Society for Human Ecology

The Geography of Despair: Environmental Racism and the Making of South Phoenix,
Arizona, USA
Author(s): Bob Bolin, Sara Grineski and Timothy Collins
Source: Human Ecology Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, Special Issue on ‘Nature, Science, and Social
Movements’ (Winter 2005), pp. 156-168
Published by: Society for Human Ecology
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Research in Human Ecology

The Geography of Despair: Environmental Racism
and the Making of South Phoenix, Arizona, USA

Bob Bolin

School of Human Evolution and Social Change and International Institute of Sustainability
Arizona State University
Tempe AZ 85287-2402
USA1

Sara Grineski

International Institute of Sustainability and Department of Sociology
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-4802
USA2

Timothy Collins
International Institute of Sustainability and Department of Geography
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-0104
USA3

Abstract

This paper discusses the historical geographical con
struction of a contaminated community in the heart of one of
the largest and fastest growing Sunbelt cities in the US. Our
focus is on how racial categories and attendant social rela
tions were constructed by Whites, in late 19th and early 20th
century Phoenix, Arizona, to produce a stigmatized zone of
racial exclusion and economic marginality in South Phoenix,
a district adjacent to the central city. We consider how rep
resentations of race were historically deployed to segregate
people of color, both residentially and economically in the
early city. By the 1920s race and place were discursively and
materially woven together in a mutually reinforcing process
of social stigmatization and environmental degradation in
South Phoenix. This process constructed a durable zone of
mixed minority residential and industrial land uses that sur
vives into the present day. ‘Sunbelt apartheid’has worked to

segregate undesirable land uses and minorities from ‘Anglo’
Phoenix. Class and racial privilege has been built in a wide
range of planning and investment decisions that continue to
shape the human ecology of the city today.

Keywords: environmental justice, environmental racism,
historical geographic development. Phoenix, Arizona

Introduction

Environmental justice studies over the last decade have
explored the socio-spatial distributions of hazardous indus
tries and have provided substantial evidence of a dispropor
tionate presence of toxic industries and waste sites in many
minority, low income communities in the US (e.g. Lester et
al. 2001). Less attention has been given to the social process
es that produce these environmental injustices over extended
historical periods. Analyses of the historical geographic de
velopment of environmental inequities, particularly the ways
that race and class are imbricated in the production and uses
of urban space, have begun to appear in the literature (e.g.
Boone and Modarres 1999). As Pulido (2000) suggests, there
is a need in environmental justice studies to consider the
complex ways racism, capitalist accumulation strategies, and
class privilege are entwined in the historical development of
urban landscapes, including the locations of both residential
areas and industrial districts. Understanding the ways racial
categories are socially constructed and employed in the pro
duction of space in the city, including the distributions of
people and environmental hazards is a central part of under
standing environmental racism (Pulido et al. 1996). As we
discuss in this paper, the diverse ways race is constructed are
tightly connected to the local social relations of production,

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© Society for Human Ecology

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Bolin, Grineski and Collins

configurations of power, and spatial practices (e.g. Pulido
2000; Soja 1989).

Our concern here is to examine the historical develop
ment of a zone of pronounced and chronic environmental in
equity in Phoenix, Arizona, exploring the effects of racism
and class privilege in constructing this hazardscape. Phoenix
today is the largest and fastest growing city in the desert
Southwest of the US, a sprawling metropolitan area with a
current population approaching 3.5 million spread out over
more than 2000 sq. km of former Sonoran desert. At the cen
ter of this urban complex is a contaminated zone of mixed
land uses (see Figure 1) which currently hosts an assemblage
of industrial and waste sites, crisscrossed by freeways and
railroads, and under the primary flight path of Sky Harbor,
the US’s 6th busiest airport (Bolin et al. 2002).

Scattered throughout this district are the city’s oldest
African-American and Latino4 neighborhoods, places which
have until recently contained the majority of Phoenix’s mi
nority populations. The environmental fate of this district,
known locally as South Phoenix5, was cemented nearly a cen
tury ago, linked to a complex of factors including pervasive
racial exclusion, class domination, political disenfranchise
ment, and a racially segmented economy. These factors, im
bricated in a variety of historical combinations, have been
materialized in distinct land-use and socio-economic patterns
in the central city.

We begin by offering a historical sketch of the early de
velopment of Phoenix, considering the ways racist practices
contributed to shaping land uses in the old urban core. We
examine the ways public representations of minority neigh
borhoods focus on filth, disease, and contamination, discur

sively attaching a persistent stigma both to people and place
in minority districts of Phoenix. We next discuss the mutual

Source: adapted from Bolin et al. (2000)

Figure 1. Map of the Phoenix Metropolitan Area.

ly reinforcing relationship of these cultural representations to
an ensemble of land uses and policies, ranging from industri
al and transportation encroachment in minority neighbor
hoods to bank redlining and neighborhood disinvestment. We
consider a period that stretches from early 20th century de
velopment to the post-war period when Phoenix entered its
current ‘boomtown’ period of rapidly accelerating population
and industrial growth. The socio-spatial processes that have
shaped the creation of social and environmental conditions in
South Phoenix have taken place in the context of an aggres
sive pro-business and anti-democratic political culture,
propped up by large federal expenditures on water projects
and military production (Wiley and Gottlieb 1985). Lastly,
we briefly note the emerging contestations of hazardous fa
cilities sitings by environmental justice activists and citizen
groups in South Phoenix, as initial steps toward mitigating a
century of environmental racism.

Environmental Racism: Conceptual Issues

Perhaps the most contentious issue in historical environ
mental justice studies concerns environmental racism and
whether race-based discrimination can be invoked as an ex

planatory factor in environmental inequalities (Pastor et al.
2001). Because of the political and legal freight that the term
carries, both for researchers and community activists, claims
about the prevalence of environmental racism are contested
(e.g., Pulido 1996). The term environmental racism gained
currency after the UCC (1987) study highlighted the impor
tance of race in predicting of the location of hazardous waste
facilities, based on a national US study (see also Bryant and
Mohai 1992; cf. Anderton et al. 1994). The environmental jus
tice literature appears divided over what constitutes environ
mental racism. A ‘pure discrimination model’ (Hamilton 1995)
argues that environmental racism must involve racially moti
vated, intentional acts against people of color by those making

facility siting and other land use decisions (Pulido 2000).
Other researchers discount intentionality as a necessary

element in defining racism, instead focusing on the variety of

historical and current institutional practices that disadvantage

people of color and produce environmental inequalities
(Bullard 1996). Proponents of this approach argue that insti
tutional racism, in all its diverse ideological, discursive, and
political-economic manifestations, operating at a variety of
spatial scales, must be seen as the key in environmental dis
crimination, whether explicitly intentional acts are involved or

not (Pulido 2000). As critics have noted, focusing on the
issue of intentionality in siting unwanted facilities in minority

neighborhoods elides consideration of the succession of land
uses, patterns of housing segregation, racialized employment
patterns, financial practices, and the ways that race permeates

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Bolin, Grineski and Collins

zoning, development, and bank lending processes in urban
areas (Boone and Modarres 1999; Cole and Foster 2001;
Rabin 1990). The focus on intentionality in discriminatory
spatial practices neglects the “simultaneous evolution of
racism…, class formation, and the development of industrial
landscapes” [emphasis in original] (Pulido et al. 1996, 420).

