Completing the mural. Photo by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana.

The border between Playas de Tijuana and San Diego. Photo by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana.

Painting the mural. Photo by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana.

The archive, it keeps growing. Another story. This time, Jorge. Yesterday it was Angel, the day before that, Ruben, Andy, Hector, Alex.

I first met Jorge in June 2017, at a Father’s Day celebration at Friendship Park in Playas de Tijuana. We were steps away from the border fence separating Mexico and San Diego’s Border Field State Park. Jorge, who was one of the only young folks there that day, and he reminded me of my younger brother Jose, and my friends back in Compton. Jorge, who was 26 years old, wore a long white t-shirt, high white socks, and baggy khaki shorts. He had a short haircut, tattoos, and a piercing in his ear. He mostly spoke English, and he made American cultural references, quoting artists such as Dr. Dre and Kendrick Lamar. Jorge liked to sing along with Lamar’s “DNA” when he rode in the car. The lyrics—“I was born like this, since one like this… I transform like this, perform like this”—align with his story.

At first, I thought Jorge was just visiting Tijuana. But I was wrong. He was stuck, having been deported there twice. His “crime” was being a “childhood arrival,” brought into the U.S. as an undocumented minor by his mother. It did not matter that Jorge came into the country as an 8-month-old infant and grew up feeling he was an American. Nor did it matter that he didn’t learn he was undocumented until he was 18 years old, nor that he had no family in Mexico. U.S. law would not allow him to go home.

Thousands of others, who were raised in the U.S., and who only know how to move around the world as Americans—who migrated to the U.S. as minors and became cultural and social citizens by learning English, attending American schools, participating in society, and developing a sense of belonging—languish in a similar situation.

When I met Jorge, I began to question why someone who was raised in the same country as me, and who went through the same educational system, was now forced to live abroad. I questioned why I had never heard more stories like Jorge’s back at home. In the U.S., deportation is usually described in numbers or heated rhetoric, and personal stories go untold—as if there is shame surrounding the forced removal of a generation of immigrants we raised.

Javier Salazar. Photo by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana.

I questioned, too, the limits of being a researcher, and felt guilt for not doing more. Perhaps I was motivated by being part of a mixed-immigration status family that is no stranger to deportations. I wanted to be a vocera, an advocate. I wanted to force audiences to engage with the stories I was hearing.

Bearing witness to the human impact of deportation became a starting point for the Playas de Tijuana Mural project, which I launched in August of 2019 and concluded in July 2021. Located on the westernmost point of the Mexican side of the border, at the edge of the Pacific where Playas de Tijuana meets San Diego, the mural stretches 150 feet long and 20 feet high. Its 15 grayscale portraits are made out of cloth, and were painted in an art studio and a migrant shelter before being cut up into strips and glued directly onto the border fence. The mural is interactive: viewers can point their phones at QR codes located next to each portrait to access YouTube videos of audiovisual stories put together by the migrants themselves, part of the Humanizing Deportation and DACAmented: DREAMs Without Borders digital storytelling projects.

The backdrop baby-blue paint blends into the sky, and creates the illusion of erasing the border. It highlights the faces on the mural and the human stories they tell, upstaging the border fence itself. Depending where a visitor stands, they will see a version of the mural unique to their perspective. The mural becomes metaphor: Throughout life, we choose how to read and see the stories that are presented to us, and the process can change our perceptions.

Chris Cuauhtli. Photo by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana.

For many U.S. childhood arrivals, the border fence is a constant reminder of their exile from their families and a country that helped shape their identity. Such is the case for Chris Cuauhtli, a mural subject who was born in Tamazula, Jalisco, illegally adopted by U.S. citizens at the age of 3, and raised in Sacramento. His adoptive parents never legalized his immigration status, and he was deported in 2019. Chris is now an English teacher, translator, and tattoo artist in Tijuana. Isaac, who was born in Oaxaca, and raised in the San Diego metropolitan area, was pulled over at an immigration checkpoint. He was a student with no criminal record, but he was arrested and deported anyway, the border patrol agent commenting, “Congratulations! You are the first person we get for the month of June.” Alex Murillo, a U.S. Navy veteran and U.S. childhood arrival, questions, “Why was I good enough to fight and die for America but I’m not good enough to live there?” Immigrant veterans hold permanent resident status and thus are eligible to enlist in the military, but receive no special consideration in deportation proceedings. Outrageously, the most accessible way for deported veterans to return to the U.S. is by dying. It is only then that they are repatriated for their military funeral, and buried with honors.

