When Jesse Marquez walked into the Los Angeles harbor commission hearing room in 2013, he didn’t bring a consultant or a slideshow. He brought death certificates.
Each sheet of paper, he told the commissioners, bore the name of a Wilmington resident killed by respiratory illness. Wedged between two of the country’s busiest ports, the neighborhood is dotted with oil refineries, chemical plants, railyards and freeways. It’s one of several portside communities known by some as a “diesel death zone,” where residents aremore likely to die from cancer than just about anywhere else in the L.A. Basin. For decades, Marquez refused to let anyone forget it.
He knocked on doors, installed air monitors, counted oil wells, built coalitions, staged demonstrations, fought legal battles andaffected policy. He dove deep into impenetrable environmental impact documents…