In a theoretically informed discussion of environmental

discrimination, Pulido (2000, 15) advances the concept of
‘white privilege.’ In her usage, white privilege denotes a
hegemonic form of racism, deeply embedded in ideologies
and practices, that works to (re)produce white advantage
across time and space. Conceptually, it calls attention to the
relationships of different racial groupings in urban space and
the ways that ‘whiteness,’ as a cultural construct, confers eco

nomic and social benefits to those so marked, thus linking
race and class. Applied to environmental justice research, it
points to the need for comparisons of those who bear heavy
environmental burdens with those who are able to avoid them

through residential and employment decisions (Szasz and
Meuser 1997). In this context, the growth of racially exclu
sive white suburbs, a pattern that predominates in Phoenix’s
century-long expansion outward from city center, is exem
plary of the geography of racial privilege. It is a socio-spa
tial process that has inexorably shifted both environmental
and economic burdens toward those remaining in the central
city (e.g., Pulido 2000; Bolin et al. 2000; Sicotte 2003).

In this paper, we use ‘environmental racism’ to denote a

complex of social and spatial practices which systematically
disadvantage people marked by certain racial categories. In
the case of Phoenix (and the US generally) until the mid
1960s, racist discourses were pervasive and racial divisions
and inequalities were ‘naturalized’ to the point of being taken
for granted. We consider environmental racism to include
acts of omission, such as failing to provide urban infrastruc
ture and acts of commission, such as the imposition of un
wanted land uses, regardless of whether there was spe
cific intent to harm people of color.

Historical Overview

Unlike other cities of the Southwestern US Sunbelt

(Albuquerque, El Paso, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Tucson),
which began with centuries old Spanish colonial and
Mexican settlements, Phoenix was founded by Anglos
and had no pre-existing Indian or Mexican settlements
to displace (Sheridan 1995). Established in the late
1860s as an agricultural center in the Salt River Valley
of central Arizona, early land speculators used the rem
nants of 14th century Hohokam Indian canal systems to

bring water to the otherwise parched Sonoran desert.
While the Hohokam had abandoned major settlements in

Table 1. Maricopa County Population Statistics, 1900-2000.

Maricopa County 1900 1950 2000

Total population 20,457 331,770 3,072,149
Latino -3,000 -50,000 763,341
Black 210 14,409 108,521
White 13,783 289,402 2,034,530

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1900, 1950 and 2000

Note: Latino figures for 1900 and 1950 are estimates based on Luckingham 1994

the valley some four centuries earlier, for reasons not well un

derstood (Abbot 2003), the new settlers optimistically named
the nascent city Phoenix, assuming it would not share the fate
of the earlier settlements. With the revival of the ancient

canal system, the ‘worthless desert’ gained value as agricul
tural land and established the central role water would play in
the political economy of Phoenix.

By the late 19th century, Mexicans and Mexican-Amer
icans were the largest ‘minority group’ in Phoenix (Table 1),
joined by smaller populations of African Americans, Chinese,

and American Indians (U.S. Census of Population 1900,
1950, 2000). While all racial/ethnic minorities were the sub

jects of discriminatory discourses and practices, those direct
ed at Latinos and Blacks had the most persistent effects on
land use and place construction in the city. Residential seg
regation and unregulated land uses in minority districts began
shaping social and environmental conditions in what would
become South Phoenix by the 1890s, when Phoenix’s popu
lation numbered fewer than 5,000 people. Even at this early
stage in the development of the city, the dividing line between

Anglo Phoenix and the southern subaltern district was begin
ning to be established, demarcated by an east-west rail corri
dor first established in 1887 (Myrick 1980). This corridor
soon began serving as both the physical and symbolic bound
ary between two developing urban worlds (Figure 2).

Legend ;

— City Limits ~~Sr

E
AfricanAmerican Residential Area

Latino Residential Area

E
■ n

12 St 16 St

Source: Adapted from Roberts (1973)

Figure 2. Minority Neighborhoods in Phoenix, 1911.

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Bolin, Grineski and Collins

Mexicans were, almost from the city’s founding in
1870, marginalized and excluded in most economic
sectors, being relegated primarily to field work in local

agricultural production (Dimas 1999). This reflects
general patterns of agricultural production in the
Southwest US, which had come to rely on low-wage
Mexican labor by the 1870s. This pattern of employ
ment segregation persists today in California and Ari
zona. In the hegemonic ideology of the period, Mexi
cans were viewed as ‘naturally’ predisposed to stoop
work in fields picking fruits and vegetables and cultur
ally adapted to low wages and poverty (Walsh 1999).
Mexicans and Mexican Americans were systematically
disadvantaged in the early political economy of the
city. By 1900, wealth, political power and property
were controlled by a growing Anglo business and po
litical elite, a factor critical in shaping race relations
and the production of space in the emerging city. As Luck
ingham (1989, 8) notes, “Phoenix, from its founding was run
by Anglos for Anglos,” a consequence of which was the pro
duction of a persistent north-south geography of uneven de
velopment across the city.

