Wildflowers and Water: Desire,Joy,and Creativity in Environmental Justice Organizing

INTRODUCTION

In February 2020, a group of students, researchers, artists, and residents gathered at the Committee for A Better Arvin (CBA) in Arvin, California, for a tour of the Kern River guided by Rosanna Esparza, a retired clinical gerontologist who has lived and worked in Kern County for almost 10 years. Like other small towns around Bakersfield, Arvin is an epicenter of environmental justice organizing. In 2018, it passed a ground-breaking city council ordinance enforcing 91 meters setbacks between oil wells and schools or homes. ¹

One of the tour participants, Michelle Glass, is a public artist from Ventura County who has worked for the past 9 years with Arvin's Arte de la Tercera Edad art collective, a group of predominantly elder Latinx women. With Michelle, the Ladies had learned quilting, embroidery, and textile arts; now, they were working on a new project dyeing wool and yarn with natural materials. Yet they could not get the colors to come out consistently: reds, for instance, ranged from bright and vibrant to a muddier darker color.

At the tour, as the group was describing the smell of an aqueduct (one participant yelled out, “the Dead Sea!”), Michelle shared the Ladies problem of inconsistent colors and together they realized: each time, they had used water from a different place (Arvin, Bakersfield, or Ventura County). The different waters, and their contaminants, were making themselves known in the dyeing process. If, as Michelle described, natural dye records the color story of a place, contamination had become integral to that color story.

In many ways, the Kern River's first 16 km is a portrait of Kern County's economic and environmental issues. The river first travels through a hydroelectric power plant; further downstream, a canal sweeps about half the water into a tunnel and delivers it to city residents. As Rosanna explained, the remaining water is split: some irrigates the citrus and nut orchards covering the San Joaquin Valley. The rest goes to the Kern River Oil Field, where it is used in oil drilling and fracking, then treated before joining the irrigation canals. By the time the water reaches Highway 99, in the middle of the valley, it is contaminated with fracking and oil drilling chemicals, radioactive wastes, and the remnants of fertilizers and pesticides.

The tour followed the Kern River's flow to discuss the ways that oil and agriculture—the valley's two main economic drivers—impact each of our bodies in different ways depending on where we live. The tour and its confluence of interpersonal relationships, creative projects, and embodied presence that emerge from community were also a portrait of the ways that environmental justice organizing happens in Kern County. ² We believe that the practices of organizers and residents in Kern County have much to contribute to discussions of resilience and its critiques within climate and environmental justice research and organizing. Furthermore, feminist theorizing has not yet been taken up substantively within environmental justice engagements with resilience ³ —even though what is often interpreted as innate community resilience is in fact the feminized and, therefore, invisibilized reproductive labor of care.

In this article, we build from Indigenous and decolonial feminist theorizing to describe the labor of care, relationship building, and everyday creative practice that undergirds environmental justice organizing in Kern County. Specifically, we work with Eve Tuck's articulation of damage- and desire-based research to further situate the work of desire and joy in these practices. ⁴ Furthermore, both Rosanna's tours of the Kern River and the Ladies textile arts draw on long histories of prior organizing to reconnect people with land, water, and community. We argue that these feminist methods of relationship building help illuminate the politics of creativity and knowledge production in Kern County. ⁵

We believe that further articulating these methodologies is essential in an analysis of climate injustice that centers colonial relations. As Indigenous scholars have long argued, the unsustainable practices that produce climate change rely on colonial capitalist systems that devalue and dehumanize people and that disconnect people from the lands and waters where we live. ⁶ Furthermore, racial capitalism describes racial difference as necessarily produced through capitalism's function but then naturalized as degrees of difference. ⁷ This dehumanization rationalizes the extractive logics and extreme differences in health and prosperity that racial difference produces and that racial capitalism, in fact, requires. ⁸

