A Toxic Tour with Tales of Resistance
The following is an excerpt from a recent article from BeyondChron.org, authored by Steve Early:
Every several months, [Andres Soto] conducts what’s now called a “Toxics and Resilience Tour” of Richmond.” Soto’s tours, by bus and on foot, began as a mobile history lesson for students from the RYSE Youth Center. Then a member of the RYSE board, Soto discovered that many young people in Richmond “don’t know which came first—World War II or the Vietnam War” and know even less about their own hometown history…
As a boy growing up in a Mexican-American immigrant family, Soto had early exposure to the industrial hazards he campaigns against today. He recalls seeing Richmond refinery flaring, off in the distance, for the first time at age ten. He thought the pulsating glow “was so cool—like a fire-breathing dragon.” On weekends, he would go with his father, as many Richmond families once did, to deposit trash at the city dump, located in North Richmond.
At that stop on his toxic tours today, Soto describes those long ago outings as a foul-smelling but exciting “male adventure.” The dump “contained 100 years worth of garbage, a mountain of it, 185 feet tall, piled up like a modern-day midden” or the “shell-mounds” left behind more discreetly, on the shores of San Francisco Bay, by Native-Americans who were, Soto points out, far better stewards of the land.
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