Community Resources/Nonprofits & Further reading/investigation
Local southern CA agencies, nonprofits, community organizations & more:
Instagram Accounts on local EJ work in the SGV also specifically around Quemetco.
"East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice (EYCEJ) is a community-based organization that works to facilitate self-advocates in East Los Angeles, Southeast Los Angeles and Long Beach.
By providing workshops and trainings, EYCEJ prepares community members to engage in the decision-making processes that directly impact their health and quality of life."
Source: https://eycej.org/
"ActiveSGV's mission is to support a more sustainable, equitable, and livable San Gabriel Valley."
Source: https://www.activesgv.org/
"Our mission is to build a diverse base of support to ensure that everyone in the Los Angeles area has equitable access to the wide range of benefits which nature provides.
We're committed to building support to protect, create access to our forests, rivers, and parks, and developing a new diverse generation of environmental leaders and stewards who connect to and care for our public lands."
Source: https://lanatureforall.org/
"San Gabriel Conservation Corps serves as a bridge to a better life for young adults ages 18-25. We provide paid job training, support services, and a second chance to earn a high school diploma, while simultaneously offering a variety of professional services to the San Gabriel community."
Source: https://www.sgvcorps.org/
"We are volunteers committed to defending the environment and quality of life in our community. We develop innovative programs to raise awareness and keep our neighbors safe from environmental harms. We insist that our corporate neighbors be environmentally responsible and expect that our community be made aware of projects that affect our well being. Our goal is to have our residents, corporate neighbors, government representatives and public agencies share our commitment to the protection of the environment and health of our community. "
"Mujeres de la Tierra is a grassroots environmental equity non-profit founded in 2004, in the city of Los Angeles. Mujeres de la Tierra has the distinction of being the first Latina-founded and led 501 (c)(3) environmental organization on the healing of La Madre Tierra (Mother Earth) in Southern California."
Matilijia Lending Library (located in El Monte, CA)
"Our mission is to celebrate the diversity of El Monte and San Gabriel Valley community by uplifting stories by Black, Indigenous, People of Color. We aim to create a space to reflect our people of color communities in the San Gabriel Valley, and build multi-racial solidarity together."
Source: https://matilijabooks.weebly.com/
"The Association of Raza Educators was established to uphold the rights and liberties of the Raza community. Education is essential to the preservation of civil and human rights. It provides the foundation for all political and economic progress and it must be a basic right of all people. Making this right a reality is the fundamental objective of A.R.E. Raza has been and continues to be oppressed by the educational system within the United States. Therefore, we are obligated to ensure that education serves as a tool for the liberation of our community. "
Source: http://www.razaeducators.org/
"Earthjustice was founded on the belief that everyone has the right to a healthy environment. Every one of our clients gets top-tier legal representation, free of charge."
Source: https://earthjustice.org/
"South El Monte Arts Posse (SEMAP) is a collective of artists, writers, urban planners, educators, scholars, farmers, ecologists, swap meet vendors, and youth dedicated to engaging with the South El Monte and El Monte community through the arts by rethinking our use of space and transforming how we inhabit it. Unlike most arts organization, we do not house SEMAP operations and projects in a building. This is an integral part of our community-building process as it ensures that all our projects are site-specific works of public art. When we exhibit in gallery spaces, we make sure to translate the public and often process-based nature of the projects for gallery audiences, often integrating interactive and participatory elements."
Source: https://semartsposse.wordpress.com/about/
For further reading/investigation:
"East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, is an edited collection of thirty-one essays that trace the experience of a California community over three centuries, from eighteenth-century Spanish colonization to twenty-first century globalization. Employing traditional historical scholarship, oral history, creative nonfiction and original art, the book provides a radical new history of El Monte and South El Monte, showing how interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship can break new ground in public history. East of East tells stories that have been excluded from dominant historical narratives—stories that long survived only in the popular memory of residents, as well as narratives that have been almost completely buried and all but forgotten. Its cast of characters includes white vigilantes, Mexican anarchists, Japanese farmers, labor organizers, civil rights pioneers, and punk rockers, as well as the ordinary and unnamed youth who generated a vibrant local culture at dances and dive bars."
Source: https://www.amazon.com/East-Greater-Latinidad-Transnational-Cultures/dp/1978805489
"Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortizoffers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.
With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present.
Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative."
Source: https://www.amazon.com/Indigenous-Peoples-History-ReVisioning-American/dp/0807057835
"For much of his life, historian Howard Zinn chronicled American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version taught in schools - with its emphasis on great men in high places - to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace.
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of - and in the words of - America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles - the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality - were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.
Covering Christopher Columbus' arrival through President Clinton's first term, A People's History of the United States features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history.
"Winner of an American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Award and Choice Magazine’s Outstanding Academic Book Award, and voted one of Teacher Magazine’s “great books,” Other People’s Children has sold over 150,000 copies since its original hardcover publication. This anniversary paperback edition features a new introduction by Delpit as well as new framing essays by Herbert Kohl and Charles Payne.
In a radical analysis of contemporary classrooms, MacArthur Award–winning author Lisa Delpit develops ideas about ways teachers can be better “cultural transmitters” in the classroom, where prejudice, stereotypes, and cultural assumptions breed ineffective education. Delpit suggests that many academic problems attributed to children of color are actually the result of miscommunication, as primarily white teachers and “other people’s children” struggle with the imbalance of power and the dynamics plaguing our system.
A new classic among educators, Other People’s Children is a must-read for teachers, administrators, and parents striving to improve the quality of America’s education system."
Websites for educators
