From Kern Island to the Streets of Bakersfield: Logics of Contamination, Embodied Empiricisms, and the Afterlives of Reclamation

California’s arid San Joaquin Valley was once inundated by lakes and wetlands. Through settler colonial discourses of contamination, a network of canals and aqueducts drained these lakes and wetlands in the late nineteenth century. Now, the Valley’s air and water are contaminated by pesticides, nitrates, and hydrocarbons from oil extraction and large-scale agriculture. Building from archival research and participant observation with environmental justice activists, this paper bridges settler colonial and critical Indigenous studies, work on racial capitalism, and feminist science studies to investigate logics of contamination in the production of private property through hydraulic projects. California’s hydrologic history shows that ideas of contamination were contested alongside emergent ideas of the racialized body. Hydraulic infrastructure, then, was not only an economic project but functioned within a larger logic of contamination that further articulated racial formations and settler sovereignty claims. Yet chemical contamination can also induce futurities, intimacies, and collectivities in powerful ways, as environmental justice activists in the valley consistently highlight. I argue that a critical analytic of contamination can trace how racial categories are ecologically produced and reconfigured, not only through differential relationships to land, but through changes in the land itself.

water, hydraulic engineering, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, environmental justice, feminist science studies

Kyle and I barreled down dirt roads, dust pouring into the rolled-down windows in the hundred-degree heat because neither of us had air conditioning. We parked next to a gas flare. Other than its guttering flame, the late afternoon was silent. “I don’t see any trespassing signs,” Kyle shrugged, and walked into a field to get the flare in the camera’s sights.

I moved around a still pumpjack nearby, taking photos. Suddenly, the pumpjack started to move, and the hydrocarbon smell was so strong that my throat burned and my eyes watered. I hurried to the upwind side, trying not to breathe. I had a headache, though from heat and dehydration or from the fumes, I didn’t know. As we drove away, Kyle’s eyes were also watery and red-rimmed, and we both had slightly runny noses.

Kyle works for FracTracker and has been trained in how to use a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) camera, which uses infrared technology to visualize hydrocarbon emissions (Kenny, Liboiron, and Wylie 2019). All day we had filmed oil wells and storage tanks in the small town of Arvin, south of Bakersfield in the San Joaquin Valley, guided by Cesar Aguirre and Gustavo Aguirre Jr., both organizers with the Central California Environmental Justice Network (CCEJN).

In Arvin, oil wells and storage tanks sit directly next to apartment buildings, schools, and homes. In 2014, eight houses were evacuated because they contained dangerous levels of petroleum gas from a leaking underground line. For months, residents had complained of nosebleeds, dizziness, and headaches, but were disregarded until sampling showed levels of toxic gas thirteen times higher than the EPA standard. In response, CCEJN and Arvin residents, including the local group Committee for a Better Arvin (CBA), began monitoring hydrocarbon emissions anywhere people reported the smell.

The FLIR footage was part of CCEJN’s and CBA’s support of a 2018 ordinance considered by the Arvin City Council that would ban oil drilling within 300 feet of homes and schools. This ban is relatively conservative compared to the medically recommended 2,500-foot setback between oil and homes or schools (Shonkoff et al. 2017). But in the oil-dominated Bakersfield area, even this 300-foot ban was a major accomplishment. That evening, Kyle sent a few clips of our FLIR footage to Gustavo and Cesar, who immediately shared it on Twitter. It also became part of the City Ordinance’s public record.

In Arvin and other communities across the San Joaquin Valley, including Shafter and Lost Hills, the public health impacts of oil and gas drilling disproportionately impact Latinx, low-income residents ( Morello-Frosch, Pastor, and Sadd 2001; London, Sze, and Liévanos 2008; Garoupa White 2016; Richter 2018). These disproportionate impacts exemplify Robert Bullard’s definition of environmental racism as policy or practice that “differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups or communities based on race or color” (1993, 23). Environmental justice scholarship has importantly documented the fact that low-income communities and communities of color are disproportionately exposed to toxicity (e.g., Pulido 1996a; Bullard and Chavis 1999; Cole and Foster 2001; Checker 2005). However, an approach that exclusively sets out to document disproportionate exposure can stabilize categories of race or class as pre-existing and fixed, rather than historically co-produced. Recent environmental justice work has instead argued that we must see current environmental racism in historical context as the product of racist land use and planning, and have argued for rigorous theorizations of race beyond policy-oriented definitions (Pulido 1996b; Pellow 2016). As these scholars point out, race and racism are not static but rather are consistently in circulation and reproduction, in tandem with shifting geographies of environmental pollution (Tuck and McKenzie 2015; Dillon and Sze 2016; Ranganathan 2016; Ranganathan and Bratman 2021).