Therefore, environmental injustice not only disproportionately impacts communities of color in the present, but more fundamentally arises from racial capitalist and colonial histories of land use, labor exploitation, and dispossession. Locating climate change as inherently part of racial capitalist and settler colonial logics shows the ways in which Kern County's frontline communities' disproportionate exposure to water contamination is not only an unfortunate externality that can be remedied within existing systems. Rather, it is inherent to the dehumanization and exploitation that racial capitalism requires. ⁹ From this vantage point, research on the resilience of frontline communities is insufficient because it does not unsettle the power dynamics of the present. In what follows, we show how community-based creative practices not only respond to specific climate justice issues. They also, methodologically, confront the foundational disconnection and dehumanization that racial capitalism and colonialism produce.

RESILIENCE, DAMAGE, AND DESIRE

Recent scholarship has addressed the ambivalences of resilience in environmental and climate justice planning. Scholars have shown that although resilience can be a strategic term to support community development, ¹⁰ and it is important to uplift the inherent strength within marginalized communities, an emphasis on resilience can also undermine the “justice” aim within environmental justice. Its definition as a community's ability to absorb disturbance ¹¹ without major change implicitly means returning to a state characterized by increasing state neglect of marginalized communities. ¹² Scholars have argued that notions of resilience as an inherent or “natural” capacity externalize the “life- and death-dealing effects” of capitalism ¹³ onto communities while promoting market-based technological solutions, ¹⁴ rather than addressing the structural and systematic inequalities that communities face. ¹⁵ Therefore, critics point to its susceptibility to appropriation within conservative agendas and its ability to defang more revolutionary or resistant impulses ¹⁶ : as one scholar wrote, “The rallying-cry of the early 21st century is not ‘revolution’ (as in the early 20th century), but ‘resilience.’” ¹⁷

Eve Tuck's 2009 influential open letter to communities calls for a moratorium on what she calls “damage-centered research.” ¹⁸ It also provides a different lens to consider the valences of resilience. As Tuck describes,

“[Damage-centered research] looks to historical exploitation, domination, and colonization to explain contemporary brokenness, such as poverty, poor health, and low literacy. Common sense tells us this is a good thing, but the danger in damage-centered research is that it is a pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community. Here's a more applied definition of damage-centered research: research that operates, even benevolently, from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation.” ¹⁹

She later describes this theory of change as a litigation-type mode in which researchers assume the role of litigators, “putting the world on trial” ²⁰ by articulating damage as evidence of harm done and, therefore, evidence that reparations are required.

We suggest that Tuck's critique of damage-based research can deepen critiques of resilience. While at the surface, resilience and damage might appear to be opposed, both resilience and damage-based frameworks divorce characteristics from the historical patterns and contemporary structural inequities that produce them.

Furthermore, although damage-based research singularly defines a community through oppression rather than deeper historical context, resilience framings can also dehistoricize the ongoing impacts of colonization and afterlives of slavery. Therefore, both ultimately disconnect the complex entanglements of power, oppression, autonomy, and agency in everyday life. In the case of environmental injustice, resilience discourses can make unequal impacts seem to arise from within communities rather than from the colonial and capitalist underpinnings of climate change itself. For these reasons, the San Joaquin Valley activists we work with rarely articulate their work through the frame of resilience.

In response, Tuck proposes a turn to desire-based frameworks. Importantly, this is not a one-to-one shift from damage to desire. Instead, thinking with desire proceeds from an entirely different theory of change that does not require establishing harm as the basis for reparations but rather opens different imaginations: “Desire, yes, accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities.” ²¹ This is important because one of the seductions of resilience as a framework is its promise of shifting from a deficit-based model to a strengths-based model. But a strengths-based model that reduces strength to a flattened resilience (whether innate or externally imposed) erases the ongoing practices of care, healing, and relating that maintain internal community strength.

