[ El Paso, Texas, witnessed the first violent outburst of US
eco-fascism—and is also a living rebuttal to the hateful ideology]
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ECO-FASCISM, UNCOVERED  
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Ruxandra Guidi
December 27, 2022
Sierra Magazine
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_ El Paso, Texas, witnessed the first violent outburst of US
eco-fascism—and is also a living rebuttal to the hateful ideology _

, Illustrations by Shonagh Rae

 

THE CIELO VISTA WALMART Supercenter in El Paso, Texas, is located east
of downtown, near most of the city's Mexican American neighborhoods
and about six miles from the Bridge of the Americas, which connects
the US community to its Mexican neighbor, Ciudad Juárez. The store
keeps its doors open 17 hours a day, seven days a week, and it's
almost always busy. Like all big-box stores, the Walmart sits on the
edge of a sprawling parking lot.

[Illustration shows a parking lot at night with a van and two cars and
a shopping cart spread out.]

"Vanlife" devotees and people living out of their cars know the
parking lot as a place to access restrooms and park overnight. Locals
and middle-class cross-border shoppers from Mexico know the store for
its low prices and aggressive marketing. For Josiah Heyman, a scholar
at the University of Texas at El Paso who for years has studied the
borderlands and immigration through the lens of cultural anthropology,
the big asphalted parcel can also be seen as a symbol of a worldview.
"The view across the Walmart parking lot is the impression that there
are these hordes of immigrants who are poor," he said, offering an
all-too-common perception (which he does not share) of Latinos and
Latin American immigrants. "And they're men, because there's this
gendered fear of darker-skinned men hanging around."

LIKE EVERYONE IN THIS border city of a quarter million people, Heyman,
a curly-haired, spectacled man originally from Oklahoma, has been
trying to make sense of what took place at the Cielo Vista Walmart
three years ago. Late on an August morning in 2019, a 21-year-old
white man from an upper-middle-class suburb of Dallas pulled into the
parking lot when approximately 3,000 people were in and around the
store. Dressed in a black shirt and cargo pants and carrying an AK-47,
the man opened fire on whoever crossed his path, targeting shoppers in
the parking lot and throughout the store's aisles. The shooter killed
23 people and wounded another 26. Today, a memorial to the victims
stands at the edge of the parking lot. It's been dubbed the "Grand
Candela"—a collection of 30-foot-tall aluminum columns in
remembrance of the people who were murdered.

Before his killing rampage, the shooter published a white supremacist
text online that seemed galvanized by the view of the Walmart parking
lot. The El Paso killer expressed support for a self-described
"eco-fascist" in Christchurch, New Zealand, who, just four months
earlier, had murdered 51 people in a terrorist act targeting
immigrants. The Walmart shooter wrote, "I am simply defending my
country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an
invasion."

Contemporary eco-fascist rhetoric cannot show a connection between
environmental destruction and immigration for a simple reason: There
isn't one.

The killer went on to lay out a plan to separate the United States
into different territories according to race and cited the "great
replacement theory"—a conspiracy theory claiming that whites are
being demographically and culturally replaced by nonwhites. He blamed
Latinos for taking away native-born Americans' jobs and for destroying
the environment. The shooter advocated for "decreasing" their numbers.
"If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more
sustainable," he wrote. According to federal prosecutors, the attack
was meant to scare Latinos into leaving the United States.

[Illustration shows a hole in a chain-link fence, a large moon, a
refinery, a flower, and a man sweeping.]

In 1998, Heyman published a monograph, Finding a Moral Heart for US
Immigration Policy, which was intended as a response to border
vigilantism and anti-immigrant policies—a fever of xenophobia that
has only grown more inhumane since then. "I wrote that book not to be
optimistic," he told me, "but to think about a vision of what could be
done. I wasn't really happy with tearing everything down without
offering something else in its place." How about seeing immigrants
with compassion? Heyman asked. What if we drafted policies that
recognized the drivers of migration?

More than two decades after Heyman called for "finding a moral heart,"
immigration policy in the United States is more polarized than ever,
with a growing number of US citizens expressing opposition to
immigration. The Cielo Vista Walmart terrorist attack was horrific
evidence of the violence lurking just below the surface of white
nationalism.

