For decades, East Los Angeles had been a community where decisions were made without its residents. Freeways were routed directly through the neighborhood, displacing thousands of families and leaving behind noise and pollution. Dodger Stadium was built without community input, removing an entire neighborhood in the process. Industrial facilities accumulated in and around the area, releasing hazardous chemicals into the air and soil of a predominantly Latino, low-income community. Unwanted projects had a way of finding East Los Angeles, and residents had a way of being told there was nothing they could do about it.
When California announced plans to build a new state prison in Boyle Heights in 1984, a group of women decided that pattern would not continue. Led by founder Juana Gutiérrez and co-founder Aurora Castillo, they began organizing in the basement of a local Catholic church. They named themselves the Mothers of East Los Angeles, or MELA, deliberately centering their identities as mothers and caretakers. Every Monday for months, sometimes hundreds of women marched across the LA River, wearing white scarves and carrying candles. They organized letter-writing campaigns, traveled to Sacramento to lobby state legislators, and built a coalition of 47 civic organizations. The prison was never built.
Before that fight was fully resolved, new threats had already emerged. A company proposed building a hazardous waste incinerator in the adjacent city of Vernon, designed to burn 125,000 pounds of toxic waste daily. State regulators had approved the project without requiring an environmental impact report. MELA joined a lawsuit challenging that approval, organized rallies, distributed bilingual materials throughout the neighborhood, and sustained pressure on the project for six years. In 1991, a California Court of Appeals ruled in the community's favor. The company withdrew rather than continue.
MELA went on to successfully oppose an oil pipeline routed near an elementary school, a path chosen in part because wealthier communities along the original route had resisted it. By the early 1990s, the organization had grown to more than 400 members and had been called on to support similar efforts in other cities and in Baja California, Mexico. Their work helped bring national attention to what advocates were beginning to call environmental racism, the practice of siting industrial hazards disproportionately in low-income communities of color.