Tuck describes desire as inhabiting a “third space” between the produced dichotomy of resistance (or revolution) versus reproduction, instead more rigorously describing the ways that power, oppression, and resistance thread through daily life. Feminist theory, in fact, has long done important work to move beyond similar dichotomies, having long shown that scholarship and organizing that hierarchize spectacular forms of resistance over more mundane forms implicitly mirror capitalism's hierarchies of paid versus reproductive labor. ²² Just as capitalism relies on reproductive labor and on rendering that labor outside the capitalist relation, ²³ so too can research or organizing that does not attend to all the forms of racialized gendered nonpaid labor involved in everyday living. ²⁴ Tuck's analytic of desire attends closely to the daily multiplicity of resistance and reproductive labor. ²⁵

Desire also troubles dichotomous relationships between researchers and communities: against a long history of extractive research, ²⁶ prioritizing desire in research agendas makes space to reconsider all participants' roles as knowledge producers and members of various communities. ²⁷ In particular, decolonial theorist Maria Lugones has described the work of tantear as a crucial aspect of decolonial feminist research and organizing. ²⁸ As Linnea Beckett describes tantear in the context of a popular education project, it is a “tactile searching together in the dark, listening and feeling for each other toward a knowledge production dependent on the relationship over the direction or end goal.” ²⁹

Because capitalism and colonialism try to disconnect us from each other and from the lands and places we live, working to regrow those connections is in itself deeply resistant and essential—specifically because it also produces a greater ability to withstand the consistent stressors of colonial capitalism. We argue that, by moving from desire and the joy of relationship, creative practices respond to a deeply historical view of community and land, furthering community organizing toward environmental and climate injustice.

WILDFLOWERS, WATER, AND PUBLIC ART

When Michelle first came to Arvin, her relationships deepened through a long process of tantear. Michelle originally volunteered to teach preschool art, where community parents introduced her to the ladies of the Arte de la Tercera Edad collective. They had just formed a Zumba group; “They said, you come do Zumba with us first, we'll do art with you after,” Michelle described. Those relationships slowly developed into a multiyear series of workshops around wildflowers, migration, and women's labor.

Many of the Mujeres are community leaders; when the senior center closed, for instance, they distributed meals in place of the meals-on-wheels program. Many worked in the fields while raising children and grandchildren, and now they wanted something of their own that would still contribute to the community. As they began envisioning an art process, many of the women wanted to relearn the traditional textile skills from Oaxaca and other regions in Mexico they had never gotten a chance to learn.

These workshops became the Nomadic Murals Project, the Arvin Quilt Project, and 1000 Wildflowers. The group taught themselves to embroider, and together they made wildflowers that simultaneously represented the dwindling wildflowers around Arvin and women's labor in the community. They also made seed ofrendas (offerings), packets of decomposable paper holding poppy seeds, decorated with prayers and images, and planted in the hills above Arvin.

Although these creative projects emerged from community members' desires, they also register the region's colonial and racial histories. Before colonial contact, the Central Valley was an expanse of seasonal lakes and wetlands, and several Indigenous nations including the Yokuts lived in the foothills and along the lakes. ³⁰ Archival sources describe the hills being covered in fields of wildflowers. However, after United States annexation of California in 1848, settlers fundamentally restructured the San Joaquin Valley's ecosystem toward large-scale agriculture and oil extraction.

Questions about proper forms of labor and land ownership fundamentally influenced emergent racial formations in California. For instance, debates about whether Mexican land grant holders were white, and whether Indigenous peoples were Black, hinged on what economies and property relations would define the new state. ³¹ Since then, the settler state's growing agricultural industry has consistently required the racialized exploitation of farm workers. Although historically this included Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Philippinx, white, and Black migrant groups, current agricultural labor is predominantly done by Latinx workers. ³²

The ofrendas and textile wildflowers threaded this history together and are an example of the power of desire-based projects. Kern County is still known for its wildflowers, and Arvin celebrates an annual wildflower festival. Beginning from this communally beloved season, the project's focus on wildflowers simultaneously mourned and celebrated the land and its histories, in relationship with Arvin's histories of migration.