The Walmart massacre also represented the first lethal outburst of
American eco-fascism—that is, violence in the name of environmental
conservation. The El Paso terrorist attack catapulted into public
awareness the "greening of hate" that has long haunted the American
environmental movement. In the 1990s, Betsy Hartmann, professor
emerita of development studies at Hampshire College, coined the term
greening of hate as a way to describe how scapegoating immigrants for
environmental degradation is a way to lure environmentalists into the
folds of the nativist movement.

HARTMANN HAD BEEN INVITED to debate Virginia Abernethy of the
nonprofit Carrying Capacity Network at an environmental law conference
in Oregon in 1994. "I quickly realized I wasn't debating a fellow
environmentalist or family-planning advocate," Hartmann later wrote,
"but rather an anti-immigrant activist for whom population and
carrying capacity were euphemisms for circling our wagons and closing
our borders." She has been tracking such discourse ever since, warning
how it "too easily plays into the hands of apocalyptic white
nationalism."

The exact contours of eco-fascist ideology can be hard to pin down,
given that it's such a mash of conspiratorial white supremacy. But in
its broadest definition, eco-fascism sees itself as a kind of
environmentalism that advocates violence or the exclusion of some
groups of people due to their race or class—or both. Since the 2019
terrorist attack in El Paso, eco-fascism has continued to be a
touchstone for some members of the violent right wing. The shooter who
killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store last May
described himself as an "ethno-nationalist eco-fascist."

"Eco-fascism has become kind of a popular buzzword for talking about
these terrorist attacks that have happened in the last few years,"
Aaron Flanagan, a research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law
Center who studies white-power movements across several ideologies,
told me. "But largely, I encourage people to look at the historical
legacy of white supremacy." The term eco-fascism is confusing,
Flanagan said, as it doesn't encapsulate the insidious ways that white
dominance and exclusion have been foundational to American
conservation.

It's true that strands of white supremacist thinking run deep in the
history of American environmentalism. It's also true that contemporary
eco-fascist rhetoric cannot show a connection between environmental
destruction and immigration for a simple reason: There isn't one.
Blaming immigrants for widespread environmental challenges is bogus.
Immigration to the US is not considered a major source of population
growth, as immigrants make up about 14 percent of the population, the
same as in 1870. And, in any case, all the available evidence suggests
that it's not working-class immigrants but large-scale industry and
affluent, US-born Americans that are driving consumerism, climate
change, and the loss of wildlife habitat.

Yet within some right-wing circles, the paranoia persists that
immigration is, somehow, a cause of environmental destruction. So
then, what do we call a 21-year-old who holds such hate for brown
people in a brown city? What does it mean when seven out of 10
Republicans believe in the great replacement theory, according to a
recent poll by the Southern Poverty Law Center? It might be tempting
to dismiss such fear as mere delusions, but it would be dangerous to
do so. The hate-filled view of the El Paso Walmart parking lot does
not reflect reality, yet it's one that keeps spreading online, shaping
perceptions and opinions that have proved challenging to explain,
difficult to extricate, and deadly.

ON JULY 19, FOX NEWS host Tucker Carlson went off on one of his
trademark monologues that blend together fact and fiction to promote
the idea that the United States is—or should be—a white nation.
"Sometime around 1965," he told the camera, "our leaders stopped
trying to make the United States a hospitable place for American
citizens, their constituents, to have their own families. That used to
be considered the central task of leadership, perpetuating the
population. If people are happy and confident, they'll have kids.
They're vested in the society. And if they're not, they won't."

The mention of 1965 was a racist dog whistle. That year, President
Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act.
The law did away with national-origin quotas that favored immigration
from northern and western Europe, and it led to a shift that we still
see today in which a growing number of immigrants to the United States
are coming from the Global South and a majority are arriving from
Mexico (around 25 percent, according to the most recent numbers
available). In the view of its proponents, the 1965 law created a more
welcoming immigration system. "The bill . . . will not upset the
ethnic mix of our society," Senator Ted Kennedy told the Senate at the
time. "It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs."

Carlson and his audience see things differently. Carlson has become
infamous (or famous, depending on one's politics) for giving a sheen
of respectability to white nationalist ideas. Among Fox News hosts and
Republican elected officials, this is not unusual. During an interview
with the network in 2021, Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick said
that the immigrants entering the United States are "trying to take
over our country without firing a shot."

