In her early fifties, Suzie has cropped black hair, a prominent nose, olive skin, and melancholic eyes. Her earrings are shaped like bunches of grapes; beaded bracelets adorn her wrists. She has the air of a guidance counselor from an at-risk high school: deeply empathetic, yet a little wary, too. At the Town & Country Diner, she orders the bacon-and-egg special before saying, more to herself than to me, “Where should I begin?”
Suzie grew up on the west side of Corpus Christi—the part of town where multiple generations gather each Sunday for backyard barbacoa, where sons tinker beneath their trucks while their fathers shout encouragement from the front step, where young moms put on lipstick before pushing strollers down the street, where every taqueria with a hand-painted sign should be frequented. Suzie’s father mostly worked as a construction supervisor, but he also picked up shifts as a security guard at the refineries. When the girls were little, their mom would pack an ice chest full of chicken, rice, and beans, and the family would spread out on a knoll overlooking the industrial park for dinner al fresco. At dusk, the refineries lit up like Christmas—a soft glow of golden lights, the red ones occasionally blinking. Rounding out their neighborhood was a municipal garbage landfill called Greenwood. Though unsightly, it bothered them only when it rained and made the air reek of spoiled eggs. The family would dart about the house sealing windows whenever the sky turned slate, despite the soothing winds.
Suzie fostered two dreams as a child: becoming a nurse and moving to New England (because it sounded regal). She ditched the first plan during her second semester of nursing school when she glimpsed a patient in a hospital bed with a tube stuck up one nostril and bile spilling out the other. That left New England. She married a navy man who promised to take her there. Together, they lived in places like San Diego, Hawaii, and Washington, raising two children along the way. By early 1999, her husband was primed for retirement. They planned to move to Pennsylvania for the millennium.
It happened one morning in February. The kids were late for school. Suzie was watching her son, Jason, tie his shoes when a vision took his place.
“A vision?” I interrupt.
“I don’t know if you believe in this kind of thing,” she says, then hesitates.
“I do,” I say, more forcefully than intended.
She studies me for a moment, then describes how her sister Diana appeared before her, face up and frighteningly still, “as if she were in a casket, but there was no casket.” The image lasted just a second before vanishing. For two weeks, Suzie wondered what to do about it. Then her mother called to say that Diana’s breast cancer had returned. It was now stage 4 and had metastasized to her brain. Diana was forty-two years old.
Suzie had to make a decision. Should she move her family back to Corpus to help her sister through this? Or should they continue on to New England as planned? Her husband was game for either, but Suzie couldn’t shake the feeling that returning to Texas would wreck their marriage. If I move back home, we’ll be over within a year. This haunted her to the core. Twenty years they’d spent together. Twenty years of seizing each new duty station by storm—camping in the Olympic Mountains, visiting Amish markets in Ohio, and, on quiet nights, playing board games with the kids.
Yet home has a gravitational pull like no other. They returned to Corpus in September. Diana died that December, two days before the millennium. Friends descended upon them, rosaries wrapped around their wrists. Aye, so young. You know, my niece has breast cancer too. Neighbors she hadn’t seen in years. My sister died of breast cancer last year. She was even younger than Diana, only thirty-five. Former classmates from Cunningham Middle School. I heard three of your sisters got hysterectomies. Me too, and I’m just thirty-eight. The services blurred into a fog of grief. Remember my little brother? He’s passed. My big brother too. Pues, they had cancer, both of them.
Before departing the funeral home, the family gathered in a huddle. Did anybody notice all that talk of cancer? They had. Someone started compiling a list of the dead. The names quickly filled two pieces of paper. By the time they grabbed a third, they vowed to investigate. First, they ran an ad in the Thrifty Nickel and Adsack, asking Greenwood residents to contact them if anyone in their family had cancer. Within days, they were fielding calls about teenage girls undergoing hysterectomies. The local CBS affiliate noticed their ad as well and rang them for details. Though nervous about public speaking, Suzie agreed to a slot on the evening news. Soon, her telephone was ringing incessantly. Suzie typed up a health survey she found on the Internet, ran off hundreds of copies, and distributed them to her brothers and sisters.1 They fanned out in their old neighborhood, knocking on every door, and returned with stories not only of cancer but of birth defects and immunodeficiency diseases as well. People complained of migraine headaches, asthma attacks, nosebleeds.