In their next project, they began using naturally occurring materials to dye fibers. As Michelle described it, natural dye captures the color story of a place through the water, natural materials, and fibers—and how they intersect. This project led to the realization that the constituents within waters affected the colors they could produce. They did more color testing, using bottled water versus tap water, and the conversation expanded: while they worked, participants began sharing what they had heard about water contamination.

Meanwhile, they created a quilt made of 150 squares including birds, wildflowers, houses, the United Farm Workers Union flag, the American flag, the Mexican flag, and many more. The art not only provided a different way of grappling with history but also added different valences to the languages of environmental justice organizing.

Similarly, Rosanna first envisioned the tours as an experimental art form that built on people's embodied experiences traced lines across landscapes. Already, generations of people flocked to Kern County to see its wildflowers. But, she thought, what if she took the principles of a tour and instead used them to illustrate, to Kern County residents and others, how the oil and gas industry undermines quality of life for many people of color in favor of stockholders? What if people intentionally felt the throbbing headaches, nausea, vomiting, or burning eyes and itchy skin of chemical exposure for an hour or two?

She consistently rooted the tours in community participation. After retirement, Rosanna moved to Bakersfield and become deeply involved with community environmental justice organizing, centering intergenerational involvement in particular. The tours mixed art, science, and participation, forming a way to directly address and publicize the public health risks of oil activity in the heart of oil country. Although they focus on potential toxicity and damage to health and human bodies, they do so in a way that prioritizes community connection, relationships, and desire.

One activity along the tour invited participants to lie on pieces of butcher paper; others traced their outlines, and then participants illustrated what they felt during the tour—sore feet, headaches, or tightness of the chest—in addition to what they felt on a daily basis living in Kern County. Through these “body maps,” participants produced artistic renderings of their embodied experiences and how the oil and agricultural fields affected their daily lives. Participants also shared personal stories of their own relationships to the tour sites: Hart Park, for instance, abuts an oil field, yet is a popular place for families to escape the urban heat in the summer. Therefore, the tours are a useful example of a desire-based framework: while they do not turn away from toxicity, nor do they make toxicity itself a defining factor or the basis for external reparations. They also form an example of tantear: beyond Rosanna's explicit educational objectives, these tours prioritize time spent and relationships built. Like the wildflowers, they serve as a way of connecting people with each other and with the structural conditions that have produced Kern County as such a dense place of environmental contamination, creative practice, and organizing.

CONCLUSION

As we discussed and finalized this article, the Kern County Planning Commission held a public meeting on a new ordinance that would nearly double the oil wells in Kern County. Hundreds of residents testified against the ordinance through calls, voicemails, and live testimony. Yet ultimately, the commission voted 4-0 in favor of the oil ordinance ³³ —even in the face of such opposition—in part because of an epistemic regime that disregards lived experience as evidence and that overlooks the labor that is required to buffer against the chemical toxicity communities experience.

In some ways, this loss shows the problems with damage-based models: even 200 calls articulating the damage of oil-related contamination could still be overlooked in favor of increased oil development. In contrast, one of the reasons that Arvin passed the ordinance (already discussed) mandating a 300-foot setback from oil and gas infrastructure was the longstanding relationships among community members and environmental organizations. Therefore, we believe that Kern County's creative relationship-based community organizing shows the necessity of desire-based work in response to the challenges of climate change and global capitalism.

Understanding environmental and climate injustice through racial capitalism and colonialism underscores the fact that connection despite dehumanization and isolation is deeply political work in itself. Because capitalism and colonialism work to disconnect and dehumanize, working together to regrow those connections is necessary to maintain the capacity to withstand consistent pervasive stressors. This is the third space of desire-based research.

In both the Arte de la Tercera Edad collective's textiles and Rosanna's tours, the confluence of artistic, relational, and embodied modes of understanding the world created new understandings of water and different relationships to it. These conversations and projects helped share experiences and build trust, hope, and coping mechanisms, improving the quality of life for all. In this way, they continue to do the emotionally sustaining resistant revolutionary work of creativity and connection.