| 06 April 2010
Artists. Innovators. Advocates. Grassroots Warriors. These are the new brown faces of the green movement. During a time when environmental issues are still not viewed as a priority for people of color, this group of fearless Latino leaders from across the country and representing various sectors, are proof that we not only get the message, we're leading the way.
From mobilizing Latino communities through grassroots efforts to pioneering new solutions for energy storage to raising awareness through art installations in the Earth's polar caps, these activists are channeling their talents into making our home planet a better place for all of us.
THE WARRIOR
“I want to leave this city with a black eye – and a handshake,” says Kimberly Wasserman, executive director of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization. “To show that you can’t mess with us anymore, but we’re also willing to work together.”
The 34-year-old Chicana mother of three, with her shiny black bob and eight tattoos, has never been one to back down from a worthwhile pleito.
Sitting in the colorful and cozy basement offices of her not-for-profit organization, the daughter of Mexican activists recalls staging her first sit-in in the seventh grade; being thrown out of history class in high school after disagreeing with the teacher’s rendition of American history; and writing her college entrance exam on how healthcare under communism worked better than it did in the United States. “It was just embedded in me,” she says.
She has channeled this same spirit into her current role at the Little Village group, the only Latino-based environmental advocacy organization in Illinois and one of a few nationwide. The group seeks to help the predominantly Mexican-American residents of Little Village and Pilsen in the fight for environmental and social equity by helping them see how environmental circumstances affect their daily lives, she says.
“The environment hasn’t really been looked at as a social justice issue until recently,” Wasserman says. “For us, it’s been a question of making that direct link. Your kid has asthma because of the air pollution, so you had to miss work. A lot of the struggles [our communities] are dealing with is tied to the environment.”
Although low-income communities and developing countries typically contribute the least amount to global warming, they often bear the brunt of the consequences. “That above all else is the biggest injustice,” she says.
Since it was established in 1997, the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, with its staff of six, has used grassroots tactics to mobilize the community in several crucial campaigns at both local and national levels.
It has campaigned for the creation of more green spaces in the densely populated area (one park serves 108,000 residents) and the cleanup of hundreds of homes contaminated by local power plants, as well as encouraged urban agriculture. “We feel it’s our right to have access to clean air, land and water, regardless of race, language or immigration status,” she says.
Unlike mainstream environmental groups that claim to speak for minority communities, Wasserman’s group empowers residents to speak for themselves. “Our primary goal is leadership development. We feel the community understands the problems and has the ability to solve a lot of these problems themselves,” she says. “We represent ourselves.”
In its 10-year history, the group has already yielded real results. Their lobbying resulted in the Environmental Protection Agency ordering the cleanup of 177 homes near the 24-acre Celotex toxic waste site that was contaminated by cancer-causing polyaromatic hydrocarbons. The group also lobbied for and was awarded a new bus line on 31st Street once city funds are available.
These triumphs against seemingly insurmountable obstacles highlight what a community can accomplish when it taps into its own power, Wasserman says.
“This is a movement that’s needed. The days of rolling over and taking it are done,” she says. “We need to ask ourselves, do we want this? Is this healthy for us? The environment isn’t just for tree huggers anymore.”
Marisol Becerra, 20, met Wasserman while taking a community tour organized by the Little Village organization seven years ago.
The young Chicana already serves as the Little Village group’s board chair and is pursuing an undergraduate degree in public policy studies at DePaul University. “Kimberly is more than just a mentor, she's like an older sister for me,” Becerra says. “Kimberly saw me grow from an adolescent to an adult within the environmental justice movement.” She says Wasserman’s dedication to environmental justice influenced her to follow suit and study environmental policy.
Becerra says her mentor’s leadership stems from Wasserman’s commitment to empowering the community to be their own best advocates.“She speaks the reality that communities like ours face every day,” she says. “Kimberly shares knowledge and helps train community members into leaders.”
“We are amazing women, and we have a legacy,” Wasserman says. “We come from a long history of warriors.”