What makes Carlson's white nationalism noteworthy is how explicitly he
ties anti-immigration views to conservation ideals. Take his November
20, 2019, broadcast: "One of the greatest blessings we have as
Americans is the amazing pristine beauty of our country," he declared.
"Even with 320 million people living here, this country still is not
particularly crowded. . . . The old environmental movement understood
that, and was why they campaigned for lower immigration
levels—because crowded countries are never beautiful countries."
Carlson may not be an eco-fascist (he is careful, always, to say he
doesn't believe in white supremacy). Yet his statements represent a
way of laundering some eco-fascist rhetoric.

As an ideology, eco-fascism has had a complex history. In their book,
The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right, Sam Moore
and Alex Roberts make a case for keeping the definition simple:
"Perhaps the main purpose of [this] book as a whole is to convert
popular worry about 'ecofascism' into more clear-eyed opposition to
the forms of racialized power that are wielded over and through the
environment, be they 'fascist' or not." In other words, white
dominance, exclusion, and hate have been foundational to the history
of this country—and the American environmental movement, past and
present, is not immune to these pathologies.

The dark web and social media have mutated and further radicalized
understandings of US history. The authors of The Rise of Ecofascism
argue that one thing that defines eco-fascism online is its
absurdity—but that even its inherent confusions may not be enough to
diminish its attractiveness to some people. "It is not the radicalism
of these arguments that should give us pause so much as their
strangely incoherent juxtapositions of disparate parts," they write.
"The nature politics that emerges from this wing of the Far Right . .
. is both repugnant and trivial, although its danger is that neither
will limit its spread."

Today's eco-fascist rhetoric is at once unprecedented and a long time
coming. It represents one of multiple desperate attempts by the Right
to scapegoat immigrants, despite the fact that the immigrant
population is plateauing and despite the data that points to how
prosperous Americans tend to drive much more consumption than
working-class immigrants do.

In this era of conspiracy theories, however, facts and data can do
only so much to advance the truth. Especially if, as in this case, the
truth points to a long, troubling history of how one strain of US
environmentalism has sought to make a link in the American mind
between immigration and environmental destruction.

SPEAKING TO ME VIA a video call from a wood cabin in Oregon last
summer, Hop Hopkins, the Sierra Club's director of organizational
transformation, wore his trademark felt cowboy hat and plaid shirt. "I
don't think most people are clear about eco-fascism and white
nationalism," he told me. "They think they are two different forests,
but they actually come from the same seed." Starting from this
country's foundation on the enslavement of Africans and the attempted
annihilation of Indigenous peoples, racism permeates every aspect of
US culture. As a product of this history, eco-fascism is not new,
Hopkins argues. We just "haven't been able to scale our awareness and
knowledge of these pernicious movements as they've gained more
traction and steam." And this is very dangerous: As ecological
breakdown becomes more acute, people of color and immigrants around
the world will bear the brunt of its impacts. If eco-fascists have
their way, people of color and immigrants will face an additional
burden—more of them will be blamed for anthropogenic climate change.

When he joined the Sierra Club eight years ago, Hopkins admitted,
neither the organization nor the larger environmental movement was
ready to receive this complicated history. Today, there is growing
consensus about just how entwined the roots of eco-fascism and the
roots of American environmentalism really are.

In August 1901, one month before becoming the youngest president in US
history, 42-year-old Theodore Roosevelt visited Colorado Springs and
delivered a speech titled "Manhood and Statehood," praising westward
expansion. "It is a record of men who greatly dared and greatly did; a
record of wanderings wider and more dangerous than those of the
Vikings; a record of endless feats of arms, of victory after victory
in the ceaseless strife waged against wild man and wild nature," he
declared. "The winning of the West was the great epic feat in the
history of our race."

Everyone in the audience would have understood that "our race" meant
the white descendants of European colonists. As Indigenous peoples
continued to face massacres and removals from their ancestral
territories, Roosevelt would be lauded for establishing five national
parks and four national monuments made up of Native territories.
Meanwhile, his friend and fellow conservationist Madison Grant turned
to racist pseudoscience to make a case for preserving the supposedly
superior traits of America's "Nordic" peoples. His book, The Passing
of the Great Race, hugely influenced America's first restrictionist
immigration policies targeting non-Europeans as well as the
articulation of the white supremacist ideology. Roosevelt praised the
book. So did Adolf Hitler, who, in a letter to Grant, described it as
his "bible."

