Who killed the Salton Sea?: Settler infrastructures and ecological violence in the Southern Californian Desert

The Salton Sea, Southern California's largest inland lake, is dying. This article moves environmental justice analysis beyond siting and distribution models to show how racialized capitalism is materially inscribed in landscapes over time. I argue that the Sea's ecological crisis was produced by water infrastructures that encoded white supremacy and racialized capitalism into the landscape, concentrating harm in the Cahuilla, Kumeyaay, and Cocopah nations whose territories preceded the modern Sea and the Mexican American communities whose labor made the region's agriculture profitable. Two analytical concepts trace this history. Embeddedness reveals how seemingly technical decisions about water allocation and land use were structured by racial and class hierarchies that determined who bore the costs of development. Sedimented violence traces how those costs accumulated across generations, depositing a stratigraphic record of regulatory choices and industrial activities in the Sea's sediments, local ecologies, and human bodies. Following these processes from the construction of irrigation infrastructures in the early 1900s to contemporary efforts to extract lithium, I demonstrate that each layer of development reproduced the same racial and class logics: invoking a greater public good to justify poisoning the Sea and the communities that surround it.