An unapologetic pro-growth ‘boosterism’ has been a
central ideological feature of the ruling class in Phoenix from

its earliest days and has shaped innumerable planning and in
vestment decisions over the last century designed to ensure
growth, profitability, and capital accumulation (e.g. Mawn
1979; Wylie and Gottlieb 1985). Critical in Phoenix’s early
growth was the establishment of railroad linkages to external
markets, and it is the railroad that gained a primary role in
shaping the industrial ecology and patterns of racial segrega
tion in the urban core (see Figure 2) (Kotlanger 1983). The
rail corridor transecting southern Phoenix became, by the
1890s, a magnet for industrial, warehousing, and stockyard
activity. Some of the city’s earliest industries located ‘south
of the tracks’: these included meat packing and rendering
plants, foundries, ice factories, flour mills, brick factories and

food processing facilities, giving the district a durable indus
trial presence (Mawn 1979). The railroad also anchored a
growing warehouse district, as the city rapidly emerged by
1920 as a regional distribution center (Russell 1986). The
east-west line of the railroad served a relatively impermeable
residential barrier between the poor Black and Latino dis
tricts of South Phoenix and Anglo Phoenix extending from
the central business district, northward. Today, the rail corri
dor remains a zone of environmental justice concerns (Bolin
et al. 2002) (see Figures 2 and 3).

The northward movement of Anglo residential develop
ment began after major flooding on the Salt River in 1891
showed the hazardousness of living on the floodplain. This
left the area between the central business district (CBD) and

Source: adapted from Roberts (1973)

Figure 3. Minority Neighborhoods in Phoenix, 1940.

the Salt River channel as a liminal zone hosting the rail corri
dor and an expanding industrial presence, in proximity to the

agricultural fields which were the mainstay of the city’s econ
omy in the early 20th century. The barrios and ghettoes of
South Phoenix languished in the interstitial areas between
factories and fields, well isolated from the expanding white
only neighborhoods to the north (Dimas 1999). Public ex
penditures on water lines, sewage, paved roads and urban ser
vices were directed toward neighborhoods north of the down
town, while those south of the rail corridor did without, in
some areas well into the 1960s (Russell 1986). The lack of
basic urban services south of the rail corridor throughout this

period contributed to the increasingly unhealthy living condi
tions prevalent in its low-income neighborhoods. Indeed the
city’s storm water rains, first constructed in 1890, directed
runoff and untreated sewage of Anglo neighborhoods into the

minority neighborhoods of South Phoenix, “…victimizing]
the lower areas with filth and stench” and causing “… the tran

sition of a desirable residential neighborhood into a depressed
area” (Mawn 1979,140). Because much of South Phoenix re
mained outside the city limits and political jurisdiction of
Phoenix until annexations in 1959 and 1960, land use regula
tions were lax and urban services were minimal (Konig
1982). The low land values in the district made the area at

tractive to continuing industrialization into the 20th century,

which in turn, engendered continuing environmental blight in
residential areas adjacent to the industries (Mawn 1979).

South Phoenix, by the 1920s, was indelibly marked in the

Anglo controlled media as an undesirable district of industry,
stockyards, and minorities not suitable for the privileged class
es (Luckingham 1994). North of the CBD, a new urban trol
ley system provided transportation to growing suburban White

neighborhoods springing up (Russell 1986). This growth, in
turn, was promoted by a the Salt River Project, a federal water

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Bolin, Grineski and Collins

project which by 1920 was providing reliable water supplies
for urban and agricultural uses in central Arizona (Reisner
1993). Indeed, as Reisner (1993) notes, the availability of fed
erally subsidized water promoted rapid increases in land val
ues in desirable parts of Phoenix leading to a frenzy of land
speculation and housing development in the early 1920s.

By this time, clear effects of ‘white privilege’ (Pulido
2000) can be seen in the city’s development patterns, with
Anglo middle classes increasingly distancing themselves
from the degraded environmental and residential conditions
of South Phoenix as city limits were extended northward in a
series of annexations (Luckingham 1994). Unlike cities of
the US industrial heartland, with distinct patterns of ‘white
flight’ to suburbs as central cities deteriorated (e.g. Harvey
1996), Phoenix’s split of a minority urban core and expand
ing white suburbs on the periphery has been in place for the
last century. A Chamber of Commerce report in 1920 articu
lated the desired image of Phoenix when it characterized the
city as “a modern town of forty thousand people, and the best
kind of people too. A very small percentage for Mexicans,
Negroes, or foreigners” (quoted in Kotlanger 1983, 396). For
Phoenix boosters, the “best kind of people” were Anglo and
middle class, the social class that promoters historically have

sought to attract as tourists and as new residents to the city
(Luckingham 1994).

Irrespective of city boosters’ visions of a racially pure
desert Utopia, the region has attracted people of color since its
founding. Initial African American settlement in the Phoenix
area began in the latter part of the 19th century as migrants
escaping racism in southern states came west. Phoenix, how
ever, offered little refuge from segregation and discrimina
tion, and by 1912 African Americans were subject to a vari
ety of laws enforcing strict residential, schooling, and em
ployment segregation, practices that persisted well into the
Civil Rights era of the 1960s (Harris 1983). A net socio-spa
tial effect of racial control and exclusion in this period is the
concentration, even today, of much of Phoenix’s proportion
ately small Black population in a few census tracts of South
Phoenix (Sicotte 2003). Both African Americans and Latinos
were segregated and racially controlled by a wide variety of
formal and informal practices that remain inscribed in the
city’s current spatial form.

Race and Place

Race and class inequalities were deeply entwined in the
process of place construction in Phoenix, as was typical of
US cities of the period (e.g. Harvey 1996). The hegemonic
racism that held sway among Arizona’s political elite and the

planning and investment decisions that were shaped by it in
sured that South Phoenix’s early industrial trajectory would

not be stopped in deference to the growing residential popu
lations in the district. Racist discourses fused race and place
as embodied characteristics by ascribing ‘hazardous’ tenden
cies to bodily characteristics and cultural practices, thus jus
tifying the segregation of ‘races’ (Brunk 1996; cf. Craddock
2000). As Young (1991, 126) notes, when a dominant class
“…defines some groups as different, as the Other, the mem
bers of these groups are imprisoned in their bodies. Domi
nant discourse defines them in terms of bodily characteristics

and constructs their bodies as ugly, dirty, defiled, impure,
contaminated, or sick.” It also rationalizes and justifies their
separation in space.

Such discourses were present from the earliest days in
Phoenix as an 1879 newspaper account illustrates:

[Mexicans] do their washing and cooking on the
sidewalks, and all manner of filth is thrown into the
[irrigation] ditches. They have no outhouses, and
the stench arising from the numerous adobe holes is

simply fearful… Some portions of our town surpass
that of the Chinese quarters6 in San Francisco for
filth and stench (quoted in Luckingham 1994. 18).