In the same year that Roosevelt delivered his "Manhood and Statehood"
address, John Muir published Our National Parks, which would catapult
him into national fame and make him among the country's most prominent
conservationists. Muir's views about the "cleanliness" of nature were
steeped in a white-centric world­view that was widespread among
European Americans of that time. Other Sierra Club founders took such
a worldview into more dangerous territory. Mountaineer and scientist
Joseph LeConte was a Confederate sympathizer, and David Starr Jordan,
the founding president of Stanford University, was a prominent
eugenicist who pushed for the forced sterilization of Black and
Indigenous people.

In the mid-20th century, the false idea that people of color had an
outsize environmental impact continued to burble within the US
environmental movement—even as the civil rights movement was
beginning to overturn a white-centric worldview. In 1968, the Sierra
Club published Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, which
blamed poor nonwhites for ecological disaster. "Some of the most
depressing situations are found in Latin America," the Ehrlichs wrote.
"There, politicians have generally been far behind those of Asia in
recognizing overpopulation as a major source of their problems."

The book singled out population growth in poorer nations—rather than
total global resource consumption, mostly driven by wealthy
nations—in predicting that hundreds of millions of people would
starve to death in the following two decades. Those predictions proved
untrue. But the book provided fuel to individuals and groups opposed
to US immigration, voices that grew louder in subsequent years as they
preached the myth that immigrants were a danger to the American
environment.

Few people did more to advance that myth than a man considered to be
the architect of today's anti-immigration movement: John Tanton.
Starting in the 1960s, he joined scores of environmental organizations
and founded three—the Federation for American Immigration Reform,
the Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA—that advocated
for population control, nativism, and eugenics through
environmentalist arguments. "North America cannot accommodate huge
additional numbers—it is now quite fully occupied, with scarcely any
virgin land or untapped resources awaiting settlers," he wrote, absent
supporting evidence, in 1994.

As part of his larger effort to bring such views into the mainstream,
Tanton tried to make anti-immigration policy a centerpiece of the
Sierra Club. On two separate occasions, in the late 1990s and early
2000s, Tanton and his followers attempted to take over the Sierra
Club's board of directors to adopt an anti-immigration policy as part
of the organization's priorities. To the credit of the Sierra Club
membership, both attempts failed. But they revealed the extent to
which some environmentalists imagined a link between immigration and
environmental problems. (Tanton died in 2019, two weeks before a
terrorist opened fire on the Cielo Vista Walmart in El Paso.)

The efforts to weaponize environmental concerns in order to advance an
anti-immigrant agenda continue. In 2021, Arizona's attorney general,
Mark Brnovich, sued the Biden administration on the grounds that it
had failed to do an environmental impact study of its immigration
policies. In his suit, Brnovich argued, "Migrants . . . directly
result in the release of pollutants, carbon dioxide, and other
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which directly affects air
quality."

IF EL PASO HAS the awful distinction of being the first place in the
United States where eco-fascist ideas erupted in violence, it is also
representative of something else: a place that is almost a reverse
image of the white supremacist ideology fueling the great replacement
theory. El Paso is a binational border city that's home to Mexicans
and Mexican Americans who work, study, shop, dream, live, and die like
everyone else. This city with a roughly 80 percent Latino population
is also steadily growing and thriving. The border community is a
living challenge to the premise of eco-fascism: It shows us how
immigrants and their descendants aren't, in fact, responsible for
environmental degradation. On the contrary, their inclusion in US
society will be key for sustainable growth, environmental justice, and
public land conservation. El Paso, and its firebrand Latino-led
environmentalism, is a lab for America's future.

I met Cemelli de Aztlan in El Paso on a 100°F spring day. We drove in
her car with the air conditioning on, but it barely kicked in, so she
kept the windows open as she took me on a "toxic tour" of El Barrio
Chamizal. The neighborhood, meaning "thicket" in Spanish, is a hub of
industrial activity in one of the oldest and poorest residential areas
in south-central El Paso. De Aztlan is a community organizer with La
Mujer Obrera, a Chicano, women-led organization that was founded in
1981 to take on local environmental fights along with labor, housing,
and women's rights campaigns in El Paso. As an organizer, she's
focused on getting this community of 8,000 people—especially its
mothers and grandmothers—engaged in environmental and social justice
issues.

In the mid-20th century, El Chamizal made sense for the folks who
called it home: It was an affordable neighborhood where garment
workers could be close to the factories where they toiled. Now the
garment industry is gone, and heavily polluting recycling facilities
have been grandfathered into the neighborhood. Local residents have
had little choice but to live next to them.

