Curiosity taught Olga Bautista about the “big piles of black stuff” in Southeast Chicago; Justice pushed her to act.
When she was growing up, Olga Bautista was one of those curious kids who would always ask, “but why?” She wanted to understand the world around her—why things were the way they were in her neighborhood on the Southeast Side of Chicago. Olga, now a mother of two, sits with me in the kitchen of her home, just a few blocks from the home in which she grew up. We drink canela tea and talk about community organizing, systemic injustice, and motherhood.
There had always been big black piles of black stuff around Olga’s neighborhood. When she was growing up, the piles that dotted the Southeast Side had consisted mostly of coal. This changed in the early 2000s as the US began refining oil from the Alberta Tar Sands. Tar sands oil is heavy, and the process of refining it leaves behind large volumes of a byproduct called petroleum coke, or petcoke for short. When BP upgraded its Whiting, Indiana refinery to process tar sands, petcoke began making its way into Chicago’s Southeast Side in unprecedented quantities. It was mostly stored by KCBX Terminals, a subsidiary of Koch Industries. To residents such as Olga, nothing had changed at first. The piles of petcoke didn’t look very different from the coal piles that had always been there.
However, petcoke is much finer than coal, and it can easily be picked up by the wind. If inhaled, it can severely harm the heart and lungs. These effects are well documented—so much so that many states, including Indiana, do not allow companies to store petcoke if it is not covered. Since Illinois was not one of those states, KCBX began storing petcoke on the Southeast Side of Chicago, just 5 miles away from the BP refinery. The storage facilities were completely uncovered.
This is how petcoke spread across Southeast Side neighborhoods, blanketing lawns and lodging into the lungs of local residents, who, as a result, exhibited unusually high rates of asthma. It did not help that petcoke storage facilities were located dangerously close to homes, schools, and busy streets.
Olga organized her community to fight back. She was a founding member of the Southeast Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke, which lobbied elected officials, organized town halls and direct actions, and educated Southeast Side residents about the health effects of petcoke. The battle to get rid of petcoke was hard and long—one in which city officials consistently broke their promises to Southeast Side Residents. Olga remembers how frustrated she felt when, even after showing elected officials the data on petcoke pollution, nobody seemed to care. Indeed, it took years for the city to finally act, and even then it did not do enough. In 2014, City Council passed an ordinance to limit the amount of petcoke that could be stored.
But, just as the City began taking petcoke seriously, EPA air monitors detected dangerously high levels of manganese. Unlike petcoke, which primarily affects the respiratory system, manganese is a neurotoxin that affects the brain. If too much manganese makes its way into the human body, it can cause neurodegenerative damage, decrease learning capacities, and change behavior. The manganese picked up by the air monitors came primarily from a handling facility on the Southeast Side owned by S.H. Bell, the same company responsible for manganese pollution in East Liverpool, Ohio, where a University of Cincinnati study concluded that “increased [manganese] in hair samples was significantly associated with declines in full-scale IQ, processing speed and working memory.”
Once again, Olga mobilized her community, which began to fight back against the companies that were making their neighborhood a toxic dumping site. They confronted the City of Chicago, which had once again failed to keep their community safe. A few months ago, another chemical handling company announced that it would stop storing manganese on the South Side. I smiled, thinking of this as a victory, but Olga tells me that experience has taught her not to trust this type of news. Whatever volume of manganese this facility stops storing will probably just be absorbed by other facilities. She has been organizing around these issues long enough to know not to be too optimistic.
Indeed, Olga’s organizing experience started long before she confronted corporations on environmental issues. Years earlier, when she was pregnant with her first daughter, she helped mobilize her immigrant community against the Sensenbrenner Bill. This bill would have criminalized aid to undocumented immigrants, so that anyone who willingly helped an undocumented person stay in the U.S. would potentially face prison time. Olga feared that this would affect her family. So, along with other community leaders, she worked tirelessly for two weeks to try to get people from her community to show up to the upcoming immigrant’s march in downtown Chicago. In just two weeks, they managed to get enough people to fill 60 buses. These supporters joined a crowd of nearly 100,000 people on March 10th, 2006. However, Olga says it was not until after the march, when they organized a follow-up meeting, that she realized this was a movement. They marched again on May 1st, as part of the nationwide “Day Without Immigrants.” Furthermore, even before working on immigration issues, Olga had been a part of the Death Row 10 campaign, which sought to abolish the death penalty in Illinois, where several death row inmates had been wrongfully convicted based on false confessions given while they were tortured by former Chicago Police Commander John Burge.
I ask her how these earlier political experiences influenced how she organized around environmental justice issues. After all, she’d had a fairly successful start to her activist career; The Sensenbrenner bill had not passed, and many of Illinois’ Death Row inmates had had their sentences commuted. She begins by telling me that, “it wasn’t perfect. It was really messy.” Not everybody stayed in the movement. This taught her that you have to be patient and meet people where they are—you have to understand where people are coming from, and connect with them in real life rather than just on social media. If you are there for people, they are more likely to get invested in the work. These experiences also allowed her to develop a clear theory of power. As she continued organizing and working around immigration issues, criminal justice, and, later, environmental justice, she realized that these issues are interconnected.
Finally, Olga has learned that political movements are far from perfect. She jokingly tells me that she feels like every time she is part of a big movement, she’s pregnant. As she has learned, pregnancy and motherhood are not always easily amenable to activist spaces dominated by men. But Olga is the type of person that creates the change she wants to see. Realizing that movement spaces need to change, she decided to co-found an organization to teach young girls about activism and social justice called the Rebel Bells.
To learn more about her work, follow Olga on Twitter @obauti