To Protect the Children of East L.A.

“My concern is the air,” says Juana Beatriz Gutierrez.

In East Los Angeles, where she lives, “there is more and more pollution, especially in September and October. Your eyes ache and you have, like a cold, only it’s not a cold,” she says.

Gutierrez, 59 and the mother of nine, has just won a battle to protect the air in her neighborhood--already polluted by traffic from five freeways, body shops, food-processing plants and factories.

As president of the Mothers of East Los Angeles, Santa Isabel chapter, Gutierrez led a coalition of environmental and community groups that this year defeated plans to put a commercial waste incinerator in Vernon--just a few minutes away from the two-story, five-bedroom house on South Mott Street where she and her husband, Ricardo, raised their children.

“They would have been burning hospital trash and other toxic things from Long Beach, Pasadena, the Valley, all over, right here in our community,” says Gutierrez, who has lived in East Los Angeles for 33 years. “That’s too close to the schools and the churches. We have senior citizen homes, we have rest homes.”

They also were going to have California’s first large-scale hazardous-waste incinerator.

In February, 1987, permits were issued to Security Environmental Systems for a 22,500-ton-per-year burner, raising fears about toxic emissions and the disposal of tons of toxic ash.

Gutierrez already had an organization in place when Assemblywoman Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles) informed the community that the incinerator was planned for Vernon.

“Nobody liked it,” says Gutierrez.

The Mothers of East Los Angeles had taken their first activist stand in 1985, when the state announced plans to put a prison in their neighborhood. “We organized the people with telephone calls,” she says. “We informed the community after Sunday Mass.”

In defeating the prison, the Mothers of East Los Angeles learned how to protest, how to march, how to get media coverage. They sold tamales to raise funds and on Earth Day ’90 set up a table in Exposition Park with educational materials, buttons and T-shirts.

The incinerator was stopped with protest marches that attracted people from “all over,” says Gutierrez, who got her activist start with the Santa Isabel PTA.

By the time the project was dropped last May, the coalition included environmental groups such as Greenpeace and community groups throughout California who feared similar incinerator projects.

“We won,” says Gutierrez, whose group expressed gratitude for public support in a letter to The Times last June.

The letter concludes: “Through this victory, let it be known that communities of color throughout the state of California will unite whenever children are threatened.”

The Mothers of East Los Angeles continue to be activists, says Gutierrez. They have raised funds for bus trips to protest rallies as far away as Kettleman City, 175 miles north of Los Angeles, and as near as UCLA to support students in the Chicano studies department.

Attendance at their meetings averages 30 or 40, “but when we have something to protest, we call the people and we have 250,” she says.

“It’s not only in my neighborhood,” emphasizes Gutierrez, who classifies herself as an environmentalist. “We care about the bay, we care about the redwoods. What I say is I don’t want these things in my back yard, and I don’t want them in any back yard.”