ABSTRACT
Participatory action research formed the basis of long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Pacoima, an urban community confronting toxics, such as household lead, toxic dumping, and diesel pollution, through resident coalition-building on behalf of community action to mitigate these toxic threats to their homes and neighbourhoods. Pacoima, a working class community in the northeast San Fernando Valley in the City of Los Angeles, has endured multiple crises, including deindustrialization, transnational migration, and environmental degradation, compounded by natural hazards, including the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. A largely African-American community until the mid-1990s, Pacoima is now approximately 85 per cent Latino. The trauma of the earthquake forced residents to acknowledge that their community ’s built and natural environments had become progressively degraded well before the earthquake. The shared experience of the disaster helped to establish a place-centered community identity among neighbours, many recently migrated into the area, as they began to reconstruct after the temblor. As neighbours set out to repair their homes and to clean up their blocks, they also extended their helping resources to people in adjacent neighbourhoods. A grassroots organization, called Pacoima Beautiful, which was initially formed to help residents clean up but then grew to promote environmental health and justice education, leadership development, and advocacy skills to residents, has an agenda of civic engagement on behalf of environmental awareness and community building. An action research approach designed to enhance the quality of life in the community, together with the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility, informed the various projects undertaken by Pacoima Beautiful. My fieldwork focused on the tension between lay and professional knowledge among stakeholders as they set priorities and develop strategies to carry out a broad-based action research agenda on behalf of identifying toxic substances, understanding the health implications of potential toxic risks, and ameliorating those risks. The process of community-based participatory action research, together with ethnography, describes how the Pacoima-based environmental justice project followed a strategy that resulted in long-term community capacity to improve the local environment.