In putting the project together, I wanted to change the way we consider art-making. It was vital for the storytellers to paint their own portraits. Instead of producing the mural himself, the lead artist, Mauro Carrera, provided tools for the storytellers to become artists. Together, the storytellers, volunteers, Carrera and myself drew the portraits—using a projector and Sharpies we traced photographs of each storyteller onto cloth. We then painted each face using gray tones we mixed ourselves. Through this method, the storytellers got to control how they would be seen and understood by others, creating a counter-narrative to the media and political rhetoric that prevails on the other side of the border.

Alex Murillo. Photo by Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana.

At the border mural, two-way conversation is key. Deported people get to inform our understanding of deportation, a reciprocity not afforded to them by the law enforcement system, and the staunch border fence erected in its name. Throughout the project, there is a spark of resistance, of reclaiming the barrier that continues to inflict violence on the storytellers. Because of the mural, Javier Salazar feels others care about him and is no longer alone in fighting for his return home. Daniel Ruiz feels empowered to continue sharing his story because he knows others are willing to listen. José Avila, who was deported to Tijuana in 2021, shares appreciation for finding a community through the project—a group of folks who provide support upon arrival in Tijuana, helping U.S. childhood arrivals adapt to Mexican society, culture, and bureaucratic processes.

Research demonstrates that most Americans support the legalization of immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. But the various proposals to benefit the approximately 800,000 childhood arrivals—legislative efforts such as Deferred Action and Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Actcontinue to fall short. DACA and the DREAM Act, while seeking to protect a selective group of immigrants, set eligibility guidelines that creates a deportable class of childhood arrivals excluded from legal protection.

So far, the mural has withstood weathering and some vandalism. As long as it stands, it will invite visitors to inquire about the 15 faces on its surface. Viewers, who perhaps only engaged with this ongoing American sin in a superficial way, can begin to understand the circumstances that led a generation of immigrants, as American as any of us, to be banished to a country they don’t recognize.

My intention is for people to leave the space not able to unsee or unhear the stories, and unable but to learn more. The simple act of scanning a QR code can fold any viewer into the conversation, presenting the option to become an advocate or a perpetrator. The storytellers talk, and the visitors ask: Which am I?

Which are you?

The post Looking Deportation in the Face appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 1979, the year of Three Mile Island, I exposed another nuclear accident—another partial meltdown—in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. It occurred at the Santa Susana Field Lab, a reactor and rocket-testing facility in the mountains between the San Fernando and Simi Valleys.

Back then, the story was both news and history. The Field Lab opened in 1947, at the onset of the Cold War, and the reactor accident happened in 1959. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and a nuclear contractor kept it secret for 20 years, but there was no denying the evidence we revealed on local TV, discovered in AEC archives by the watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap.

Today, that accident is still news, as Gov. Gavin Newsom appears to be backing away from enforcing a cleanup of nuclear contamination that remains on the site. Sixty-three years since the accident, Santa Susana should remind us of the perils not only of nuclear materials but also of our short memories. This story’s hardest lesson is that when dangerous secrets get buried you often have to keep excavating them, over and over.

In 1979, we showed pictures of broken fuel rods on the bottom of the reactor core.  Documents reported that the heat measured 1465 degrees Fahrenheit and was thought to be even higher. Splitting uranium atoms had melted both the fuel and the metal cladding, and highly radioactive gases were being released. It was an accident that wasn’t supposed to happen, and it continued for 10 days until engineers finally shut the reactor down. New equipment, including special cameras had to be developed to remove the melted fuel, and the video has been used to train nuclear plant operators for the future.

