Skip to main content
Log in

Environmental justice in the American south: an analysis of black women farmworkers in Apopka, Florida

  • Published:
Agriculture and Human Values Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Research has established that the burdens of externalities associated with industrial production are disproportionately borne by socially and politically vulnerable groups, and this is particularly true for farmworkers who are at high risk for environmental exposures and illnesses. The impacts of these risks are often compounded by farmworker communities’ social vulnerability. Yet, less is known about how the intersection of race, class, and gender can position some farmworkers to be at higher risk for particular types of oppressions. We extend the literature by analyzing the case of Black women farmworkers in Apopka, Florida, which was historically home to a large agricultural community. Drawing on the concept of critical environmental justice, we investigate the lived experiences of these women in the context of racialized, gendered, and economic oppressions during their time working on the farms. We use the case of Apopka to ask: (a) how the policies and socio-historical context of the agricultural industry in the American South contributed to injustices experienced by Black women farmworkers in Apopka, Florida; and (b) how race, gender, and class intersected and intersect to create and legitimize environmental injustices in the workplace for these farmworkers. Our data include semi-structured in-depth interviews, newspaper and media coverage, and archival materials. Our analysis advances work on critical environmental justice and intersectionality by mapping the relationship between structural and environmental intersectional oppressions for Black women farmworkers.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Alavanja, Michael C.R., and Matthew R. Bonner. 2012. Occupational pesticide exposure risk: a review. Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health 15 (4): 238–263.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arcury, Thomas A., Sara A. Quandt, Dana B. Barr, Jane A. Hoppin, Linda McCauley, Joseph G. Grzywacz, and Mark G. Robson. 2006. Farmworker exposure to pesticides: methodologic issues for the collection of comparable data. Environmental Health Perspectives 114 (6): 923–928.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arcury, Thomas A., and Sara A. Quandt. 2007. Delivery of health services to migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Annual Review of Public Health 28: 345–363.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bachmann, Roger W., Mark V. Hoyer, and Daniel E. Canfield Jr. 1999. the restoration of lake apopka in relation to alternative stable states. Hydrobiologia 394: 219–232.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beaulieu, M. 2020. Preserving stories, offering justice. Florida Catholic. 2 April. https://thefloridacatholic.org/2020/04/02/preserving-stories-offering-justice/. Accessed 18 August 2020.

  • Blanco-Muñoz, Julia, Clemente Aguilar-Garduño, Ricardo Gamboa-Avila, Miguel Rodríguez-Barranco, Oscar Pérez-Méndez, Claudia Huesca-Gómez, Beatriz González-Alzaga, and Marina Lacasaña. 2013. Association between PONI genetic polymorphisms and miscarriage in Mexican women exposed to pesticides. Science of the Total Environment 449: 302–308.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bonner, Matthew R., Laura E. Beane, Jane A. Freeman, Stella Koutros Hoppin, Dale P. Sandler, Charles F. Lynch, Cynthia J. Hines, Kent Thomas, Aaron Blair, and Michael C.R. Alavanja. 2017. Occupational exposure to pesticides and the incidence of lung cancer in the agricultural health study. Environmental Health Perspectives 125 (4): 544–551.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bullard, Robert D., and Glenn S. Johnson. 2000. Environmental justice: grassroots activism and its impact on public policy decision-making. Journal of Social Issues 56: 555–578.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brulle, Robert J., and David N. Pellow. 2006. environmental justice: human health and environmental inequities. Annual Review of Public Health 27: 103–124.

    Google Scholar 

  • Castañeda, Xóchitl, and Patricia Zavella. 2003. Changing constructions of sexuality and risk: migrant Mexican women farmworkers in California. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8 (2): 126–150.

    Google Scholar 

  • Charlton, Linda. 2011. Former farmworkers in apopka lose out on hope for health care coverage, and use quilts to promote their cause. Freeline Media Orlando, July 11, 1–7.

  • Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. 2013. Toward a field of intersectionality studies: theory, applications, and praxis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (4): 785–810.

    Google Scholar 

  • Choo, Hae Yeon, and Myra Marx Ferree. 2010. Practicing intersectionality in sociological research: a critical analysis of inclusions, interactions, and institutions in the study of inequalities. Sociological Theory 28 (2): 129–149.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cole, Elizabeth R. 2008. Coalitions as a model for intersectionality: From practice to theory. Sex Roles 59: 443–453.

    Google Scholar 

  • Collins, Patricia Hill. 1998. It’s all in the family: intersections of gender, race, and nation. Hypatia 13 (3): 62–82.

    Google Scholar 

  • Collins, Patricia Hill. 2013. On intellectual activism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Collins, Patricia Hill. 2015. Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology 41: 1–20.

