Leilani Nishime - Racial Ecologies

Racial Ecologies

EDITED BY

Leilani Nishime and
Kim D. Hester Williams

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

Seattle

Copyright 2018 by the University of Washington Press

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Cover illustration by Christi Belcourt

Lucille Clifton, excerpt from mulberry fields, from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton , ed. Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser. Copyright 2000 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company Inc. on behalf of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

Nathaniel Mackey, excerpts from Song of the Andoumboulou: 33, from Whatsaid Serif . Copyright 2000 by Nathaniel Mackey. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company Inc. on behalf City Lights, www.citylights.com.

giovanni singleton, Day 49, from the collection Ascension (Denver: Counterpath, 2012), reprinted by permission of the author.

CONTENTS

Curtis Marez

Leilani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams

Dian Million

Stephen Nathan Haymes

Min Hyoung Song

Tiffany Lethabo King

Jessi Quizar

Dominique Bourg Hacker

Julie Sze

Erica Tom

Ana Elizabeth Rosas

Zoltn Grossman

Sunny Chan

Catalina Mare de Ons

Ashley Cheyemi McNeil

Yu-Fang Cho

Kim D. Hester Williams

Leilani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams

FOREWORD

RACIAL ECOLOGIES

A View from Ethnic Studies

CURTIS MAREZ

During the historic dot-com bubble, that period of explosive growth and enormous profits in the technology industry that began around 1995 and burst in 2001, I taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, situated between the strawberry fields of Watsonville and Silicon Valley. At a time of shrinking state investments in public education and as part of his aspiration to globalize the humanities, our dean advised faculty to seek patrons by researching and writing hagiographies of the new high-tech elite. By contrast, the working-class students of color in my large undergraduate lecture course on US popular culture pressed me to research the Homies.

The last few decades have witnessed an explosion of collectible plastic figurines for sale, and leading the way have been the Homies, a popular line of small, plastic figurines representing the largely Chicanx inhabitants of an imaginary barrio somewhere near Silicon Valley. These finely detailed and painted figures of various barrio types, with names like Smiley, Shy Girl, and Spooky, were widely sold in gumball machines, at swap meets, on eBay, and on the Homies official website. Each of the almost two hundred figures has a name and a brief biography, and over one hundred million of them have been sold. Their creator, David Gonzales, developed the Homies merchandising empire in his office in Oakland, California, and he has based many of the figures on people from his hometown of San Jose, the diverse metropolis next to Silicon Valley.

The small brown dolls represent suggestive, iconic responses to the Silicon Valley financial bubble and the euphoric fantasies of technological and environmental progress that have accompanied it. The Homies invite us to reconsider the ways in which ideas and fantasies about high tech have emerged from material conditions of production that depend on poisoning people and their environments. Collectively, the figurines make up a particular neighborhood. The Homies universe is a world-building project that indirectly references the toxic forms of segregation and uneven development that have accompanied high-tech industries. Silicon Valley, for example, is characterized by the contrast between the exclusive neighborhoods of the wealthy and the working-class barrios, many situated near Superfund sites created by the high-tech industrys dumping of toxic waste. The Homies thus represent the seeming intractability of spatial segregation, inequality, and environmental racism in Silicon Valley, an interpretation supported by Gonzaless new line of zombie Homies, which suggest the conditions of living death experienced by so many in the area.

As representations of the low-wage workers of color in and around Silicon Valley, the Homies draw attention to the historic toxicities of labor segregation. The dot-com bubble depended on an expansion of low-wage jobs and the employment mainly of migrant women in Silicon Valley, the US-Mexico border region, and other parts of the world, particularly China. Many low-wage jobs in semiconductor factories and other high-tech manufacturing facilities place workers at risk of exposure to highly toxic chemicals. Since the Cold War, high-tech companies in Silicon Valley have been aggressively opposed to organized labor, becoming what David Bacon has called laboratories for developing personnel-management techniques for maintaining a union-free environment. As a result, tech companies in the Valley remain largely nonunionized, and low-paid workers have few options but to accept the risks of illness, disability, and premature death from toxic chemical exposure. As David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park argue in The Silicon Valley of Dreams , these risks extend to the even more precariously situated workers in the periphery jobs in printed circuit board, printer, and cable assembly, including home-based piecework and prison labor, disposable workers performing dangerous tasks.

In response to some of the inequalities in Silicon Valley, low-wage immigrant workers have begun to organize unions and environmental organizations. Examples include the successful organization of janitorial workers at Apple and other companies. Environmental justice organizations, such as the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, have fought to protect workers from exposure to industrial toxins.

In this regard, the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley echoes the agricultural industry it partly succeeded. For those who profit, and for consumers who buy into it, the growth of the Silicon Valley high-tech economy has sustained an optimistic ideology of progress through technology. The promoters of the dot-com bubble projected that the high-tech economy would transcend many of the limitations of the industrial age. Silicon Valley companies claimed that theirs was a clean, postindustrial, post-smokestack enterprise representing progress over not only heavy industry but also the regions agricultural and canning industries. As Pellow and Park point out, however, both farm workers and high-tech workers are vulnerable to toxic chemical exposures. Thus struggles over environmental racism in Silicon Valley share common ground with movements to organize farm workers, particularly the efforts by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, who were also active in support of Silicon Valley janitors.

The Homies would be at home in the pages that follow. Drawing on themes and methods familiar from critical ethnic studies, the contributors to Racial Ecologies persuasively demonstrate that environmental concerns are intertwined with differences of race, indigeneity, class, gender, and nation.