Power and Justice in the Environmental Decision-Making Process: Kettleman City in KKK County

Despite persistent exposure to environmental hazards over three generations of grassroots organizing, residents in Kettleman City, a majority-Latinx immigrant rural town in the agricultural Central Valley of California, continue to live without a clean drinking water source. Their mobilization efforts have led me to ask how and why did this happen? What is the history of water in California’s Central Valley? Who is responsible? What voices are silenced and ignored? Why does this continue to happen? I develop a case study of the permit acquisition process for a toxic dumping site owned by Chemical Waste Management, Inc. (Chem Waste). I focus on the time period from 2005, when the permit process began, to 2015, after the approval of permits is granted to Chem Waste--in spite of mobilization efforts by activists with El Pueblo para el Aire y Agua Limpia de Kettleman City (People for Clean Air and Water of Kettleman City) and Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice. I examine how the decision-making process is shaped by intersectional dimensions of power. I use multiple forms of qualitative data for this project, including primary and secondary documents, and newspapers. I primarily draw from Greenaction’s archival collection on the history of Chem Wastes’ application for an expansion permit in Kettleman City. I use a framework rooted in critical environmental justice and intersectionality to observe how the permit acquisition process has functioned and evolved over time. My analysis reveals how meso and macro-level factors intersect in the political and institutional sphere of the environmental decision-making process