Signifiers like ‘dirt,’ ‘filth,’ and ‘disease’ were all used by the
media to stigmatize residents of South Phoenix for decades,
helping to reinforce their Otherness to the ‘right kind of peo
ple’ in Anglo Phoenix. The colligation of racial stereotypes
and degraded living conditions of the inhabitants of South
Phoenix legitimated, in turn, a wholesale official neglect of
the region, expressed both in unregulated industrialization
and an absence of urban services for the residents of the area

well into post-war boom period (e.g. Mawn 1979).
Racism was not evenly applied. Blacks and Latinos

were subjected to different patterns of discrimination, and,
further, were internally segregated along racial and class lines
within South Phoenix itself (cf. Figure 2 and 3). African
Americans were subject to formal segregation typical of
much of the US through the 1960s. In Phoenix, a variety of
laws and strict social rules of deference to Whites in public
spaces produced near absolute residential, employment,
health care, and educational segregation (Luckingham 1994,
1989). An active Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s enforced racial

discipline on African Americans in the city although their
vigilantism attracted far fewer followers than it did in the
Southern US (Harris 1983). Unlike Latinos, Blacks were re
stricted by Arizona law to Black-only schools. When none
was available, Blacks had to endure the humiliation of micro

segregation at White schools in so-called ‘colored rooms.’ In
Phoenix, a ‘colored cottage,’ a small outbuilding where Black
high school students were isolated was used, as if they were
carriers of contagious diseases. This form of micro-segrega
tion continued until the city’s first segregated ‘colored’ high

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Bolin, Grineski and Collins

school was built in 1927 (Hagerty 1976). Federally mandat
ed school and housing desegregation, however, would not
begin until the 1960s, permitting continuing racial segrega
tion in Phoenix in a variety of spatial scales, from the class
room and workplace to entire zones within the urban core.
Indeed, deed restrictions and housing covenants, as well as
lending practices kept African Americans out of all-White
suburbs until fair housing laws began to be enforced in the
1970s (Harris 1983; Gammage 1999). These forms of spatial
and social control reinforced the economic marginality of
most of the city’s African American population, restricted as
they were to service work and as agricultural laborers
through the 1920s (Horton 1941). US Census7 reports cover
ing four decades from 1900 to 1940 show the overrepresen
tation of ‘Negroes’ in domestic work and unskilled laborers
(primarily farm and railroad work) as well as among the un
employed (US Census 1922, 1943). While income figures are
not given, surrogate indicators including mortality rates and
housing conditions (discussed below) suggest pervasive
poverty among Blacks.

Socio-spatial discrimination against Latinos was more
pronounced in Phoenix than other Southwestern cities in the
region that originated as Spanish colonial and Mexican set
tlements (Dimas 1999; Sheridan 1995). While the barrios of
Phoenix provided settings for the continuation of Mexican
cultural traditions and practices, they were contained there by

an all White police force (Dimas 1999). As Dimas notes
(1999, 32), the internal segregation of the Catholic Church,
with Latinos restricted to the basement for services in the

1920s was “perhaps the most profound indicator of the prej
udice and discrimination that the Mexican population
faced…in the Valley.” In addition to spatial control, cultural
control took the form of efforts to ‘Americanize’ Latinos in

the 1920s and ’30s, including teaching young women how to
be domestic servants in Anglo households of north Phoenix
(Mawn 1979). While Latinos were not subject to the
apartheid-like conditions of Blacks, they were equally re
stricted in employment and to residential locations in South
Phoenix, circumstances that persisted until US housing and
employment laws were changed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
As Dimas (1999) reports, labor markets were clearly racial
ized, with the primary occupations for Latinos prior to World

War 11 in very low wage agricultural field work and as labor
ers in the warehouse district adjacent to the rail corridor
(Luckingham 1989).

The sequestration and spatial control of people of color
in Phoenix is an exemplar of what Sibley calls ‘spatial purifi
cation,’ using race and class segregation to separate the puta
tive threats of disease, crime, and moral corruption of the
poor from the middle classes in their ‘purified’ suburbs
(1995, 77). As Sharpe and Wallock contend (1994, 9): “That

[White] suburbanites effectively wall out those unlike them
selves after arriving [in suburban neighborhoods] suggests
that a major force driving their migration is the wish to es
cape racial and class intermingling.” This aptly describes a
process that has characterized urban growth in Phoenix since
the 1890s and continues today with the ongoing expansion of

predominantly class segregated suburbs increasingly distant
from the pollution and poverty of South Phoenix.

Health and Housing South of the Tracks

The material effects of racial discrimination, spatial con

trol, and unregulated land uses in South Phoenix were pro
nounced by the 1920s. By then, living conditions for the
poorest Latinos and African Americans in South Phoenix
were, by all accounts, dire; blame for conditions was placed
on residents. Areas of housing, comprising a mix of tents
with hastily erected shacks of cardboard and scrap wood,
with no water or sewage, were clustered between factories,
warehouses, and stockyards (Horton 1941). The stockyards
and unregulated emissions of factories and trains produced a
miasma of contaminated air and water in which low-income

Phoenicians lived and worked. The presence of sugar beet
processing factories and meat packing plants inevitably con
tributed to high concentrations of smoke and putrid odors in
adjacent minority neighborhoods (Mawn 1979; Russell
1986). Heat-related deaths and high infant mortality were
commonplace in summers when daytime temperatures con
sistently exceed 40°C. Overcrowded housing, severe pover
ty, and malnutrition were prevalent as were epidemics of ty
phoid and tuberculosis in the 1920s and ’30s across the dis
trict (Kotlanger 1983). Infant mortality data from the De
pression era clearly shows death rates for Blacks, Latinos,
and Indians as two to three times the White rate (Buck 1936).

T.C. Cuvellier, working for the Arizona State Board of
Health, reported housing conditions in Black and Latino
areas of the city to be severely degraded (Culvellier 1920, 5):

… many families were found eating and sleeping in
a single room with scores of them crowded into a
single block or group of dwellings opening onto a
common court. In many cases children were found
living in the same room as persons afflicted with
positive cases of [tuberculosis]. In many cases filth
and flies contributed to the general squalor and un
healthiness of the surroundings, and more de
plorable still, many families, as high as ten, were
found making use of a single vile smelling toilet.