    Google Scholar 

  • Combahee River Collective. 1977. A Black feminist statement. In This bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color, ed. C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa, 210–218. New York: SUNY Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–1299.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1993. Beyond racism and misogyny: Black feminism and 2 live crew. In Feminist social thought: a reader, ed. D.T. Meyers, 247–263. New York, NY: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 2011. From private violence to mass incarceration: thinking intersectionally about women, race, and social control. UCLA Law Review 59: 1418.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ducre, Kishi Animashaun. 2018. The black feminist spatial imagination and an intersectional environmental justice. Environmental Sociology 4 (1): 22–35.

    Google Scholar 

  • Engel, Lawrence S., Ellen S. O'Meara, and Stephen M. Schwartz. 2000. Maternal occupation in agriculture and risk of limb defects in Washington State, 1980–1993. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health 26 (3): 193–198.

    Google Scholar 

  • Farmworker Association of Florida. 2017a. “Our History.” https://floridafarmworkers.org/about/. Accessed August 17, 2020.

  • Farmworker Association of Florida. 2017b. “Lake Apopka Project.” https://apopkaquiltproject.blogspot.com. Accessed August 17, 2020.

  • Farmworker Association of Florida. 2020. “Mission and Vision.” https://floridafarmworkers.org/about/. Accessed August 17, 2020.

  • Friends of Lake Apopka. 2016. “Lake Apopka Timeline.” https://www.friendsoflakeapopka.org/about. Accessed August 17, 2020.

  • Galarneau, Charlene. 2013. Farm labor, reproductive justice: migrant women farmworkers in the US. Health and Human Rights 15 (1): 144–160.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ganz, Marshall. 2009. Why David sometimes wins: leadership, organization, and strategy in the California farm worker movement. New York, NY: Oxford University Press Inc.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garrison, Arthur W., Louis J. Guillette Jr, Thomas E. Wiese, and Jimmy K. Avants. 2010. Persistent organochlroine pesticides and their metabolites in alligators livers from Lake Apopka and Woodruff, Florida, USA. International Journal of Environmental Analytical Chemistry 90 (2): 159–170.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gottlieb, Robert, and Andrew Fisher. 1996. Community food security and environmental justice: searching for a common discourse. Agriculture and Human Values 13 (3): 23–32.

    Google Scholar 

  • Graddy-Lovelace, Garrett. 2017. The coloniality of US agricultural policy: articulating grarian (In)Justice. The Journal of Peasant Studies 44 (1): 78–99.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hahamovitch, Cindy. 2008. ‘The worst job in the world’: reform, revolution, and the secret rebellion in Florida's Cane Fields. The Journal of Peasant Studies 35 (4): 770–800.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harrison, Jill. 2008a. Abandoned bodies and spaces of sacrifice: pesticide drift activism and the contestation of neoliberal environmental politics in California. Geoforum 39 (3): 1197–1214.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harrison, Jill. 2008. Lessons learned from pesticide drift: a call to bring production agriculture, farm labor, and social justice back into agrifood research and activism. Agriculture and Human Values 25 (2): 163–167.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2011. Pesticide drift and the pursuit of environmental justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hinson, Waymon R., and Edward Robinson. 2008. ’We Didn’t Get Nothing:’ the plight of Black farmers. Journal of African American Studies 12: 283–302.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hiott, Ann, Joseph G. Grzywacz, Thomas A. Arcury, and Sara A. Quandt. 2006. Gender differences in anxiety and depression among immigrant Latinos. Families, Systems & Health 24 (2): 137–146.

    Google Scholar 

  • Huffman, Matt L., and Philip N. Cohen. 2004. Racial wage inequality: job segregation and devaluation across US labor markets. American Journal of Sociology 109 (4): 902–936.

    Google Scholar 

  • Malin, Stephanie A., and Stacia S. Ryder. 2018. Developing deeply intersectional environmental justice scholarship. Environmental Sociology 4 (1): 1–7.

    Google Scholar 

  • Susan Archer, Mann. 2012. Doing feminist theory: from modernity to postmodernity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mann, Susan Archer. 2013. Third wave feminism’s unhappy marriage of poststructuralism and intersectionality theory. Journal of Feminist Scholarship 4: 54–73.

    Google Scholar 

  • Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American apartheid: segregation and the making of the underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • May, Vivian M. 2014. ’Speaking into the void’? Intersectionality critiques and epistemic backlash. Hypatia 29 (1): 94–112.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCall, Leslie. 2005. The complexity of intersectionality. Signs 30 (3): 1771–1800.

    Google Scholar 

  • McKay, Rich. 2009. “Bass relief.” Orlando sentinel, February 5. Retrieved June 19, 2020 from: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-2009-02-05-fishtimeline05-story.html

  • Mitchell, Don. 2012. They saved the crops: labor, landscape, and the struggle over industrial farming in Bracero-era California. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Murphy, Jeanne, Julie Samples, Mavel Morales, and Nargess Shadbeh. 2015. ’They Talk like that, but We Keep Working’: sexual harassment and sexual assault experiences among Mexican indigenous farmworker women in Oregon. Journal of Immigration and Minority Health 17 (6): 1834–1839.

