Isabel M. Estrada Portales
07/22/2005

Recently, the play Living Out, about the always difficult relationship between a working mother and her babysitter, presented the worst case scenario of poor families in urban neighborhoods, surrounded by factories and pollution.

After many episodes of asthma, the babysitter's boy dies in the lousy nearby clinic. We are confronted with the fact that the well to do couple who hire this Salvadorian woman actually had just moved to the more expensive area of the city to avoid the pollution for their newborn girl.

When a marital fight breaks about finances and the like, the husband says: “Well, then we can't afford to breathe.” The audience laughs.

But it seems there are communities where people literally can't afford to breathe, and Latinos and African American seem to partake most often on that privilege.

A report by the Sierra Club shows that even if they don't die everyday, good breathing has become a luxury for many Hispanics.

“The Hispanic community is disproportionately at risk,” the report says. “Study after study has shown that Hispanic communities are located in the most polluted areas of cities.

Three out of every five Latinos live in communities near uncontrolled toxic waste sites. Eighty percent of Latinos live in the 437 counties with the country's worst air, compared to 57 percent of Anglos and 65 percent of African Americans. And 90 percent of farm workers are Hispanic and are still exposed to extremely dangerous pesticides.”

At the Annual Conference of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (Democrat from New York) called attention to the issue.

"We have to protect every child's health and we have to take actions against silent epidemics like lead poisoning and asthma. They can steal a child's future even before it begins," Clinton said.

She mentioned how Hispanics are twice as likely to suffer from lead poisoning, and, just in New York, one in three Latino children has asthma.

The Sierra Report relates the stories of 12 families affected by pollution in different ways. Here are some of those stories.

There's No Easy Breathing For Mother or Son

Sierra Club

Dr. Ubaldo Martín is a lung doctor at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia. Many of his patients are Puerto Rican, a community that suffers from very high rates of asthma and suffers all the more because of limited access to health care, lack of information about the illness, and living in polluted areas.

Thania Delgado, for example, sometimes can't even walk a block because her asthma overcomes her. "I don't have medical insurance, and since I don't have a doctor, I use my son's asthma medicine," she says.

And Thania's son, who is six, is suffering too. He was diagnosed with asthma at a week old when he stopped breathing. He now has two or three attacks each year, more than what doctors consider acceptable. Since the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970, air quality has improved in many regions of our country. But even after 30 years of progress, more than 130 million Americans and 3.8 million residents of southeastern Pennsylvania, continue to breathe dirty, unhealthy air.

Pennsylvania is home to 35 coal-fired power plants, located throughout the state which contribute to air quality problems in the area. Also Pennsylvania citizens breathe pollution from dirty Midwestern power plants located upwind in Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia, as well as winds blowing in from Baltimore and Washington. And now because the Bush administration is weakening clean air protections, Pennsylvania's air pollution problems stand to get worse.

"Pollution plays a very significant role in asthma and exacerbates it. There isn't any way to deny that. Anything that allows pollution to accelerate, any policy that goes soft on environmental protection, ultimately harms asthma patients," says Dr. Martín.

According to the Sierra Club report, under the Clean Air Act, the New Source Review program requires older plants to install modern pollution control technologies when they make significant changes that increase pollution. The Bush administration is exempting factories including utilities from this program, allowing older, more polluting plants to avoid pollution reduction, placing local communities and those downwind at increasing risk of health damage and pollution.

"Clean air sounds right, it's wrong for anyone to weaken the law," says Tahnia. "Sooner or later people will start wearing masks on the street because this is getting worse and worse."

New York City Coalition Fights Childhood Lead Poisoning

Sierra Club

Maria Celia Nolasco is raising three grandchildren who were poisoned by lead. She lives in Bushwick, a neighborhood of Brooklyn that is part of New York City's "lead belt," a swath of housing plagued by highly toxic lead-based paint. Many children in her community suffer from lead poisoning, which causes permanent brain damage that leads to learning disabilities and behavioral problems."

"Lead poisoning has been devastating to the children, to me and to our entire family," said Mrs. Nolasco.

Working with community organizer Manuel Castro of Make the Road by Walking, a Bushwick based organization, Nolasco and other community leaders, along with Sierra Club's local Environmental Justice Committee, joined with the New York City Coalition to End Lead Poisoning (a network of medical doctors, labor unions, and environmental, tenant and low income housing groups). They advocated for a stronger city law to prevent childhood lead poisoning.

Local activists had hoped the federal government would weigh in. In October 2002, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) established a scientific advisory committee to consider strengthening the standard for lead poisoning, since new research showed that brain damage occurs at lower levels of exposure.

But the Bush administration intervened. It rejected several experts that the CDC's own staff scientists had recommended for the committee in favor of people more likely to oppose tightening the standard. At least two of the new appointees had direct financial ties to the lead industry. Not surprisingly, the old standard has not changed.

Yet the community activists didn't and couldn't give up. In New York City, 94 percent of lead poisoning victims are children of color, and Bushwick has the city's highest rate of lead poisoning - 64.4 cases per thousand children. If the Bush administration had tightened the standard, the city would have been forced to act, but Mrs. Nolasco and her neighbors had to walk this road alone.

In February 2004, after hearing from Mrs. Nolasco and others, the New York City Council passed the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Act, even overturning the Mayor's veto. Still, slumlords claim that the law is unnecessary and it is not yet clear whether the city will enforce it.

"Lead poisoning has changed all of our lives for the worse," said Mrs. Nolasco. She urges government officials: "Please do your part to stop more kids from being poisoned.

Sierra Club

Lisa Martínez knows very well the punishment breathing the country's most polluted air can be for a person's lungs. Her two children, Nicholas, 17, and Ilene, 9, both have asthma, an illness which, in the Valley, is already considered an epidemic.

Sierra Club