Health and the Urban Environment

Sam Hege, “When Noxious Odors Prevail”: Dust, Race, and the Creation of an Agro-Industrial Complex in the Texas Panhandle
Abstract: In the mid-20th century, intensive efforts to suppress dust throughout the Southern Plains of the United States sparked a region wide surge in agricultural production. Following the 1930’s dust storms, which earned the region the enduring moniker, the Dust Bowl, many outside observers deemed this part of the country unsuitable to farming and permanent human settlement. To counter this malignant perception of the Dust Bowl, local boosters, farmers, and politicians adopted new and extractive approaches to farming that could persist amidst severe periods of drought. Although much has been written about the history of industrial farming in the Southern Plains, scholars have paid little attention to the impact of this transformation on working-class Black and Latinx communities. As activists in Lubbock, TX, a primary urban hub of the Southern Plains, have argued, ag-related dusts were not so much suppressed as they were disproportionately respatialized. Concentrating dust within racialized urban spaces allowed local boosters to turn the region’s dust particles from a national spectacle into a localized and tolerable nuisance. This article argues that racial conceptions of health, space, and atmosphere ultimately sustained the region’s transformation into an agro-industrial complex.
In tracing how West Texas dust transformed from a rural disaster into an urban nuisance, this article identifies key, yet unrecognized, mechanisms underlying the formation of postwar agro-industrial complexes throughout the U.S. Southwest. To develop this argument, I draw out the “creative” forms of extraction that boosters and developers employed to enable this transition. As Louise Seamster and Danielle Purifoy have argued, the extraction of value from Black and Latinx spaces, via “displacing environmental harms” through innovations “in laws, policies, and implementation to reproduce racialized uneven development,” makes possible the creation of white land values. While Purifoy and Seamster focus on the ways that “creative extraction” has constricted the possibilities of Black towns in support of the expansion of metropolitan white suburbs, a similar model applies to the dynamic urban-rural settings that comprise the Southern Plains agricultural landscape. In West Texas, this included the development of racialized systems of labor appropriation as well as the use of development tools such as urban renewal to expand industrial operations and concentrate dust within particular communities. Building Jennifer Gabrys’ practice of “tuning in... to the demands for justice that particulate pollution instigate,” this article argues that discussions of the future of industrial farming must address the disproportionate distribution of dust that continues to infect Black and Latinx resident’s lungs, breakdown their a/c units, and pollute their greenspace. This history illustrates how the relational mechanisms of racism and pollutive sitings are not “externalities” but rather fundamental to the formation of modern industrial agriculture.
 
Opening comment by Josiah Rector, University of Houston