De Aztlan drove by a small adobe home where her grandmother, a Mexican
garment worker, used to live. She made another turn, and we crossed
back into the industrial zone where her daughter's school sits.
Frederick Douglass Elementary used to be a school for Black children,
and it remained segregated until 1956. Today, nearly all Douglass
Elementary students are Latino and from low-income families.

Behind the school, she pointed out a mountain of metal: W. Silver, a
recycling facility that extends across seven city blocks and takes in
metals, electronics, and batteries. The facility generates a fine dust
that blows into Douglass Elementary. "We've been able to pressure [the
company] to get some of it moved, but the soil they left behind is
still in need of a cleanup," De Aztlan said. The company has reduced
the amount of waste it dumps in El Chamizal and now ships some of it
to Santa Teresa, New Mexico, a community a half-hour drive north of El
Paso that's 80 percent Latino.

De Aztlan took me by Interstate 10 to show me where 18-wheelers line
up during rush hour, and by the bus depot, another major source of
dangerous particulate matter that drifts into the Douglass Elementary
playground. The American Lung Association ranks El Paso as the
12th-worst US city for ozone pollution, beating Chicago, with a
population four times bigger. And El Chamizal is largely at the center
of this pollution, with its truck emissions and high concentration of
power plants and industrial boilers. Add to the mix steadily rising
temperatures caused by climate change and you can begin to imagine how
smog pollution in El Paso will likely become worse in coming years,
and how it'll affect some families more than others.

The story of El Chamizal—a working-class Latino community that's
facing the brunt of industrial encroachment and pollution and the
impacts of climate change—is hardly unique. For years, researchers
have found that on average, Black, Latino, and Asian people are
exposed to higher than average levels of fine particle pollution.
People of color, the EPA says, also face disproportionate negative
impacts from climate change, including air pollution, flooding, and
excessive heat.

At the same time, communities of color are more likely to be in favor
of stronger environmental protections—very likely because they tend
to be disproportionately affected by environmental abuses. According
to a 2019 poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication,
Latinos and Blacks are more concerned than whites about climate
change. This attitude extends to greater support for conserving water,
reducing air pollution, and protecting wildlife. An estimated 69
percent of registered Latino voters polled said they were alarmed or
concerned about global warming—compared with 49 percent of white
respondents.

Calling themselves Familias Unidas del Chamizal, De Aztlan and other
neighborhood women got together in 2017 to pressure local and state
officials to regulate industry emissions. Within a year, they joined a
coalition of environmental and community groups, including the Sierra
Club, to sue the EPA. Their lawsuit claimed that for years the EPA
ignored El Paso's unsafe smog levels and failed to enforce the Clean
Air Act.

In 2020, a court sided with Familias Unidas, and the EPA demanded the
regulation of all new sources of pollution in the area. But the Texas
Commission on Environmental Quality has appealed the decision,
claiming the ozone pollution is coming from south of the border. Yet
just 3.5 miles from El Chamizal (and north of the US-Mexico border), a
Marathon Petroleum refinery remains one of the city's largest
industrial sources of dangerous pollutants, including PM2.5, PM10,
volatile organic compounds, and nitrogen oxides. Familias Unidas del
Chamizal is among many El Paso activist groups demanding that Marathon
Petroleum be shut down. (The company is currently trying to renew its
air permit for carbon monoxide and other pollutants.)

Joshua Blaine Simmons grew up three blocks from the Marathon Petroleum
site. "My grandma would tell me, 'Oh, look at the refinery!'" he told
me, describing how the labyrinth of shiny metal stacks and pipes with
flares and little blinking lights looked like a city from another
planet. "'It's magical, like The Wizard of Oz.'" His grandma lived in
that house for almost 50 years, and she died there at 64 with a long
list of ailments. "As I learned the facts, I found out it wasn't steam
coming out of those smokestacks."

A graduate in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at
El Paso, Blaine Simmons had a steady job he didn't love as an engineer
when Donald Trump was elected president. He remembered feeling shaken
by the news and by Trump's nativist rhetoric and what it meant for
people like him who cared for the environment. "So in 2018, I decided
that I had enough of my job. I knew that solar was going to become a
big thing for Sun City," he said, using El Paso's nickname.