Meanwhile, Suzie started researching the history of the area and learned that it used to be littered with oil and gas production companies.2 Pipelines ran right beneath their old neighborhood. She combed through property records. She searched through city planning archives. She flipped through volume upon volume of minutes from meetings of the railroad commission, the city council, and the school board, not even knowing what she was looking for until one afternoon at the Office of Planning Commission when she found the minutes from a 1942 meeting devoted to the topic “What to Do with the Negroes?”
I suck in my breath; Suzie closes her eyes and nods.
Their solution: race-zoning ordinances that placed the city’s African American population in neighborhoods adjacent to the ship channel, right where the refineries were being built. Tejanos, meanwhile, were zoned by some oil waste dumps that had been repurposed as landfills, including the one bordering Suzie’s old neighborhood. Greenwood, it turned out, had been built atop a forty-seven-acre hazardous waste dump. When Suzie and her classmates marched around during band practice after school, they were hovering over covered oil pits.
Although those ordinances have long since been outlawed, many of the families remain. Heavy industry, meanwhile, has proliferated. By the millennium, Corpus Christi was home to six oil refineries plus a slew of chemical manufacturing plants and gas processing units, all located along a fifteen-mile strip called Refinery Row that is surrounded by impoverished neighborhoods of color. These are the borderlines that lurk in every community: class and race.
After city officials dismissed Suzie’s health surveys as “anecdotal evidence,” she plunged into activism full-time. In 2000, the family founded a grassroots organization called Citizens for Environmental Justice (CFEJ), with Suzie as director. Though she’d never received formal training in college, she learned basic toxicology and epidemiology as well as bureaucratic legalese. She typed up reports. Sent out press releases. Conducted community meetings. Organized press conferences. Appeared on television and radio shows.
Meanwhile, her husband struggled to readjust to civilian life. The kids—now grown—were making their own friends and leading their own lives. Nobody needed him anymore. His days stretched like putty. He sulked in the doorway while Suzie pounded on the keyboard.
You’re ignoring me.
What do you mean? I followed you around for twenty years—kept your house, raised your kids. It’s my turn now.
Eventually another woman caught his gaze: twenty-eight years old, with two little ones of her own.
You want another baby? All right. I’ll give you one.
You can’t. You’re all messed up.
Contaminated, he meant, from living so long atop a toxic waste dump. They’d always wanted a third child, but after their son, Suzie had a miscarriage. Then another. Then a third. Then a fourth.
Suzie’s marriage dissolved nearly a year to the day after returning to Corpus. Stirring her cup of diner coffee, she softens her voice. “People often ask if I could do it all over again, would I have moved back? But I already had that choice. And I decided to do it anyway.”
Suzie maintains certain military privileg
es such as health insurance, but she is on her own financially. CFEJ has received a few grants and she’s won some major awards3 over the years, but nothing to subsist on. Office jobs sap too much time; she needs a flexible schedule so she can attend meetings and press functions and rallies and parent-teacher conferences.
“Parent-teacher conferences?” I ask.
“Oh yes. I’m raising one of my daughter’s sons too, so I’m a single mom on top of everything else,” she says, shaking her head. “What can I say? It takes a village.”
Lately, she’s been working at Luby’s, a family-style cafeteria. For $7.25 an hour, she dons a blue uniform, tucks her hair inside a net, and scoops salads and gelatins into a tower of bowls that she proffers one by one to an unceasing line of customers. It can be humbling at times, particularly when she gets yelled at for dropping the occasional bowl, but it allows her time to think.
