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

Refusing Death offers an analysis of social movements that challenge the agenda of the neoliberal state while at the same time encompassing ideas, emotions, and experiences of Asian and Latin@ activists in twenty-first century greater Los Angeles. Nadia Kim demonstrates why power imbalance and the systemic marginalization of minorities are at the core of contemporary environmental crises. The author also shows how working-class immigrants, who have been threatened in their human rights and deprived of equal opportunity to participate in democratic processes, find in environmental activism an avenue for political legitimacy and a strategy for survival in an area that stores nearly all the region's crude oil, tar sand, and asphalt.Most of the research for this book took place between 2008 and 2013. In-depth interviews with members of community-based organizations serving the predominantly Asian and Latin@ populations from the south bay area of L.A. were conducted in English and in Spanish (a fluent bilingual Spanish speaker translated the author's communication with Latin@ activists). By employing data from political literature and official reports, as well as from interviews with representatives of several organizations, Refusing Death compellingly positions immigrant women's role in community leadership at the center of environmental studies of neoliberalism.In the first chapter, the author addresses the complex relationship between clean air organizers and government representatives. Kim highlights how participants' communities have utilized local knowledge ("street science") to combat the everyday state-led racial "bioneglect," this Foucault-influenced concept that denotes the positioning of certain groups of individuals within the process of "letting die" practiced by the neoliberal state (p. 27). Chapter 2 centers on the emotional dimensions of immigrant organizers' resistance to corporatist control mechanisms. It argues that activism for environmental justice plays a significant role in shaping conceptions of the body and influencing textures of emotionality (p. 102). The next chapter draws on Asian and Latin@ women's experiences of marginalization and illness in Los Angeles in order to provide broader understanding of physical and emotional harm as a result of an ongoing history of socioeconomic injustice from a "body-and emotions-centered" perspective: "the immigrant women fighting for cleaner Angeleno air made plain that they were rarely able to take their bodies for granted in the way that privileged 'American' bodies could and did each day" (p. 144).Kim offers an alternative to simplistic approaches to social movements in chapters 4 and 5. The author explores the intersection of transnational grammars of identity—which crucially shape the politics of belonging and help define the "boundaries" of community-making in today's globalized world—and local community organizing. The book's references to the influence of rural Mexican culture on the communal experiences of Latin@ organizations from the south bay area of Los Angeles, for instance, hint at a rich transnational history of environmental justice activism in the United States (pp. 204–5). Chapter 6 builds on the previous two chapters' theme of transnational identities and local activism to suggest that the political views of immigrant women organizers in L.A.'s south bay area are as diverse as anywhere else in the world. Here, it is possible to see not only some of the opposed political stances among the Asian and Latin@ activists but also a few commonalities: "regardless of where the activists stood on the issues, they deemed what they were doing as unequivocally political, even if it was not 'big-P Politics'" (p. 254). The next (and final) chapter delves into the experiences of youth activists who have been directly or indirectly involved with the environmental justice work of their parents, grandparents, and/or community leaders.In the Afterword, Kim—who also aims at expanding the Foucauldian framework of biopower—asserts that "the larger arc of biopower ultimately hurts the privileged despite the interim benefits that accrete to the privileged and their institutions" (p. 312). I wonder how the agency of the non-human environment responded to the actions, and lack thereof, taken by the racial state. Additionally, Refusing Death suggests that "the environment" in Los Angeles has emerged through immigration, neoliberal schemes, as well as the state-led "let die" process. However, as a reader, I am left eager to know more about the influence of transnational knowledge flows on the discourses of immigrant women activists regarding "the environment." Specifically, what does "the environment" mean for Asian and Latin@ women who are fighting for cleaner Angeleno air?Scholars interested in interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary social movements will find Kim's book a valuable addition to the literature. Refusing Death provides an in-depth look at community organizing through which readers can better understand how immigrant women activists have employed their unwavering strength—this instrumental element in their struggle for survival and in their fight for better living conditions for the next generations—and confronted structural power inequities in order to navigate the ever-changing landscape of the second largest urban center in the United States.