Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA

The industrial-port belt of Los Angeles is home to eleven of the top twenty oil refineries in California, the largest ports in the country, and those "racist monuments" we call freeways. In this uncelebrated corner of "La La Land" through which most of America's goods transit, pollution is literally killing the residents. In response, a grassroots movement for environmental justice has grown, predominated by Asian and undocumented Latin@ immigrant women who are transforming our political landscape-yet we know very little about these change makers. In Refusing Death, Nadia Y. Kim tells their stories, finding that the women are influential because of their ability to remap politics, community, and citizenship in the face of the country's nativist racism and system of class injustice, defined not just by disproportionate environmental pollution but also by neglected schools, surveillance and deportation, and political marginalization. The women are highly conscious of how these harms are an assault on their bodies and emotions, and of their resulting reliance on a state they prefer to avoid and ignore. In spite of such challenges and contradictions, however, they have developed creative, unconventional, and loving ways to support and protect one another. They challenge the state's betrayal, demand respect, and, ultimately, refuse death.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Fighting for Breath in the Other LA 1. Neoliberal Embodied Assault 2. Emotions as Power 3. Every Body Matters 4. "Our Community Has Boundaries": Race and Class Matter 5. Citizenship as Gendered Caring 6. politics Without the Politics 7. The Kids Will Save Us Afterword: Toward Bioneglect

About the Author :
Nadia Y. Kim is Professor of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University. She is the author of the award-winning book Imperial Citizens (Stanford, 2008).

Review :
"Immigrant environmental justice movements are at the leading edge of social change in global cities, and yet they are frequently overlooked. Nadia Kim delivers a major intervention for reassessing the impacts of these movements, extending our vision with a keen ethnographic eye, a compelling narrative, and robust theoretical analyses."—David Naguib Pello, author of What is Critical Environmental Justice? "An urgent, much-needed account of the activism of Filipin@ and Latin@ immigrant activists in Los Angeles. Spotlighting gendered resistance and community citizenmaking, Kim effectively recasts environmental justice to mean commitment to care for both physical and emotional lives."—Yen Lê Espiritu, University of California, San Diego "An innovative and close-up look at the ways in which Latin@ and Filipin@ activists mobilize bodies, emotions, and gendered caregiving in their struggle for environmental justice."—Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, University of Southern California "The author poignantly conveys how aware these women are that pollution in their community is assaulting their bodies and emotions and leading to death. One of the book's major strengths is the respectful and culturally sensitive manner in which Kim employs mixed methods and intersectional approaches to detail how the women-led act of embodied citizenship—emotional support of one's neighbors against the assault of 'bioneglect'—constitutes a key resistance strategy....Highly recommended."—I. Coronado, CHOICE "I found the focus on embodiment and the expansion of Foucauldian thought to bioneglect to be the most compelling parts of this book. In addition, I was struck by Kim's honesty when she reported contradictions in the field."—Sanchita Dasgupta, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity "Kim's book is an essential read and eminently teachable. It will be a new classic in environmental justice, grounded in the original home discipline of the field and drawing from key works of sociologists like Robert Bullard, Beverly Wright, and David Pellow."—Julie Sze, American Journal of Sociology