Suzie feels certain that industrial contamination poisoned her sister. The problem is how to prove it. There are plenty of reports about the high rates of birth defects, cancer, and respiratory illnesses in fence-line communities (that is, neighborhoods bordering heavy industries). The refineries themselves admit to releasing millions of pounds of hazardous air pollutants each year. But there has yet to be a widely accepted scientific study that establishes a direct correlation between the two—and attempts to do so have proven contentious. In 2008, for example, CFEJ helped secure funding for a pilot study by the Texas A&M School of Rural Public Health that discovered blood and urine samples collected from residents living along Refinery Row contained 280 times as much benzene4 as samples from other U.S. residents and 14 times as much benzene as a sample taken from gas station attendees in Mexico. A toxicologist hired by the refinery Flint Hills quickly discounted the study, however, concluding from state data that there was not enough benzene in the air circulating around the refineries to produce such results. After months of getting bombarded by industry personnel questioning the legitimacy of his research, the lead Texas A&M scientist, Dr. KC Donnelly, died of esophageal cancer before he could complete it.5 His colleagues eventually released a new study revising his figures downward (although a quarter of the people tested still recorded elevated benzene levels). A 2011 federal study then showed “normal” levels of benzene in the community.
But while the correlation between refineries and ill health is considered “ambiguous” in Corpus Christi, the connection between refineries and power is not. Citgo alone has a $345 million annual impact on our local economy. Its spokesman recently completed two terms on our city council, and Valero’s senior manager of public affairs got elected in 2014. Flint Hills, meanwhile, is owned by Koch Industries, whose majority stakeholders—Charles and David Koch—have a collective net worth of more than $100 billion and whose political action committee bankrolls scores of ultraconservative campaigns and causes. Koch Industries contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Rick Perry during his fourteen-year reign as Texas governor, as did Valero Energy and other oil and gas companies. Perry in turn repeatedly challenged and even sued federal regulators for trying to enforce the Clean Air Act in Texas and appointed a climate change skeptic to run our state’s chief environmental agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
True, these industries have been fined over the years for violations of various sorts. In 2007, Citgo became the first refinery ever tried and convicted on criminal charges for illegally allowing two huge tanks full of toxic chemicals to vent in the open air for almost a decade. Members of CFEJ and other fence-line residents testified at the hearings, during which prosecutors demanded $2 billion in fines. But when the federal judge finally handed down Citgo’s sentence in 2014—before a crowd of eagerly awaiting fence-line residents, most of whom were minority and many of whom were elderly—he slashed three zeros off that request, fining the multinational corporation only $2 million. And Citgo promptly announced it would appeal.
It didn’t take Suzie long to decide she was better off conducting her own studies. After learning how to monitor air quality herself from a nonprofit group, she loaded up some buckets, air pumps, and collection bags and started driving around Refinery Row at night and on weekends with her sister Cindy, collecting air samples. Every refinery operates a fleet of security guards with whom the sisters quickly got acquainted: practically every other weekend, one pulled them over for interrogation. Reminding themselves that their father once did this work, the sisters answered their questions respectfully. After all, the guards probably lived in the neighborhood, too.
No, sir, we’re not terrorists. We’re activists. We’re here to monitor air quality.
No, sir, we’re not with the TCEQ , but you can give them a call. They know who we are.
In March 2006, Suzie and Cindy piled into their Jeep and spent the afternoon monitoring Citgo, which refines upward of 165,000 barrels of crude oil a day. Suzie hoped to photograph Citgo’s coker unit, which she says releases a cloud of heavy particulates every eleven hours. CFEJ was on the verge of publishing a new report, and she thought a belching coker would make a good cover. Cindy drove slowly down the public road, snapping photos, while Suzie filmed the facility with her camcorder. A few miles into their venture, a security guard from Valero pulled them over. They explained their project, and he permitted passage. Assuming he would notify other guards in the area, they sped on.