THE REFORMIST
Growing up in lush, tropical Puerto Rico, where mango trees and chatty coquis dot the landscape, Rosalinda Sanquiche was exposed at a young age to a wild abundance of nature.
Most Fridays after school, her family would pack up some clothes, food and necessities and spend the weekend at the family property, which happened to be adjacent to the El Yunque national rainforest. “I had the good fortune of playing in the river, hiking up the mountains, picking fruits off the trees and verduras off the ground,” she says. “It just was. I never even saw it as something that I needed to protect. It wasn’t until much later that I came to the idea that not everyone has this.”
Sanquiche – who lived with her grandparents in Puerto Rico until moving to the United States to be with her mother in second grade – acquired not only an appreciation of nature, but a sense of frugality and simplicity. “They were really wise in how they used things, reused things, how they never wasted anything,” she said of her grandparents. “That was just how we lived.”
Her move to the United States opened her eyes to a different lifestyle, one rooted in consumerism. “I saw a lot of waste all around me. But I was still connected to those values, still thought of the land as something that you took care of and it would take care of you,” she says.
After Sanquiche’s mother married a military man, the family moved all over the country, hopping from Georgia to Tennessee to California. As an undergraduate student at the University of Alabama, she graduated with three majors: history, political science and Spanish.
Purely by chance, she says, she stumbled on the notion that you could get a degree in environmental policy. “I thought, wow, they give out degrees in this lifestyle that I do naturally, that was organic to me. I was also looking around and saw that most people didn’t do this naturally. I wanted to be able to convey that message, to help others get it.”
Sanquiche, now 42, eventually would graduate from George Washington University with a master’s degree in environmental and resource policy. With the value of hard work ingrained in her from an early age, she worked her way through graduate school, conducting research for the American Wind Energy Association.
After graduation, she landed an internship with the state of North Carolina working with agricultural permits. She later worked with the non-profit organization Ipas on population issues, specifically looking at reproductive health in developing countries. Eventually, she moved to St. Augustine, Fla., to work for the North Florida Land Trust and teach ecology classes on how policy issues directly impact the environment in Florida and Belize.
While sitting in on a friend’s lecture on environmental policy, economist Hazel Henderson, founder of Ethical Markets Media, gave a powerful presentation on using financial sustainability and investing money to yield the greatest results for the “triple bottom line” of people, planet and profits. “It totally aligned with what I’ve always thought about the environment,” says Sanquiche, who had studied Henderson’s policies in graduate school.
“I love the environment, but really I’m more interested in protecting it because I think humanity would suffer without it. That’s very much how Ethical Markets approaches things,” she adds. “How can we make financial markets ethical for humanity?”
A couple of months after that lecture, Sanquiche joined Ethical Markets, an independent media company based in Florida that covers the emergence of a sustainable, green, more just and ethical economy worldwide. Henderson hired her as an executive assistant with the aim of grooming her to take over as executive director.
As the current executive director, Sanquiche leads Ethical Markets’ push for global financial reform by demonstrating that capitalism and sustainability are not mutually exclusive. Sanquiche says she looks forward to a future when investors demand that their money be used in a way that’s both profitable and environmentally and ethically sound.
“I want to be able to communicate to people that this is possible,” she says. “I want to convey the idea that there is enough for all of us and we can make a living, and we can support our children and be educated and live comfortable lives, while simultaneously saying we can do this without irreparably damaging the world.”
Melanie Feliciano, Ethical Markets’ director of communications, says part of Sanquiche’s talent lies in her ability to connect with other Latinos on a “person-to-person” basis. “While mass media covets eyeballs and uses generalizations of populations to convey watered-down messages, Rosalinda has learned from Hazel that the best way to make authentic connections with human beings is face-to-face over a cup of cafe con leche,” Feliciano says.
Although Sanquiche focuses her work on macro-scale, international financial markets, she says she is “regularly frustrated” by how much this issue does not seem to resonate with the Latino community in the United States. “For many reasons, we should be highly in tune to these environmental issues, but at the same time, a part of me really understands [why we’re not].
