Study looks to educate minorities about importance of environmentalism

Campus researchers are trying to make minorities more aware of the dangers of environmental pollution by recording the oral histories of victims from a 1980s water crisis on Tucson's south side.

Since fall 2000, the Mexican American Studies Research Center has been interviewing victims of a 1981 scare involving the solvent trychloroethelyene (TCE), which was discovered in aquifers supplying water to south side residents.

TCE is listed by the Environmental Protection Agency as a contaminant that is "highly likely" to cause cancer, said Gregory Rodriguez, assistant professor of Mexican American studies, who is involved in the project.

The research center is involving University of Arizona students in recording and transcribing the stories of members of the community who became ill as a result of drinking the contaminated water.

The members of the community are primarily of Mexican descent.

"What we're trying to do is make history useful to people's lives. The Center has become concerned with timely topics, such as Latino health," Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez said a goal of the histories is to show that environmental pollution is not just a problem of the white community.

He said that since the minority community had to struggle for civil rights, the mechanisms were already in place to shift the focus to environmental issues.

Daniel Reyes III, a Mexican American studies graduate student participating in the project, also said that the project is a way to show that people of color are involved in the environmental movement.

"The people that are involved, the people that are dying, are informing the public of the environmental movement (among minority communities)," Reyes said. "We're interdependent, we're not independent of each other. That's important."

Rodriguez said around 50 histories have already been collected in the year and a half since the project began.

Pedro Marquez, a psychology and Mexican American studies senior, participated in the project last semester by conducting an interview with a man being treated for leukemia.

"It was a very emotional experience about personal issues," Marquez said. "These people have lost friends and loved ones."

He said members of the community have been victims of "environmental racism."

He got involved in the project though a Mexican American studies class. He said each student in the class was paired with another student and assigned one person to interview.

The students met with the subject, recorded the interview, transcribed it, and finally met with the subject again to be sure they were satisfied with the finished document, he said.

Rodriguez said once the interview process is complete that both the audio and textual versions of the interview are kept in the archives at the center.

He said although the interviews are not open to the public, they are used by students for research and kept indefinitely for future use.

"We are identifying heroes and leaders for the new generations. The clean-up takes hundreds of years, getting the younger generation involved makes sure that it doesn't happen again," he said.