But, despite our revelations, the secrecy and denial continued. I was allowed onto the site and given a tour of the reactor building, which was being torn down. But when I asked about radioactive emissions, an executive for the Rocketdyne subsidiary Atomics International told me, on camera: “The potential hazard of major release into the environment was just not there.”

That was a flat out lie.

The Field Lab’s experimental reactor had no containment structure like the big domes at Three Mile Island. While it was out of control, radiation levels went off the scale and doors had to be opened for worker protection. Clouds of highly radioactive gases and particulates were released.

There were also three other accidents at the Field Lab’s 10 nuclear reactors. In addition, the Field Lab conducted some 30,000 tests of rockets for NASA and for military ballistic missiles before it closed down in 2006. Throughout the period, operators illegally burned radioactive waste and toxic rocket-fuel in open-air pits.

Over the years, residential development moved closer to the Field Lab, but no one ever told the public about the release of radioactive contamination which would remain dangerous for thousands of years. In 1989, a local newspaper reported on secret government studies showing extensive contamination at the site. That drew attention from unsuspecting homeowners, and a community group called the Rocketdyne Cleanup Coalition sprang up to oppose re-licensing of site facilities. Nuclear operations at Santa Susana finally halted in 1990.

But there was still no cleanup—even after UCLA’s School of Public Health, in 1997, found increased death rates of Field Lab workers due to radiosensitive cancers. Federally funded studies in 2006 and 2007 showed migration of contaminants into surrounding neighborhoods and an elevated incidence of key cancers in the community.

In 2007 and 2010, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office of Environmental Protection (CalEPA) negotiated agreements with NASA, the Department of Energy, and Boeing (which had bought Rocketdyne and inherited its liabilities) to conduct a full cleanup. The deadline for completion was 2017, during Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration. But there was still no cleanup, and remediation still hasn’t started—even though the federal Environmental Protection Agency reported widespread nuclear contamination in 2012.

Today, despite the agreements they entered into, NASA, the DOE, and Boeing have failed to carry them out, contending there’s little danger and claiming that full cleanup is too complex and expensive. But community outrage is building.

In 2014 four-year-old Grace Bumstead of West Hills, a neighborhood close to the Field Lab, developed a rare and aggressive form of leukemia. At Children’s Hospital, her mother, Melissa, met other parents whose children had rare cancers, too. Some of their kids died; the survivors will have health problems for the rest of their lives.

When the parents compared notes, it turned out that several of the pediatric cancer patients lived in the vicinity of the Field Lab, and since then more cases have emerged in the area. There are 14 with brain cancer in Simi Valley alone. Melissa Bumstead told me: “We kept meeting other families who lived near us and because childhood cancers are so incredibly rare, statistically, that’s not supposed to happen… so we started to wonder if there could be an environmental connection. That was actually the first time that I had heard of the Santa Susana Field Lab.”

How solid is the connection? Of course, it can’t be proven that a particular cancer came from the Field Lab, but the cancer-causing radioactivity and toxic chemicals that will continue to migrate off site are clearly a risk until it’s finally cleaned up.

Dan Hirsch heads the Committee to Bridge the Gap, which found the evidence of the meltdown in 1979.  Now retired as director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at UC Santa Cruz, he is co-chair of the Santa Susana Field Lab Oversight Panel established by the state Legislature. He dug into risk assessments at the site submitted to the state by Boeing, which is now lobbying for a more limited cleanup than required by the agreements it signed on to.

Buried deep in more than 1000 pages, are estimates of contamination that L.A. County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl found “very disturbing.” She wrote to the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), citing Boeing’s own estimate that, “The risk after such proposed minimal cleanup would remain so high that every fifth person would most likely get cancer from the remaining contamination.” Kuehl calls that “mind-boggling” when “site cleanups generally aim for one in a million.” She concedes that no one would be living on the site but, “Our constituents live nearby where they can also be exposed.”

When Grace Bumstead developed leukemia a second time in 2017, she required a bone marrow transplant. Her mother Melissa organized Parents Against the Santa Susana Field Lab, started circulating a petition demanding enforcement of the cleanup agreement, and began tirelessly lobbying agencies at the local, state and federal levels.