“We’re spending a lot of time just making ends meet. It’s almost as if we’re still trapped in the idea that being an environmentalist is for someone else, someone who has the time, has the money,” she says. “Our issue is getting the car out of the shop, or figuring out how we can fit one more person in the house.”
How can we combat this attitude? For Sanquiche, it requires a shift in mindset. “As a society – not just Latinos – we need to change our mindset that it’s not all about the things we have, its about the quality of life that we experience.When we can look at the quality of life and recognize that the environment is part of it, maybe there could be some change.”
THE ENTREPRENEUR
The impetus behind the launch of Colorado-based Ice Energy in January 2003 would seem almost obvious if it wasn’t so groundbreaking.
The company is focused on providing energy storage, previously a critical missing piece of the nation’s energy policy. Through its technology, Ice Energy aims for efficiency in how Americans use energy resources and, in the process, generating wealth for consumers and mitigating the impact of carbon emissions, says co-founder and CEO Frank Ramirez.
“What we have is a transformational energy storage solution that uses energy at night to create a block of ice in an insulated tank and during the day, we use that energy in the ice to provide cooling to [a] building,” Ramirez, 56, explains. “This process is extremely beneficial because the energy system generally operates very inefficiently during the hottest parts of the day.”
Air conditioning represents 50 percent of the heat demand for energy. This energy storage solution provides an alternative to the highly polluting power plants that support air conditioning. The founders of the company all previously worked in some capacity within the energy market, and had an “acute understanding” of what was missing from the nation’s energy policy – storage, says Ramirez.
“We store water in reservoirs, we store grain in large silos, we store natural gas and oil in strategic reserves,” he says. “We use storage in our lives every day because if we don’t, we suffer the consequences of very high prices when there is a short-term shortage.”
But because of the nature of electricity, which demands that it be generated when you need it and once it is generated, it must be immediately consumed, the energy industry did not have such a solution available until the launch of Ice Energy. “The lack of storage in the energy industry creates very large inefficiencies and also increases in an unjust manner the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that would otherwise be generated,” he says. “We saw this as a huge opportunity to both create efficiency and increase reliability, which is good for people and good for the planet.”
Ice Energy has developed sponsorships with governmental and regulatory bodies and has done a fair amount of lobbying in Congress. It has also been trying to demonstrate storage benefits with the utilities industry: Ice Energy has two dozen pilot programs throughout the United States. In January, the company announced a large energy storage contract with the Southern California Public Power Authority.
Under the Obama administration, the nation seems to have cemented its commitment to curbing oil dependence by encouraging the use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. “But the problem with renewable sources is that you can’t count on them,” he says. “If you are counting on the wind, and the wind stops, what do you do? If you are relying on solar power and clouds cover the sun, what do you do? What you need is storage. The storage is the missing leg on the horse in the nation’s energy policy.”
When asked whether energy storage is something that would be compelling to the Latino community, the first-generation Mexican-American pauses for a minute. “The key lies in demonstrating to this community how energy efficiency is a powerful enabler of their goals and aspirations,” Ramirez says.
“We care about health. We’re interested in clean air. We’re interested in using our resources in the most efficient way so that our money can be used to educate our children and feed our families,” he says. “If we end up in a position where we are paying too much for energy, it impairs our abilities to do those things that we care the most about: educating our children, feeding our families and growing community.”
The former attorney turned financial wizard left a thriving career in finance to tackle the brave new world of energy efficiencies partly because of the values his mother modeled as he grew up in a Roman Catholic, blue-collar community in Pueblo, Colo.
“We were very poor but we didn’t know that we were poor because my mother filled the home with music and love,” he says. “And she taught us, through her behavior, to be thankful for what little we had and to always understand that there were others who had less. And therefore, we had a responsibility to share with our brothers and sisters and pull them up.”
These lessons guided Ramirez when he got to a crossroads in his career. “I asked myself, what do I want my legacy to be?” he says. “For me, it appeared that the greatest area where efficiency could be created is in the energy market. It helps us to use what we have better, more responsibly, and in the process, puts more money in our pockets and helps to clean up our air.”