Local newspapers affixed blame for conditions claiming that:
“…poverty and colossal ignorance are claiming their tolls
among little brown babies… and that such a congestion of un

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Bolin, Grineski and Collins

fortunates [was] a combined result of poverty and the greed
and inhuman disregard of landlords” (quoted in Kotlanger
1983, 429). While such descriptions were common in local
newspapers, there were virtually no systematic attempts to
mitigate such conditions until federal resources became
available in the latter part of the 1930s. Further, evidence
suggests that the city refused to try to control the predatory
activities of landlords well into the post-war period (Brunk
1996).

The lack of potable water, sanitation, adequate diet, or
healthcare along with the pestilential runoff of industries con

tributed to chronic health problems of South Phoenix resi
dents. While Anglo Phoenix neighborhoods had an expand
ing water and sewage infrastructure in the 1920s, none was
extended to South Phoenix for decades, other than that need

ed for the growing industrial district along the rail corridor
(Kotlanger 1983). Conversely the city’s first sewage pro
cessing plant (1921) was placed in South Phoenix, along with
landfills located along the banks of the Salt River (Mawn
1979). In this fashion, impoverished South Phoenix func
tioned as the dumping ground for wastes produced in the re
mainder of the city.

Referred to as the ”the shame of Phoenix” in a 1920

community report, living conditions in South Phoenix were
described as “fully as bad as any… in the tenement districts of

New York and other large centers of population” (quoted in
Kotlanger 1983, 129). A community worker asserted that
housing conditions found in South Phoenix in the late 1920s
and early 1930s “helped Arizona attain the highest infant
death rate in the nation” and earn the federal distinction of

being the worst slum in the US (McLoughlin 1954, 40). A
description of a Black neighborhood in 1930s is indicative,
with the neighborhood described as:

permeated with the odors of a fertilizer plant, an
iron foundry, a thousand open privies and the city
sewage disposal plant.. . Its dwellings for the most
part were shacks, many without electricity, most
without plumbing and heat. They were built of tin
cans, cardboard boxes, and wooden crates picked
up by railroad tracks (McLoughlin 1954, 41).

These conditions were exacerbated during the Depression as
unemployment surged and incomes dropped. A survey of
‘slum conditions’ in South Phoenix in 1939 examined 4065

houses, finding that only 289 of the homes could be classified

as meeting accepted standards. On one block, the surveyors
found only two houses with running water, and only one with
an inside toilet. One outside toilet was shared by 24 families

and only seven homes had electricity (Horton 1941). Blame
for the degraded living conditions in health and housing in
South Phoenix was largely affixed to the people living there,

not local governments or businesses. There was recognition
that if living conditions were better disease and mortality
could be reduced. But as the following quote from the State
director of public health illustrates the problem was assigned
to how children were ‘born’ and raised: “if [Indian] babies
were well-born and well-cared for, their mortality rates
would be negligible” (Cuvellier 1922, 12).

The public representations of people, disease, and gen
eral living conditions in South Phoenix, while calling atten
tion to the squalid conditions, also worked to reinforce the
stigmatization of the area. Further, they tended to treat living
conditions and health issues as the fault of the inhabitants of

South Phoenix, rather than the effects of an ensemble of eco

nomic and social practices generating pronounced inequali
ties. As David Harvey notes (1996, 321),

Representations of places have material conse
quences in so far as fantasies, desires, fears, and
longings are expressed in actual behavior. Evalua
tive schemata of places …become grist for all sorts
of policy-makers’ mills. Places in the city get red
lined for mortgage finance, the people who live in
them get written off as worthless …The material ac
tivities of place construction may then fulfill the
prophecies of degradation and dereliction.

This is a suitable description of the contradictory effects of
public representations of South Phoenix on policy, planning
and place construction in Phoenix for much of the 20th cen
tury. It was well recognized by 1920 that housing and living
conditions were inhumane. Yet, according to the apparent
logic of city leaders, as evidenced by decades of planning and
permitting of industrial land uses, since South Phoenix had
little of value to preserve, continued emplacement of indus
tries and transportation routes would have little additional
negative effect on the district (e.g. Sicotte 2003; Sobotta
2002; Dimas 1999).

Institutionalizing Racism in Place

These degraded living conditions there were officially
ignored by the city of Phoenix except for scattered attempts
at constructing public housing. The advent of federal New
Deal housing assistance programs in the 1930s made grants
available for constructing low income housing. Some three
hundred units of racially segregated public housing were built

during the late 1930s to relieve the worst of housing condi
tions. Separate clusters of modest housing for poor Whites,
Blacks, and Latinos were built in ‘appropriately’ segregated
areas of South Phoenix, although the numbers built did little

to address the overall housing needs in the district (Zachary
2001).

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Bolin, Grineski and Collins

Nevertheless, at the same time that Phoenix was secur

ing federal monies to build low- income Depression era hous
ing, it was also institutionalizing leading practices that would
perpetuate the deteriorated housing and economic marginali
ty of South Phoenix neighborhoods. In 1933, the federal
government created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation
(HOLC) as an economic stimulus to mitigate the rash of
mortgage foreclosures sweeping the US. To delineate areas
within the city ‘worthy’ of HOLC monies it relied on the
overtly racist National Association of Real Estate Boards
(NAREB) policies to appraise and map the city (Brunk
1996). Phoenix was coded into districts based on the demo

graphic characteristics of the inhabitants. Neighborhoods
with African American, Latino or “foreign” residents, ac
cording to NAREB standards, warranted a ‘hazardous’ rating
and were red lined, denying loans to residents. Minority
neighborhoods concentrated in southern Phoenix were denied
HOLC monies although housing stock and living conditions
were recognized as among the worst in the US. Brunk (1996,
67) concludes that the “HOLC locked in the urban configura
tion for Phoenix by withholding relief funds from minority
neighborhoods, thus establishing precedent for institutional
housing discrimination.” These practices hindered future
economic growth in the “hazardous areas.” Continued bank
redlining of the same area in the postwar period simply per
petuated what was initiated in the 1930s (Dimas 1999).

Although some public housing was built in the 1930s it
had little effect on housing conditions in South Phoenix. A
1941 report describes conditions in the subaltern district:

Phoenix has shockingly disgraceful slum areas…
The slums created a public health menace as a
breeding place for disease. They fostered juvenile
delinquency and created social problems that af
fected the entire community. They discouraged de
velopment of areas in which they were situated and
tended to ser>e as a serious drain in some areas,

three of four persons lived in single-roomed shacks
which had only dirt floors and no modern conve
niences… children grew up in them (Horton 1941,
183).