In 2018, there was a new motivator of public outrage: the massive Woolsey Fire, which started 1000 yards from where the Field Lab reactor suffered the partial meltdown and which spread over 96,000 acres. The state agency responsible for enforcing the cleanup agreement, CalEPA’s DTSC, at first denied that the fire spread any nuclear fallout. But peer-reviewed scientific data later revealed that houses in Thousand Oaks and other cities were dusted by the Field Lab’s radioactive contamination in the smoke of the Woolsey Fire.

By 2020, Bumstead’s effort seemed to be bearing fruit. Jared Blumenfeld, Newsom’s CalEPA Secretary, talked tough in a speech to the Santa Susana Work Group, created in 1990 for state agencies to report to the public about the Field Lab. Blumenfeld deplored the delay in enforcing the cleanup, said Governor Newsom was “focused on action,” and that the DTSC would not give an inch when it came to holding polluters responsible for making things right. “Our job is to regulate, not to negotiate,” he said.

So what happened next?  Last year, DTSC did almost the exact opposite, making an explicit “offer to enter into nonbinding confidential mediation with Boeing” [italics mine]. The mayors of four cities, supervisors from both Los Angeles and Ventura counties, four members of Congress and U.S. Senator Alex Padilla have all since written to CalEPA Secretary Blumenfeld, advocating vigorous enforcement of the cleanup and asking why it’s still being delayed.

Why, when so many secrets have spilled out since 1979, when health risks appear so obvious—when Blumenfeld has spoken so strongly—would his DTSC defy its own legal enforcement obligations?

Blumenfeld has not returned calls from reporters. Hirsch chalks it up to “regulatory capture,” a situation that’s all too common, when agencies advance the interests of commercial enterprises instead of regulating them in the public’s interest.

More than 700,000 people now live within 10 miles of the Lab. This year Gov. Newsom will be up for re-election. Will his administration renew the commitment to enforce the cleanup? Or, will there be a deal that lets Boeing, NASA and DOE walk away from what Blumenfeld called their “legally binding” agreements to remove a continuing threat to public health and safety?

In the meantime, around Santa Susana, the pollution remains, and the human suffering continues. MSNBC recently aired In the Dark of the Valley, an extensive documentary about the Field Lab accident and the consequences for the Bumsteads and other families. Ever since, Bumstead says she’s been “flooded with messages about whole families who had cancer growing up here, and they thought it was just their family.”

Her petition has gone nationwide, and the number of signatures is now more than 750,000.

The post Why Is the Santa Susana Nuclear Accident Still Being Covered Up? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Mellon Foundation has awarded grants since 1969 to support a variety of initiatives centered on strengthening the humanities, arts and higher education. This grant, from the foundation’s Humanities in Place program, is its first to Zócalo.

“This project is a major opportunity for Zócalo and Arizona State University to support our communities in facilitating a discussion that explores the problems of the past, and their legacies in the present, to create transformative change,” said Mi-Ai Parrish, managing director of ASU Media Enterprise.

From October 2021 to September 2023, Zócalo will publish original, multidisciplinary works including essays, photography, illustrations, and poetry. Participants will include scholars, artists, and others whose personal histories intersect with the question; the project also will highlight creators from a range of underrepresented groups. By providing a kaleidoscopic view of how America has remembered its sins, the project aims to reimagine the subject’s future.

“For 18 years, Zócalo Public Square has dared to ask provocative questions that make people stop, think, and come together. With this funding, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is enabling Zócalo to challenge our audiences and our contributors to explore the difficult work of remembrance and reconciliation at the community and the national level—with a sense of hope and healing,” said Moira Shourie, executive director of Zócalo.

The grant also supports a four-part event series featuring top scholars and practitioners in the field of public memory and monuments convening to discuss their work and perspectives. Two events will be presented live in Los Angeles, followed by two events in historically significant locations, and all will be accessible in an interactive format for virtual audiences.

The post Zócalo Receives Major Grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.