Victor Arias Jr., senior client partner with Korn/Ferry International, has known Ramirez for more than 25 years, back when the two budding entrepreneurs were business school classmates at Stanford University. Even then, Arias says Ramirez’s unwavering sense of integrity impressed him.
“Frank is a leader on any front,” Arias says. “By definition, whatever he starts or manages will be at the front. The reasons for this is his commitment to the values of trust and integrity.”
The road so far has been rough, but just like his ever-optimistic mother, Ramirez sees a bright future ahead. “Change is hard. And getting people to change the way they think about things is difficult,” he concedes. “But I envision a day … when energy storage will be as commonplace as our refrigerators for storing food.”
THE ECO-ARTIST
The son of Cuban exiles, Miami “eco-artist” Xavier Cortada blurs the line between art and activism.
Surrounded by the beauty of the Florida Keys and Everglades, Cortada, 45, recalls being as fascinated by their splendor as he was by the art world. “As a kid from an exile immigrant family, the thing that grounded you was nature,” he says. “The same way my family shared stories about family members, they shared stories about floral and fauna in the homeland.”
The family also passed down an appreciation for the arts. “Art is something that has always been intuitive and natural to me," he says, recalling a colorful childhood rich with festivals, dances and theater.
Still, it would not be until much later that Cortada would merge his two passions – art and nature – into a career as an artist/activist. While attending the University of Miami, he would switch majors countless times, from biology to English to religion, only to end up going to law school (never mind all those law school notebooks covered in doodles).
The man with the mind of a scientist and soul of an artist would shelve both passions to work as a community organizer around social justice issues. Later, he was invited to join the University of Miami faculty and would travel Latin America and Africa lecturing on community organizing. It was while visiting South Africa that he would find his calling.
“The kids couldn’t speak Spanish or English, so I started using art as a visual aid to communicate,” Cortada says. “That’s when I realized that art is a really powerful tool as this universal language. It allowed me to engage people to effectuate social change.”
These days, he is part of a small but growing wave of artists who identify themselves as eco-artists and use their work to raise awareness and urge the global community to take action.
Cortada has recently garnered a lot of buzz for his art installations at the North and South poles as an attempt to generate awareness about global climate change. In 2008, he planted a green flag at the North Pole to “reclaim it for nature” while protesting global deforestation by encouraging people to plant a native tree next to a green flag at home. The symbolism behind the “Native Flags” installation is powerful, says Cortada. “You are taking this thing used to conquer and appropriating this symbol of political power and using it to give voice to the most powerless, fragile of species.”
Through his “Longitudinal Installation” in 2007, Xavier placed 24 pairs of shoes in a circle around the North and South poles, each pair representing a person living in a different part of the world affected by global climate change. The shoes were placed next to each other in their respective longitudes as a proxy for people in the world below in an attempt to “diminish the distance” between the people.
“The message is that we are all responsible. We are all stewards of this planet. To assume the problem is too big for an individual is the wrong assumption,” he says. “I create installations that make you look at the problem in a global way.”
Back in the States, Cortada is showcasing another installation, “Endangered World,” at the Biscayne National Park in Florida. The installation consists of 360 brightly colored flags – each representing one degree of the planet’s longitude. And once again, there’s the community action part: As part of the art project, individuals and organizations have adopted an endangered or threatened animal that lives at that longitude and paint an image of that animal on one of the flags. At the same time, the participants pledged to take an “eco-action” that would somehow help that endangered animal.
The kind of activism exemplified in Cortada’s body of work has a long rich history in art, says Dr. Mary Jo Aagerstoun, art historian and president of the South Florida Environmental Arts Project who is working closely with Cortada on the installation. Although the art world currently rejects art that engages the community in a very direct, interventional way as “real art,” Aagerstoun says the opposite is true.
“Art really is a part of life,” she says. “It shouldn’t be hidden away in white galleries and dead museums. It’s alive and active. I certainly think Xavier’s [work] is a good example of that.”
