Kettleman City: Due Process in Spanish
California
The exit for Kettleman City is one mile ahead. Most drivers do not take it. They should know what happened here.
In the late nineteen seventies, Chemical Waste Management Incorporated opened the Kettleman Hills hazardous-waste facility approximately three miles from the small community of Kettleman City, in Kings County. The facility accepted toxic industrial waste from across the western United States. Within a few years it was the largest Class One hazardous-waste landfill west of the Mississippi River.
The community of Kettleman City was almost entirely Mexican American. Many residents were undocumented agricultural workers. Their first language was Spanish.
In nineteen ninety-one, Kings County approved an expansion of the facility. They did not provide Spanish-language notice of the permitting proceedings. They did not translate the environmental-impact report.
In a community where most residents could not read the documents that governed whether more poison would be processed three miles from their children's school, no one was notified in a language they could read. A grassroots organization called El Pueblo para el Aire y Agua Limpio, which means the People for Clean Air and Clean Water, filed suit. They worked with California Rural Legal Assistance.
The California Court of Appeal ruled in their favor in nineteen ninety-one, finding that the county had violated the due-process rights of Spanish-speaking residents. The ruling was a landmark: it established that the procedure of environmental permitting, not just its outcomes, could constitute a civil-rights violation. The facility is still operating.
The community is still there. In the two thousands, clusters of birth defects and childhood cancer in Kettleman City prompted further investigation, though that research is ongoing and no final determination has been published in sources available to this research. What happened here was a legal argument about language.
It was also a story about who gets to know, in time to object, what is being decided about their lives.