Missing from Horton’s statement is any attempt to under
stand the sources of ‘slum conditions’ and the assertion that

slums were a problem because they ‘affected the entire com
munity’ and were a ‘menace.’ Further, even after a decade of

heavy military spending during World War II, living condi
tions in South Phoenix remained much as they had. Perva
sive employment segregation and a racist system of bank
redlining noted above ensured that neither good paying jobs
nor housing loans could be easily obtained in the district (e.g.
Brunk 1996; Konig 1982, 21). An Urban League report on

Phoenix in the 1950s found that 95% of the city’s Black pop
ulation lived in the most deteriorated districts of South

Phoenix (McCoy 2000).
A historical lack of planning, land use regulation, or

public investment, along with an array of racially discrimina
tory practices worked to keep housing deteriorated and land
prices low, making this blighted area attractive to industries
seeking to locate near the rail corridor and the CBD (Kot
langer 1983). While Phoenix adopted a limited zoning ordi
nance in 1930, it was used primarily to keep White middle
class neighborhoods north of the CBD homogeneous and to
protect property values there by keeping both industry and
minorities out (Gammage 1999).

Postwar Industrialization and
Suburbanization

While Phoenix banks and real estate industry may have
considered the people of South Phoenix “hazardous” and the
area too financially risky to build homes in, another set of
risks and hazards were already being built into the district.
These took (and continue to take) the form of substantial en

vironmental hazards from toxic chemicals, air pollution, and
hazardous wastes dispersed across the industrialized zone.
Since the 1890s, as noted previously, a variety of land uses
not permitted in Anglo Phoenix (stock yards, factories, ren
dering plants, meat packing facilities, sewage facilities, and
land fills) could be found in the midst of minority South
Phoenix. By the onset of the Depression more than 100 man
ufacturing firms were located south of the rail corridor and by

this period more than 80 km of railroad tracks crossed South

Phoenix, connecting dispersed factories to the main rail line
(Buchanan 1978).

One consequence was to further disperse manufacturing
sites among residential areas of South Phoenix, establishing
the rail infrastructure for further industrial expansion in the

post-war period. Although the deteriorated housing and en
vironmental conditions and high unemployment in the dis
trict were well documented in the 1930s, the city continued
to encourage industrialization there (Phoenix Action 1955).
By the 1950s it was reported that three-quarters of Phoenix’s
1000 manufacturing facilities were within 2 km of the rail
road, reflecting the expanding agglomeration of industry in
South Phoenix as well as in newer industrial districts to the

north and west (Hamilton and Huneke 1954). In a variety of
reports in the 1950s and 1960s the advantages of Phoenix’s
industrial district were promoted to attract industry to the
city. The presence of a non-union workforce and the avail
ability of large tracts of low cost land for factory sites and ad

jacent worker housing were considered part of the area’s ad
vantage (e.g. Stacker 1955; Kelly 1964; Konig 1982.)

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Bolin, Grineski and Collins

And while the railroad declined in significance as a
major transportation anchor in the city since 1950, it has been

joined by new modes creating additional impacts across
South Phoenix. First, beginning in the 1960s construction of
an intra-urban freeway system was initiated, leading to the in

sertion of two major freeways across South Phoenix parallel
ing the railroad corridor (Figure 1). This was followed by the
rapid expansion of the centrally located Sky Harbor airport in
the 1970s and 1980s. Both have promoted wholesale re
moval of entire minority neighborhoods, environmental con
tamination, industrialization and neighborhood decline in
South Phoenix into the current era (Dimas 1999; Bolin et al.

2002; Sobotta 2003). The airport is now a major anchor for
new industries requiring proximity to air transport, becoming

in the process one of the most contaminated census tracts in
Phoenix (Bolin et al. 2002).

Although the stockyards and agricultural activities slow
ly disappeared in South Phoenix as the metropolitan area en
tered its postwar boom, the industrial presence there expand
ed to produce significant hazard burdens (Bolin et al. 2002).
The postwar boom period of population growth, economic
expansion, and rapid suburbanization had few positive effects
on South Phoenix. Little was done in the immediate postwar
period to address the severe low-income housing problems
already well documented in the 1930s. While federal loan
programs in the 1940s and 1950s made low interest mort
gages available through the Federal Housing Authority, these
were available only for White home buyers seeking to pur
chase the tract homes in the burgeoning northern suburbs of

Phoenix. Thus people of color not only could not qualify for
regular mortgages or low interest home loans to improve
South Phoenix homes, they were also denied access to the all
White northern suburbs with their restrictive race covenants

(Brunk 1996; McCoy 2000).
A 1946 report by county officials described post-war

South Phoenix living conditions as unchanged from the
Great Depression (Montgomery 1946). The report described
“Steinbeck-esque Joad families living in dilapidated housing,
row after row of open backyard toilets, which smelled to high
heaven and dust blanketed, littered streets and even dirtier al

leys, and children played in a squalor that a hog raiser would
n’t tolerate in his pens…” (quoted in Zachary 2001, 203). In
another area, squatters lived in an abandoned stable. In the
1950s when the squatters were evicted, city officials discov
ered that as many as 50 families with up to 60 children had
lived in these dwellings without electricity, water or trash col

lection for over five years. The chronic slums of South
Phoenix exemplified Phoenix’s inability to manage rapid
growth (Zachary 2001, 203). Prospects for mitigation were
limited as few resources were available in the 1950s, and with

the rapidly expanding White middle class suburbs there was

virtually no political support to assist Phoenix’s poor and
people of color. At best African Americans and Latinos in
South Phoenix might be able to acquire small five-year mort
gages, resulting in a poorly constructed homes because of in
adequate financing (McCoy 2000). As one commentator
noted on housing disparities in Phoenix in the 1950s:

At [the tiorth] end of town, you’ll find long, row
ranch house mansions of the well-to-do. Down near
the other end, you’ll find the packing-box like
shacks of the very poor…mostly Mexican-Ameri
cans. As with any city, the slums are something we
don’t quite know what to do about and never like to
talk about (Stocke 1955, 58).

As recently as the mid-1960s, it was reported that “Phoenix
… finds itself saddled with square mile after square mile of
some of the most run-down, dilapidated housing in urban
America …whole blocks are served by one or two water taps
… behind a street facing row of shacks is built a second row,
and even a third, of equally inadequate structures” (Citron
1966, 8).