Like other cities in the Southwest, El Paso is deep in a megadrought
and experiencing temperatures that are, on average, 0.6°F to 1.2°F
warmer than they were a decade ago. Rooftop solar makes a lot of sense
for this region, with its 300 days of sun a year. Yet the city lags
behind Austin and San Antonio for solar capacity per person. Blaine
Simmons has made solar power adoption in his native El Paso his
passion: He's a board member of the local nonprofit Eco El Paso and a
vice chair for the City of El Paso's Regional Renewable Energy
Advisory Council. He's also on Democratic representative Veronica
Escobar's Climate Crisis Advisory Committee and a leading organizer
with the El Paso chapter of the Sunrise Movement. At 35 years old,
Blaine Simmons is considered "the boomer of the group."

"We're the ones that show up, and we annoy Marathon. We annoy city
council," he said with a smirk. One of Sunrise's biggest goals is to
get El Paso voters to approve a climate charter, inspired by the ideas
behind the Green New Deal, which would be the first of its kind in
Texas. If approved, the charter would help better prepare the city for
climate disasters, invest in renewables, and advance climate justice.
The group has gathered almost 40,000 signatures to get the amendment
on the May 2023 ballot.

"I think we have the potential for everyone in El Paso to be a climate
activist," Ana Fuentes, a 25-year-old Sunrise organizer, told me.
Going from neighborhood to neighborhood alongside Luis Enrique
Miranda, 26, Fuentes connected with hundreds of El Pasoans and found
that most of them were very receptive to the climate charter. What she
and Miranda kept hearing, over and over, was how much rising
temperatures and drier seasons were on locals' minds, Fuentes said.

Seeing this Latino-led environmental activism at play in the same city
that saw the deadliest attack on Latinos in modern US history, I
wanted to know whether the rise of eco-fascism in general, or the 2019
terrorist attack in particular, had influenced these activists. "Yes,"
Miranda told me, nodding gently. "We're providing a vision where death
isn't involved. I think that's one of the things we're definitely
trying to achieve with the climate charter—a counternarrative that
is imagining a future where we fix things."

One afternoon, as the temperature started to dip, I headed through
rush-hour traffic toward downtown El Paso. Stuck behind the seemingly
endless lines of 18-wheelers and giant pickup trucks, I rolled past El
Paso's natural and human-built landmarks. To my right was Biggs Army
Airfield's 4,000 acres and the Franklin Mountains behind it. Until
1965, the US military used the mountains as a shooting range. For
decades, the local nonprofit Frontera Land Alliance has been trying to
protect the range from future development so it can be used for
outdoor recreation. Today, the 7,081-acre Castner Range is undergoing
a munitions cleanup, and the land alliance is advocating for it to be
declared a national monument.

I kept heading west on the interstate and eventually passed the Cielo
Vista Walmart, where I glimpsed the memorial sculpture, which looks
like a giant candle. To my left, the Marathon Petroleum refinery stood
out with its blinking lights. Just past the refinery, I could spot the
rust-color border wall and the hilly neighborhoods of Ciudad Juárez,
mirror images of the barrios on the El Paso side of the international
boundary. Less than two centuries ago, this region was one and the
same Chihuahuan Desert. It still is. The two cities share air and an
aquifer.

During our tour, De Aztlan had pointed to La Mujer Obrera's community
farm, Tierra Es Vida (Land Is Life), a pocket of bright green amid all
the gray of heavy industry. "It's always a balance between defending
and creating," she had told me as we drove around in the heat,
focusing on everything that was damaged in the neighborhood. The
community garden, she explained, "sustains not only the movement
building but our sanity, our health."

Back in El Chamizal by myself, I spotted a flyer by the garden
entrance calling on local families to volunteer for community work. I
peeked through the chain-link fence, and I could make out what the
abuelas, the grandmothers, were growing in their small plots: chilies
and tomatoes and corn and nopal cacti and herbs. The flyer read, "All
are welcome."

_Ruxandra Guidi is an assistant professor at the University of
Arizona's School of Journalism. She has been a freelance journalist,
editor, and teacher in Latin America and the US for two decades._

_Editor's note: The reporting published here does not necessarily
reflect the official position of the Sierra Club. More information
about our perspectives on our founders, including Muir, LeConte and
Jordan, can be found here
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addition, you can learn more about the Sierra Club's evolution toward
equity, inclusion and justice here
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* Eco-fascism
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* El Paso
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* Racism
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* mass shootings
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