Beyond Sun and Sand: Caribbean Environmentalisms

Chapter 10. Environmental Risk and Childhood Disease in an Urban Working-Class Caribbean Neighborhood

140 Lorraine C. Minnite and Immanuel Ness 140 CHAPTER 10 Environmental Risk and Childhood Disease in an Urban Working-Class Caribbean Neighborhood s LORRAINE C. MINNITE AND IMMANUEL NESS Introduction The environmental justice movement of the last two decades has confronted dimensions of poverty and racism previously overlooked in movements for social justice: the socially and geographically inequitable distribution of the costs of environmental degradation and pollution accompanying industrialization (Freudenberg 1984; Bryant 1995; Novotny 2000; Rhodes 2003). The historically uneven pattern of this distribution reflects a class and racial bias tied to the position of poor and working-class whites and racial and ethnic minorities in the capitalist economy. Their residential segregation creates opportunities for spatially disaggregating the costs and benefits of industrial production and other polluting functions of the local economy, resulting in the disproportionate concentration of environmentally hazardous activities in low-income and minority neighborhoods across the United States (United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice 1987; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 1992; Goldman and Fitton 1994). The decisions of businesses and governments to site noxious economic activities such as those producing high levels of air and water pollution, sewage treatment plants, toxic waste landfills, incinerators, and bus depots in or near lowincome neighborhoods, usually where land values are cheapest, compound the multiple burdens of poverty (Been 1993; Chase 1993; Bullard 1994; Centner, Kriesel, and Keeler 1996). Moreover, environmental racism, or the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, contributes to higher incidence of poor health and disease among people least likely to afford quality health care (Collin and Collin 1997; Institute of Medicine 1999; Cole and Foster 2001). Environmental Risk and Childhood Disease 141 In urban areas this form of discrimination is facilitated by a complex blend of political and economic forces that capitalize on existing segregated housing patterns, ghettoization, and minority disempowerment. In New York City, for example, toxic environmental hazards are more abundant in the neighborhoods of Mott Haven in the Bronx, Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan, and East New York and Sunset Park in Brooklyn, where the quality of housing is poor and large numbers of African Americans and people of Hispanic origin live. New York City’s pattern of ethnically and racially divided neighborhoods diminishes the crisis of environmental decay for the general population of the city, since politicians and public health officials can isolate and ignore them without serious repercussions. This happens because many people living in these neighborhoods are usually inactive in or excluded from the political process. However, the environmental crisis in New York is not limited to politically excluded neighborhoods of poor housing quality. It is also important to understand the relationship between race, class, and de-industrialization. As the Puerto Rico– Northeast Environmental Justice Network stresses: Puerto Ricans have experienced the consequence of rapid industrialization on the island and de-industrialization in the Northeast that has left a legacy of environmental pollution and a range of occupational and community health impacts having the common effect of further impoverishing the community. (Puerto Rico–Northeast Environmental Justice Network 1995) This chapter addresses some of the risks to health from environmental pollution in an urban, working-class, mostly Caribbean immigrant neighborhood. It analyzes data from a survey of low-income parents and their awareness of the risks from the environmental hazards they face. It also assesses the role of social capital in helping these parents protect their children’s health. The next section briefly discusses how patterns of immigration and settlement can complicate the work of urban public health providers in addressing health information needs in low-income immigrant neighborhoods. Next we present findings from our survey of Caribbean Hispanic immigrant parents in a Brooklyn, New York neighborhood and explore how connections to community institutions like schools and churches are associated with levels of awareness of environmental hazards and the risks they pose to health. We conclude with support for an emerging family-community paradigm in public health that emphasizes building on the strengths of a community’s assets in combating the environmental health risks facing the urban minority and immigrant poor. Immigration, Cultural Diversity, and Health Care De-industrialization and the transformation to a post-industrial economy in the United States has been accompanied by an expansion in immigration and 142 Lorraine C. Minnite and Immanuel Ness cultural diversity. Population diversification through immigration is a complex phenomenon, but in its most far-reaching trends...