Suddenly, the coker unit erupted. A cloud burst into the sky like a demonic firecracker, maybe four stories high. Within seconds, blackness coated the Jeep, reeking of hydrocarbons. Grit swept into the sisters’ eyes, their ears, their noses, their throats, their mouths. Cindy frantically flashed photos while Suzie rolled the camcorder.
Are you getting it, are you getting it?
I got it, I got it.
Lights flashed behind them. Another security guard, this time from Citgo.
Hello, officer. We just got stopped by Valero five min—
Driver’s license?
The port police arrived as the security guard called in the sisters’ information and detained them. While waiting at the station, Cindy started feeling queasy. She wiped particulate matter off her face. Ten minutes passed. She blew particulate matter from her nose. Another ten minutes passed. She coughed particulate matter from her lungs. Ten more minutes passed. Particulate matter churned in her belly. Twenty minutes passed.
At last, Citgo security returned.
Look, you know who I am. We’ve got to go. My sister is sick.
Oh no, you’re not. You ladies are waiting right here.
Detaining us is illegal and you know it. We’re going.
This isn’t over.
Days later, the U.S. Coast Guard gave Suzie a call. Apparently, she had been reported to the National Resource Center for conducting “suspicious activity.” The FBI wished to interview her: when could she come in?
Suzie stares at me, still incredulous years later. “And I said, bullshit. I’m not going anywhere. They need to come to my apartment full of doilies and see I’m just a little old grandma.”
The Coast Guard and FBI arrived on her doorstep, a two-bedroom apartment in a 700-unit complex on the south side of Corpus. She welcomed them in, turned on her tape recorder, and started pulling down the plaques from the walls that recognize her community work. She told them about babies born with holes in their hearts and little girls dying of leukemia. An hour later, they thanked her and left. It seemed prudent to share her side of the story before Citgo beat her to it, so Suzie made a few calls. The front page of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times soon featured her headshot beneath the headline ACTIVIST NO TERROR THREAT, FBI SAYS. Once again, her telephone started ringing. She tried to laugh off the “terrorist” charge, but the headline truly haunted her.
“And those readers’ comments,” Suzie says.
And those readers’ comments. They were vicious: “Suzie is an environmental wacko”; “Suzie Canales has done nothing but bring attention to herself for years. She is using these people f
or her own cause. … I wonder how Suzie changes the color of her hair without chemicals”; “If I had to choose between hydrofluoric acid and Suzie Canales, I’d have to go with the acid because it’s much less corrosive than she is.”
Activism has invigorated Suzie’s life, giving it focus and meaning. Yet she thinks this work might be shortening it, too. She has high blood pressure. Tension ripples through her limbs. Like her brother-in-law Lionel, she sometimes looks in her rearview mirror and swears she is being followed. Infamy might be a blessing in this regard: “I’ve been in the media so much, it would be obvious if something happened to me.”
When I ask how she maintains her fervor, she reflects for a moment before citing her spiritual practice. Prayer has become especially rejuvenating for her. She prays for courage. She prays for endurance. She prays for words. “I don’t see myself as a smart person. I have no degrees, and so often I am arguing with people who have Ph.D.s.”
What Suzie does have is rage. Not just at the refineries but at the government: “They are supposed to be there to protect everybody, and they’re not.”
So when she received an invitation to attend the first-ever White House Forum on Environmental Justice in November 2010, she rejoiced. At last, a chance to hold the truly powerful accountable. Then she read the fine print: no travel assistance provided. She dialed the White House Council on Environmental Quality to explain that, by definition, environmental justice activists are low-income people of color. How did they expect her to fund the trip? If you can’t afford it, you can always watch it on your home computer, via live stream. Suzie resigned to do that—until word leaked out in the local activist community. Someone offered her frequent flyer miles; another pledged to cover her hotel. That December, Suzie took a few days off from Luby’s, arranged childcare for her grandson, and jetted off to Washington.
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