THE ADVOCATE
An impulse decision to ride his bike from his Little Village home to his job at the Logan Square YMCA three years ago vaulted Adolfo Hernandez, 28, into an unexpected career path as an environmental activist.
A board member of the Active Transportation Alliance – formerly the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation – noticed that the young Mexican-American always rode his bike to work and approached him about a volunteer project. The project would have Hernandez reach out to Latino families in Logan Square about the benefits of walking or riding their bikes instead of driving.
Hernandez is now director of advocacy for the alliance, a Chicago not-for-profit organization that promotes better conditions for bicycling, walking and transit to help people shift to healthier transportation means. He works on campaigns at the county, city and neighborhoods levels, with a special focus on often underserved minority communities.
Sipping a Mexican hot cocoa on a chilly February evening inside Pilsen’s Café Jumping Bean, Hernandez breaks down the numbers: ¼ of greenhouse emissions in Chicago come from transportation; 50 percent of the trips made in large metropolitan areas are less than 3 miles long. About 28 percent of these trips causing all the greenhouse emissions are a mile or less.
“Every decision about how you get around has a huge impact on the environment,” Hernandez says. “People, particularly Latinos, think about transportation but not in the typical jargon. We think about it in terms of being able to get to a job, school, church or hospital.”
During a time where the city is grappling with public transit service cuts and fare hikes, the lack of real or equitable choices to getting around comes at a higher cost to disadvantaged communities, he says. “It disproportionally impacts lower-income people and people of color.”
"We need communities that are built around livability,” Hernandez says, gesturing toward the windows facing 18th Street. “The way our streets are shaped and designed influences how people use them and congregate.”
Last year, Hernandez was co-chairman for the organization's Open Streets program. The event borrows the concept from two sprawling Latin American urban centers– Bogota, Colombia, and Guadalajara, Mexico – that dealt with significant congestion and pollution problems in the ‘90s by closing down several miles of roads once a week and encouraging residents to leave their cars behind and instead ride their bikes, play with kids or do a little salsa dancing. While held on a much smaller scale in Chicago, the event was a major success: eight miles of roads through the parkways connecting Logan Square, Humboldt Park, N. Lawndale, Little Village and Pilsen were shut down for this event, which drew 12,000 people.
“Its something that’s never been done in the West Side of Chicago,” he says.” It was really a partnership with the community organizations, predominantly Latinos and African-Americans. The activity was not only green but it provides opportunities for community building and family time.”
For a boy who grew up playing basketball in a bank parking lot and asphalt alleys – with a milk crate tied to a lamp post serving as the makeshift hoop – exposing more people to the joys of being outside is particularly important. And for a community that has some of the highest obesity, diabetes and heart disease rates in the country, being able to lead more active lifestyles is not only an environmental issue but a health concern.
“What we do know is that everyone wants to breathe clean air, have a good place to live. These are basic things everyone wants. They might not be saying we want transportation access, but they’re saying the same thing,” he says. “We just have to listen. It’s more than just translating things in Spanish. It’s connecting the message to the community.”
Hernandez is quickly carving out a reputation for himself as a leader on transportation issues, says Rob Sadowsky, executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance. “There are very few people on the transportation sector that are actively involved on policy making that are people of color,” he says.
Sadowsky adds that Hernandez’s “magnetic” personality and strong communication skills make people “listen and approach him on issues that they might not normally care about.”
Hernandez describes “making those connections in communities where they don’t exist” as his biggest goal.
“Everyone – if they want to go to work, doctor, library, school – should have real choices, and Latinos and African-Americans should play a real role in this dialogue,” he says. “Not just falling into line but playing a part in designing solutions in a way that it makes sense for our communities.”
INFOBOX
Little Village Environmental Justice Organization: www.lvejo.org
Active Transportation Alliance: www.activetrans.org
Ethical Media Markets: www.ethicalmarkets.com
Ice Energy: www.ice-energy.com
Xavier Cortada: www.xaviercortada.com
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