — and where Latino residents continue to reside today.
The fight to restore Logan could one day make the neighborhood healthier to live in, but without a massive remediation effort, the barrio will always carry the stain of its industrial past.
URBAN RESIDENTS in every corner of the U.S. unknowingly live in neighborhoods burdened by toxic contaminants. Most of this residue escaped regulatory scrutiny — the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t comprehensively regulate toxic releases until the late 1980s — and indeed most cities never even bothered to measure these pollutants.
Instead, the work was left to the occasional academic researcher.
In their 2018 book Sites Unseen: Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities, sociologists Scott Frickel and James Elliott outline how the failure to map what they describe as “relic” industrial sites leaves communities in the dark about potential contamination hot spots seeded by businesses that leave behind hazardous byproducts. Using historical industrial directories dating as far back as the 1950s in four American cities, Frickel and Elliott discovered that more than 90% of sites where hazardous industry (defined as businesses that perform work known to release toxic chemicals and heavy metals) has operated over the past half-century have become “lost, hidden from view,” and ignored by federal, state, and municipal agencies.
While large polluters such as oil refineries tend to draw the most regulatory scrutiny, Frickel and Elliott’s research concluded that the other types of trouble spots go “unnoticed administratively and legislatively.” They also found that the vast majority of manufacturing facilities and businesses in the directories are small operations with few employees, but they have historically numbered in the thousands in any given city, popping in and out of existence about every eight years on average.
“There is a lot of turnover on these sites, so over time you’re going to get a whole witch’s brew of contaminants,” said Frickel, a professor at Brown University. “You’re going to get different kinds of industry piling on top of one another over time.”
Regulators typically don’t require businesses below a certain size threshold to report emissions. For example, the federal Toxic Release Inventory Program requires reporting from facilities with 10 or more employees that also manufacture or process toxins at volumes greater than 25,000 pounds per year. Thus, according to Frickel, smaller businesses like welding shops tend to fly under the radar. Because the number of historically industrialized sites across the country is so vast — and continues to expand — potentially contaminated soil is a systemic problem, and one that is not being tracked by most regulatory agencies.
Among the most insidious contaminants of this “witch’s brew” is lead. Its use in everything from bullets to car batteries, from aviation fuel to automobile fuel, has allowed it to pervade every aspect of our urban lives and environment — so much so that the social historian Christian Warren has concluded that America’s cities have become “veritable lead mines” as a result. “This lead will not go away by itself — after all, one of the element’s chief attractions has always been its incorruptibility,” he wrote in his 2000 book Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning.
A 2018 study published in the medical journal The Lancet estimates that lead exposure is responsible for more than 400,000 deaths annually in the United States, a number that’s 10 times what scientists previously estimated and comparable to deaths attributed to tobacco smoke exposure. The higher mortality estimate was due to the study’s finding that low-level environmental lead exposure has been a largely overlooked risk factor for death from cardiovascular disease, which could be responsible for nearly two-thirds of the deaths attributed to lead exposure.
“It is not surprising that lead exposure is overlooked. It is ubiquitous, but insidious and largely beyond the control of patients and clinicians,” concluded Bruce Lanphear, a professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and his co-authors in the study.
Five decades ago, Clair C. Patterson, a California Institute of Technology geochemist who pioneered techniques to measure lead levels, warned that legacy lead contamination would come back to haunt cities. He argued that Americans’ blood lead levels were unsafe, and his findings provided key evidence for environmental activists who successfully sought to remove lead from gasoline.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
