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Introduction
In March 2015, facing potential criminal charges from federal investigators with the Department of Justice (DOJ), Exide Technologies was finally forced to permanently shutter its lead-acid battery recycling plant in Vernon, California, a five-square-mile industrial zone just five miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles (figure 1). For decades, the plant had spewed toxic chemicals into the air and water, exposing thousands of families living in the surrounding neighborhoods to dangerous levels of lead and arsenic.1 These neighborhoods—Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, Commerce, Bell, Maywood, and Huntington Park—are predominantly working-class and Latinx; they are also among the most disproportionately burdened by pollution and industrial toxicity in all of California (“Draft CalEnviroScreen 4.0” 2021). The DOJ’s involvement followed years of frustrated opposition to the plant by local community members and organizations who urged various state regulatory agencies to act on Exide. While California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) and the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) issued multiple fines and citations against the plant over the years, the agencies had failed to stop Exide from emitting toxins and poisoning surrounding communities.
Source: Screenshot of Google Maps, taken December 2021 by Amaru Tejeda.
[Image Omitted. See PDF.]
Unfortunately, the plant’s shuttering was only the start in a protracted process of seeking redress for those poisoned by Exide, and one that has required constant vigilance from the impacted communities in the face of a regulatory apparatus and legal system that strongly favors corporate interests. As mark! Lopez, former executive director for East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice (EYCEJ), put it in 2016, “every step of the way this cleanup has only moved forward through community pressure” (Barboza and Poston 2016). Such was the case in 2018, when California lawmakers were pressured by resident activists to expand the remediation project to include the area’s parkways—narrow strips of public land separating the sidewalk from the street—which had been excluded from the DTSC’s original cleanup plan (Barboza 2018).
The ongoing cleanup of the contamination site and the surrounding residential area is the largest and most expensive in the history of California. The most recent report by state auditors estimates that the final cost of...