While the poor of South Phoenix were materially ex
cluded from the postwar housing boom, their neighborhoods
were increasingly encroached upon by new industries moving
to Phoenix after the war. Reflective of the industrial expan
sion, Stacker (1955) notes that between 1948 and 1952, more
than 100 new manufacturers moved into Phoenix, creating
9000 new jobs. As of 1955, it was estimated that Phoenix had
more than 1000 manufacturing plants (Stacker 1955). With
this influx of industry, industrially zoned areas in South
Phoenix expanded, both to the southwest on former farmland
and east to Sky Harbor airport. The continued emplacement
of new industries adjacent to homes in the district eroded al
ready low values. A ‘model community’ of single-family
homes for African Americans built was constructed in South

Phoenix in 1959. The area ostensibly contained the best
homes for Black families in the city. But property values
were not protected from encroachment of industry and erec
tion of substandard dwellings and homes in this development
were sold in 1965 for 15% of the price they sold for in 1959
(Banner and Dyer 1965, 68).

After World War II, the defense industry in Phoenix be

came a prominent economic sector, particularly in aerospace
and electronics. These new ‘high tech’ defense industries
were heavily courted by a politically powerful pro-growth
coalition in the city from the 1940s on, offering large tax
abatements and cheap land to lure industry to Phoenix (Wiley
and Gottlieb 1985; Konig 1982). In the 1950s this coalition
successfully attracted major electronics firms such as Mo
torola to Phoenix, companies that were flush with lucrative
Cold War era contracts (McCoy 2000). Konig (1982, 28)

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Bolin, Grineski and Collins

notes that a total of 290 industrial firms moved to the city in
the 1950s, placing factories both in the older industrial dis
trict of South Phoenix and in expanding industrial districts on
what was then the urban periphery. Besides a pro-business
tax structure in the city, corporations were also attracted by
Arizona’s non-union work force, whose wages averaged 25%
below national averages (Konig 1982).

In addition to satisfying space requirements, suburban
locations of this new generation of electronics facilities pro
vided a second locational advantage: access to educated
White workers. These large corporate electronics firms de
nied employment to Blacks and Latinos until such practices
were declared unconstitutional in the 1960s (Sheridan 1995).
Then, as now, small-scale subcontractors located in South

Phoenix would provide assembly components for the large
electronics firms, part of a general pattern of outsourcing now

common in ‘post-Fordist’ industrial ensembles (Soja 2000).
These subcontractors have historically proven to be far more
lax in their pollution and safety record than the large corpo
rate plants they supply, adding to the hazard burdens of South

Phoenix (Field 1997; Pijawka et al. 1998).
Economic and residential decentralization in the 1950s

encouraged business and public investment in the suburbs,
away from the central city, leaving many downtowns mori
bund by the 1970s (Hackworth 1999). To revive the declin
ing fortunes of Phoenix’s CBD, city boosters pursued a num
ber of redevelopment schemes. These have variously in
volved a variety of public expenditures to build new govern
ment facilities, concert halls, and other facilities that would

attract consumers to the CBD. Other redevelopment efforts
in the 1970s used tax incentives and other public subsidies to
entice commercial and industrial firms into the industrializ

ing zone of South Phoenix. This led to the siting of a num
ber of industrial polluters and toxic waste handling facilities
along transportation routes in South Phoenix (e.g., Pijawka et
al. 1998; Schmandt 1995; Sicotte 2003). The new industries,

however, have done little to reverse the high rates of poverty
in South Phoenix where current poverty rates may exceed
40% in a given tract (Bolin et al. 2002).

A political priority for the downtown redevelopment
coalition was the placing of two major freeways around the
CBD in the 1960s to promote access (Gammage 1999). As a
result, two interstate highways were inserted through South
Phoenix and around the CBD: 1-17 completed in the 1970s
and 1-10 completed in the 1980s (Figure 1). Interstate 17 was

placed directly across Latino neighborhoods of South
Phoenix paralleling the historic rail corridor. The resultant
high levels of highway traffic contribute to substantial ambi

ent air pollution in this zone today (Bolin et al. 2000). As a
consequence of redevelopment efforts since the 1970s, indus
trial encroachment on residential areas of South Phoenix be

came increasingly pronounced. Zoning data illustrate the
problem: In metropolitan Phoenix today, 3% of residentially
zoned areas directly border industrial zoning, in contrast to
35% of neighborhoods in South Phoenix (Bolin et al. 2002).

Although billions of dollars have been spent in the 1990s
to ‘revive’ the downtown, reshaping the city’s skyline in the
process, those dollars have contributed few if any discernible
economic benefits to those living in the adjacent neighbor
hoods of South Phoenix (Bolin et al. 2002; Hackworth 1999).
Indeed as Burns and Gober (1998) show, there is a significant
spatial mismatch between the jobs available in the CBD and
adjacent industrial district and the people who take those jobs.

That is, few inner city residents of Phoenix actually work in the

business and factories that are proximate to neighborhoods.
Continued industrialization and commercial encroachment in

South Phoenix has done little to improve the economic or en
vironmental circumstances of the people who live there.

In addition to the negative effects of highway expansion
in South Phoenix, environmental and socioeconomic deterio

ration has been exacerbated by expansion of Phoenix’s Sky
Harbor airport. The most heavily impacted neighborhood
was the Golden Gate Barrio, one of South Phoenix’s original
Mexican-American neighborhoods (Dimas 1999). Expan
sion of Sky Harbor Airport was initiated in the 1970s and
called for the extension of the east-west runway system.
However, that extension required the removal of residential
areas of the Golden Gate barrio, a program that was dutifully
undertaken beginning in 1977 (Dimas 1999). By 1986, six
teen hundred households had been removed leaving large
portions of the landscape vacant and available for airport and
industry. The residential value of the area was also under
mined by the I-10 freeway corridor, which was placed direct
ly across it in the 1980s (see Dimas 1999; MAGTPO 1979).
Between 1980 and 1990 alone, 40% of residential land in the

area was converted to industrial uses. Noise and air quality
degradation as a result of airport operations continue to bur
den nearby South Phoenix neighborhoods (Sobotta 2002).

Race, Place, and Environmental Justice

The origin and development of the patterns of environ
mental inequality described here are a product of a persistent
and diverse forms of racism, coupled with the primary roles

of transportation corridors and industrialization in shaping
the inner city area of Phoenix. The prevalent racial discours

es of the early 20th century, associating filth and disease with

the living habits of minorities helped justify spatial segrega
tion. Equally important, it was not just the people who were
pathologized: the region in which they lived was likewise
stigmatized as a “hazardous” environment. In this fashion,
historic racist discourses and practices and their effects on

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Bolin, Grineski and Collins

land use decisions have been literally inscribed on the land
scape of central Phoenix.

