South Gate & The Geography Of Environmental Racism
In Los Angeles, the map of industry has always been a map of inequality. From the 1930s onward, zoning boards, housing covenants, and freeway planners worked in tandem to sort the region by race and class—quietly determining who would breathe clean air and who would not.
The federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps—better known as redlining maps—colored vast stretches of Southeast Los Angeles in red, marking them as “hazardous” for investment. Those same neighborhoods would later become home to the city’s densest concentrations of heavy industry. Boyle Heights, Vernon, Huntington Park, and South Gate formed an industrial corridor that produced not only steel, glass, and rubber, but also some of the dirtiest air in the country.
By the 1980s, South Gate was hemmed in by smokestacks. The General Motors assembly plant, which had once provided thousands of union jobs, shut down in 1982, leaving behind contamination and unemployment in equal measure. Other facilities—metal recyclers, paint manufacturers, and chemical processors—continued to operate along the Los Angeles River. The city’s working-class Latino residents inherited an industrial landscape built for an earlier era, but without its economic benefits.
It was in this environment that, in the early 2000s, a private company proposed a new energy project: the Nueva Azalea Power Plant. Backed by Sunlaw Energy Partners, the proposal envisioned a natural gas–fired facility on a 32-acre industrial site. The name borrowed from South Gate’s official flower, as if civic pride could soften the reality of yet another polluting enterprise in an already overburdened community.
The company promised jobs, revenue, and “cleaner air,” claiming the facility would be so advanced it would actually emit cleaner air than the community was already breathing—an assertion that rested on the grim premise that South Gate’s air was among the most polluted in Los Angeles County.
The city council initially approved the project with little public notice. But word spread quickly. Spanish-language radio stations and grassroots networks mobilized residents, many of them mothers concerned about rising asthma rates among children. At a hastily convened public meeting, hundreds packed the chamber. Testimonies were emotional, defiant.
“We’re surrounded by factories,” one woman said. “Our kids can’t breathe, and you want to build another one?”
I was there, camera in hand, hoping to document the event for a project I was working on about Southeast L.A.—SELA. Before the meeting began, an official approached me and said recording would not be allowed. If I refused, I would be escorted out. I remember hesitating, weighing my right to document against the authority in front of me. In the end, I lowered my camera. But my memory of that night—the crowded room, the thick air of anger and resolve—remains clear.
Confronted by the crowd, the council reversed its decision. In 2001, after an advisory referendum overwhelmingly rejected the project, the Nueva Azalea Power Plant was officially canceled. The company withdrew.
The victory was local, but it revealed a larger pattern—one that environmental justice advocates were just beginning to name. Across Los Angeles, communities of color were consistently targeted for industrial development and waste disposal. In Wilmington, oil refineries operated within sight of schoolyards. In Boyle Heights and East L.A., the 710 freeway carried tens of thousands of diesel trucks each day. In Commerce, Exide Technologies would later be exposed for decades of lead contamination that poisoned nearby neighborhoods.
These were not accidents of geography. They were the outcomes of policy, zoning, and political neglect—a system in which certain populations were rendered disposable for the sake of economic growth elsewhere.
The South Gate fight over the Nueva Azalea Power Plant became one of many small but significant victories in what would come to be known as the environmental justice movement: a movement that insisted pollution was not evenly distributed, that communities like South Gate, Wilmington, and Boyle Heights had been forced to bear the hidden cost of Los Angeles’s prosperity.
Today, the same site where the plant was once proposed is home to the Azalea Regional Shopping Center, a LEED-certified retail complex praised for its sustainable design. The irony isn’t lost on those who remember the fight. The name remains, but its meaning has shifted—from a symbol of resistance to a brand of renewal.
For those who lived through it, the lesson endures: in places like South Gate, survival has always required more than adaptation. It has required the courage to breathe against the odds, and to keep speaking even when you’re told not to record.
Addendum
Since the time of the Nueva Azalea Power Plant proposal, South Gate has continued to evolve. New green spaces—including the Urban Orchard Park along the Los Angeles River and the ongoing Circle Park renovation—have opened or are in development, transforming formerly industrial land into areas of recreation, ecological restoration, and community gathering.
These projects are more than aesthetic improvements; they represent a continuation of the city’s struggle for environmental justice. Where residents once fought to prevent pollution from being imposed on their neighborhoods, they are now actively reclaiming and reshaping space—demonstrating that the fight for clean air, equitable land use, and the right to define progress is ongoing.