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Latinos in the United States believe Congress and the president should address climate change, though their top priorities are the economy, job market, and inflation.
Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew’s director of race and ethnicity research, made the observations during a May 22 forum in Washington for young Latino leaders, “Climate Change, Environmental Justice, and Latino Priorities: Hearing the Cry of the Earth and the Cry of the Poor.” The forum was held in conjunction with the ninth anniversary of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, Laudato si’.
Lopez said 61% of U.S. Latinos said Congress and the president should address climate change. However, environmental concerns are not their top priority, he added. “The economy, the job market, and inflation actually rate much higher for Latinos,” according to Lopez.
Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjivar of Washington, in an opening reflection, said that if one reads salvation history in the Bible, “the care of creation is there. The theme of ecology is there,” as God has renewed everything Earth contains through Christ, “including humans.”
Even so, Bishop Menjivar said, “Earth cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her because of our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods which God has endowed her. We have come to see (ourselves) as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at our will.”
Another prelate, Bishop Joseph Tyson of Yakima in south-central Washington state, said, “Many people in my diocese are undocumented” agricultural workers, and most Masses in the diocese are celebrated in Spanish.
To prepare his seminarians for ministry in the diocese, the bishop sends them to the fields each summer to pick fruit alongside the migrant workers. “It’s a blessed place,” Bishop Tyson said of his native Yakima, “but the conditions our people work in can be very, very hazardous,” citing dangers in agricultural production, forest fires, exposure to pesticides, and “labor practices that are not always fair.”
People of color in the United States seem to live closest to all manner of treatment plants or pollution-spewing manufacturing facilities.
“The origin story I hear from our staff and our leaders and our community leaders is more urgent: ‘My child can’t read.’ ‘We don’t have safe drinking water.’ ‘We can’t afford (housing) prices, but I didn’t come here to have a refinery in my community,’” said Elena Gaona, who serves on the communications team for the League of Conservation Voters, and was formerly a communications specialist at the Catholic Climate Covenant.
Gaona takes her linkage of Pope Francis’ urging that Catholics hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor to her Sunday school class in second grade. “We were learning from the catechism: Thou shalt not kill. Killing is not just boom, boom, boom. You also have the ability to kill people’s spirits,” she recalled the teacher telling her students. “I grew up with that lesson my whole life.”
Her own work has “made me think of how climate change has a very physical connection, The environment is harming them. The cry of the poor is going back to that issue of thou shalt not kill. People’s spirits and souls are harmed,” Gaona said.
Washington Post journalist Silvia Foster-Frau, whose family hails from Puerto Rico, told of how climate change affected them profoundly. They weathered Hurricane Maria in 2017, its surprising intensity attributed to changing climate patterns. “My grandfather, who has now passed away, there was six months where his home had no electricity,” she said. “Imagine a 90-year-old man spending six months with no electricity. My uncle was traveling with a machete just to get FEMA (U.S. Federal Emergency Management Administration) rations.”
Foster-Frau, who shared a Pulitzer Prize – the highest honor in U.S. journalism — with several Post colleagues in May for their investigation into the AR-15 assault rifle, also investigated a water crisis in Sunland Park, New Mexico, on the state’s southernmost border next to El Paso, Texas, on the east and Mexico on the south. Problems surfaced not long after the city was incorporated in 1983, Foster-Frau explained. “There was an incinerator placed right over their water source,” she said, and citizens worked to get permits for the incinerator withdrawn. However, 85% of the residents speak Spanish, and most meeting notices were in English.
She said longtime residents reported worms coming out of their water tap, and of “babies being born with partial or no brains.” Records Foster-Frau obtained show illegally high levels of arsenic in their drinking water. “Families had a lot of family members dying of cancer,” she said, “diabetes along with cancer, hair loss.” Arsenic occurs naturally in the rock in New Mexico, according to Foster-Frau, but arsenic treatment plants are few and far between – and nonexistent in Sunland Park.
“It’s been 50 years since the Safe Drinking Water Act. How are we now?”, she asked. “Water issues disproportionately affect low-income communities,” she added, with a disproportionately higher percentage of their residents suffering from waterborne illnesses.
Talking about climate change can be tricky in any language. “I don’t use the word ‘climate change’ a lot in English. I try to use the word ‘growing season,’ especially for Anglophones,” Bishop Tyson said. “‘Tell me when cherries came in 40 years ago.’ ‘Oh, the Fourth of July.’ ‘When do they come in now?’ ‘June.’ I’m trying to wedge this open” to get them to think about this, he added.
A phrase Pope Francis used in Laudato si’ and since is “throwaway culture.” But Bishop Tyson said the Spanish version of the encyclical uses the word, “descartados.” “In other words, it’s like we treat people like packaging, and we just discard the packaging and keep the product,” he said.