    Google Scholar 

  • Murphy-Green, M.Celeste. 2002. The occupational, safety, and health of Florida farm workers: environmental justice in the fields. Journal of Health & Human Services Administration 25 (3): 281–314.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nash, Jennifer C. 2008. Re-thinking intersectionality. Feminist Review 89 (1): 1–15.

    Google Scholar 

  • O’Connell, Heather A. 2012. The impact of slavery on racial inequality in poverty in the contemporary US South. Social Forces 90 (3): 713–734.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oliver, Melvin L., and Thomas M. Shapiro. 2006. Black wealth, white wealth: a new perspective on racial inequality. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pellow, David. 2005. Environmental racism: inequality in a toxic world. In The Blackwell companion to social inequalities, ed. M. Romero and E. Margolis, 147–164. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pellow, David. 2016. Toward a critical environmental justice studies: Black lives matter as an environmental justice challenge. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 13 (2): 221–236.

    Google Scholar 

  • Perea, Juan F. 2011. The echoes of slavery: recognizing the racist origins of the agricultural and domestic worker exclusion from the National Labor Relations Act. Ohio State Law Journal 72: 95–138.

    Google Scholar 

  • Quandt, Sara A., Maria A. Hernández-Valero, Joseph G. Gryzwacz, Joseph D. Hovey, Melissa Gonzales, and Thomas A. Acury. 2006. Workplace, household, and personal predictors of pesticide exposure for farmworkers. Environmental Health Perspectives 114 (6): 943–952.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sara A. Quandt, Hannah T. Kinzer, Grisel Trejo, Dana C. Mora, and Joanne C. Sandberg. 2020. The health of women farmworkers and women in farmworker families in the Eastern United States. In Latinx farmworkers in the Eastern United States, ed,.T Arcury and S Quandt, 133–161. New York: Springer International Publishing.

  • Quintana, Craig. 1997. “Water district buys lake apopka farm For $19.8 Million,” The Orlando Sentinel, December 12.

  • Roth, Benita. 2004. Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rothstein, Richard. 2017. The color of law: a forgotten history of how our government segregated America. New York: Liveright.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ruef, Martin, and Ben Fletcher. 2003. Legacies of American slavery: status attainment among southern Blacks after emancipation. Social Forces 82 (2): 445–480.

    Google Scholar 

  • Saha, Robin, and Paul Mohai. 2005. Historical context and hazardous waste facility siting: understanding temporal patterns in Michigan. Social Problems 52 (4): 618–648.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sbicca, Joshua. 2012. Growing food justice by planting an anti-oppression foundation: opportunities and obstacles for a budding social movement. Agriculture and Human Values 29 (4): 455–466.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sbicca, Joshua. 2015. Food labor, economic inequality, and the imperfect politics of process in the alternative food movement. Agriculture and Human Values 32 (4): 675–687.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schlosberg, David. 2012. Climate justice and capabilities: a framework for adaptation policy. Ethics & International Affairs 26 (4): 445–461.

    Google Scholar 

  • Slongwhite, Dale Finley. 2014. Fed up: the high cost of cheap food. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith II, Bobby J. 2019. Food justice, intersectional agriculture, and the triple food movement. Agriculture and Human Values 36 (4): 825–835.

    Google Scholar 

  • St. Johns River Water Management District. 2017. “History of Lake Apopka.” https://www.sjrwmd.com/waterways/lake-apopka/. Accessed August 20, 2020.

  • Stryker, Robin. 1996. Beyond history versus theory: strategic narrative and sociological explanation. Sociological Methods & Research 24 (3): 304–352.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thomas, Melvin E., and Michael Hughes. 1986. The continuing significance of race: a study of race, class, and quality of life in America, 1972–1985. American Sociological Review 51: 830–841.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vasudevan, Pavithra, and Sara Smith. 2020. The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. 2399654420901567: 1–20.

  • Walker, Gordon. 2010. Environmental justice, impact assessment and the politics of knowledge: the implications of assessing the social distribution of environmental outcomes. Environmental Impact Assessment Review 30 (5): 312–318.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wells, Miriam J. 1996. Strawberry fields: politics, class, and work in California agriculture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, William Julius, and Richard P. Taub. 2011. There goes the neighborhood: racial, ethnic, and class tensions in four Chicago neighborhoods and their meaning for America. New York: Vintage Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wright, Angus. 2005. The death of Ramón González: the modern agricultural dilemma. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Farmworkers Association of Florida for being an active part of this research project. We would also like to thank Dr. Kendal Broad-Wright for her guidance regarding intersectional activism and intersectional theory. Lastly, we would like to thank all the participants in this study, most significantly the farmworkers of Apopka, Florida.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anne Saville.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Saville, A., Adams, A.E. Environmental justice in the American south: an analysis of black women farmworkers in Apopka, Florida. Agric Hum Values 38, 193–204 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10147-0

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10147-0

Keywords

Navigation