Decisions to place noxious facilities in the middle of mi
nority communities, based on evidence reviewed here, were
not made with the sole intent to harm. The creation of in

dustrial zones, and the logics of industrial location are sel
dom done with racially motivated intent (Pulido 2000). In
deed acts of omission, such as failing to provide urban infra
structure or not enforcing housing codes, have been as im
portant in the development to environmental inequalities in
Phoenix as have been acts of commission (e.g. the imposition

of unwanted land uses). Intentional or not, the net socio-spa
tial effect, as we show, has been to produce unequal and un
safe environmental burdens on low-income, minority com
munities, a condition that has been produced and reproduced
socio-environmental conditions in South Phoenix for more

than a century of urban development.

While continued economic marginality of South
Phoenix neighborhoods may be, in part, attributed to subur
ban expansion and the resource drain on the central city
(Guhathakurta and Wichert 1998), it is largely the result of
decades of political, planning, and investment decisions (e.g.,
Wiley and Gottlieb 1985). As we have described it, condi
tions in South Phoenix are not intentionally produced yet
they clearly flow from a racist ideologies and practices cou
pled with a strong political drive to promote growth and de
velopment in the city. To promote a century of industrializa
tion adjacent to low-income neighborhoods, without concern
for the well being of residents or any substantial investment
in housing for its residents is environmental racism (Bull ard
1996; Pulido 2000). Within South Phoenix, Latinos and
African Americans have borne disproportionate environmen
tal burdens, yet have received few economic benefits from in

dustrial and commercial presence in their neighborhoods
(Bolin et al. 2002; Burns and Gober 1998).

While African Americans and Latinos historically lacked
the political and economic power to effectively contest the
degradation of their neighborhoods, the post-World War II
period has been marked by changing legal and political con
ditions. Building off the 1954 Supreme Court decision to de
segregate public schools and the Civil Rights movement of
the 1960s, South Phoenix activists have opposed segregation,
and sought improved housing and employment opportunities
in their neighborhoods (Luckingham 1994). The Environ
mental Justice movement, which began in the 1980s in the
US, linked civil rights issues with environmental concerns
providing a new political frame for community activism
across the country (Szasz 1994). Changing regulatory and
legal structures, including a 1994 presidential mandate for
federal agencies to address environmental justice concerns,
have enabled new forms of political activism in environmen

tally stressed minority communities (e.g. Pellow 2000).
In the case of minority neighborhoods in Phoenix, a

number of citizen movements against toxic waste sites and
hazardous industries emerged in the 1990s (Sicotte 2003;
Struglia 1993). In the contemporary political milieu, haz
ardous industry sitings no longer go uncontested. In a polit
ical and legal environment shaped by civil rights and Envi
ronmental Justice principles, a variety of recent lawsuits over
the permitting of hazardous facilities in South Phoenix have

been filed. Local neighborhood movements and environmen
tal justice organizations now frequently deploy the term ‘en
vironmental racism’ at site-specific protests. However the
success of such contestations has been mixed and few conta

minating industries have been denied permits or required to
shut down (Sicotte 2003).

Once the ‘permanences’ of industrial zonation are in
place, it is a challenge to alter the built landscape to benefit
low-income residents. Industries will continue to locate on

land near transportation corridors and waste disposal facili
ties and pollute neighborhoods, unless interventions are po
litically mandated and there are wholesale changes in zoning
and land use. Once an area has begun to function as a center
for industrial production and other commercial activities such

as storage and transportation that land use legacy will persist,
even with the decline of the original commercial enterprises.
That industries seek vacant land adjacent to both transporta
tion corridors and waste disposal facilities is well document
ed, insuring that, as in the case of South Phoenix, an ag
glomeration of hazardous sites and other residentially
incompatible land uses will tend to develop around an initial
transportation or industrial node. In South Phoenix, there
have been no official actions to discourage such land uses,
and in the case of some neighborhoods, zoning has been used
to eliminate residential uses all together (Dimas 1999).

The persistent expansion of environmental burdens in
South Phoenix, despite major changes in federal regulations,
scientific knowledge of toxic hazards, and the environmental
justice movement, reflect ongoing neglect by city officials.
Environmental activists have been quick to label this disre
gard as racism (Sicotte 2003). While the Arizona Department
of Environmental Quality initiated a marginally funded toxic

hazards reduction program for South Phoenix, the first year
of that program has seen no reductions mandated (ADEQ
2003). The pervasive racism that shaped the early landscape
and economy of Phoenix set in place processes of industrial
ization and residential patterns that appear to be changing
slowly in the current period of rapid urban growth. Few re
sources are today being directed toward rehabilitating South

Phoenix and mitigating industrial hazards in its neighbor
hoods, reinforcing a century long pattern grounded in racial
exclusion and class privilege.

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Bolin, Grineski and Collins

Endnotes

1. Author to whom correspondence should be directed:
E-mail: [email protected]

2. E-mail: [email protected]

3. E-mail: [email protected]

4. The term Latino refers to residents who can trace ancestry to coun
tries of Latin America. In Phoenix most Latinos have roots in Mexi

co. The term is more inclusive than Mexican-American. We use the

term Anglo and White interchangeably. In the Southwest US, Anglo

is commonly used to designate White populations.

5. South Phoenix is administratively part of the city of Phoenix although

it is recognized as a distinct area within the city, one whose boundaries

have expanded with central city development over the last century.

6. The reference to San Francisco’s Chinatown is significant as it was

discursively constructed by Whites of the period as a center of filth,

moral corruption, and disease, and hence a putative threat to the

health and moral well being of the Anglo majority (Craddock 2000).

To compare South Phoenix to Chinatown is to place it in the context

of what the popular press held to be the most degraded of US ethnic
enclaves.

7. The US Census in this period listed Mexican Americans under
Whites, making it impossible to separate out Latino populations.

While the Census lists ‘foreign born’ Whites, which likely include

large numbers of Mexican born residents, the census doesn’t provide

sufficient information to separate out Latinos from European born

whites. While Mexican Americans were ‘White’ according to the

Census, there were nevertheless subject to racial stereotyping and

discrimination (Dimas 1999).

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