Migration, Environment, and the Search for Sanctuary

This public history project addresses two of the most urgent social issues today: migration and the environment. We do so by critically analyzing the ways in which migrants pursue environmental justice in Southern California. This collaboration ? of students and faculty in the Departments of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), and Asian American Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and members of Parent Pioneers, an activist community organization in Los Angeles ? re-assesses assumptions about migrants and their relationship with nature and the environment as a core partner of a global coalition of universities and organizations across 21 cities in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and South Africa. This unique, interdisciplinary project is both international in its intellectual scope and community-based in its grounding in the lived experiences of immigrants in Southern California. Using archival and interview methods, we challenge the long-standing premise underlying much of both environmental and migration scholarship that there is little to no relationship between the two issues. Instead, we argue that migrants and the larger social condition of migration are deeply intertwined with the environment and environmental social movements. In fact, migrants have been and continue to be significant actors in efforts to protect the environment.