Not only are rigorous theorizations of race necessary, but also of contamination. Contamination is not a stable fact or self-obvious process; to the contrary, understandings of contamination have shifted profoundly through the last few centuries. Today, San Joaquin Valley environmental justice organizers rely on discourses of contamination to articulate the disproportionate chemical exposures of predominantly Latinx residents in fenceline communities such as Arvin. Yet for much of the nineteenth century, vast areas of the San Joaquin Valley were considered contaminating in a very different way: racialized public health discourses understood the San Joaquin Valley—and other kinds of “wastelands” (Di Palma 2014; Voyles 2015)—as inherently contaminating to the white body, and white women’s bodies specifically. These ideas propelled hydraulic infrastructure processes that were central to Indigenous dispossession as well as emergent hierarchies of racialized labor. In fact, the land that Kyle and I traversed was once an expanse of shallow lakes filled with tule reeds (Latta 1949), but at the turn of the century, settlers drained these lakes through a series of canals, reservoirs, weirs, and pumping stations. These activities, and the apparatuses of hydraulic and public health knowledges that arose with them, in turn reconfigured ideas of contamination altogether.

Reclamation projects also produced the San Joaquin Valley as a site of large-scale agriculture and oil extraction, which today requires pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and other chemical toxins as well as deeply exploited and chemically exposed, but differentially racialized, labor.¹ In the process, these projects produced and reproduced logics of contamination—but the question of who, and what, is potentially contaminating or contaminated has shifted along with changes in the land itself.

Though water was the focus of nineteenth-century reclamation projects, today the chemical impacts of settler agriculture and oil are most immediately and easily felt in the air. This immediacy reflects the pervasiveness of settler colonial and racial capitalist environmental logics, akin to Kristen Simmons’s elaboration of settler atmospherics as the collective but radically unequal “conditions we breathe in” (2017, 2). The residents, organizers, and activists I spent time with work within this “settler atmospherics” to contest not only the exposure of their bodies and communities but also dominant notions of contamination altogether. While valley-wide air monitors rarely register the hyper-local effects of individual oil wells placed next to schools or homes, organizers and residents have trained their own senses of smell or vision to measure this contamination at much higher resolution. “Besides,” as Cesar shrugged once, while he was coaching me on how to smell pesticides, “we still have to breathe in either way.” The San Joaquin Valley’s environmental history—and the fact that understandings of contamination have profoundly shifted over time—call for a closer attention to what we mean by contamination itself.

Therefore, this paper attends not only to historical shifts in understandings of contamination, but further, how a logic of contamination—in which the border between pure and contaminating must be performatively maintained—has functioned in the co-constitution of racial thinking and the San Joaquin Valley’s present. While the specific contours of this logic have shifted over time, its effects have accumulated in deepening environmental inequalities across California’s geography, and in the materiality of groundwater, sediment, and living tissues. I draw from archival evidence, participant observation, and ongoing collaborations with environmental justice activists in the San Joaquin Valley to track how this racialized sense of bordered purity moves and evolves through land and people over time, connecting contemporary environmental justice fieldwork to nineteenth-century racialized discourses of contamination.²

In what follows, I first situate ideas of contamination within environmental history, feminist science studies, critical Indigenous studies, and racial capitalist theorizations of racial difference. I then describe historical understandings of the Valley as contaminating, both a site of potential marronage and source of public health concern, and elaborate the material-discursive ways in which reclamation projects aimed to “civilize” the landscape through the performative work of hydraulic engineering. I then return to the work of contemporary environmental justice activists and trace the affective and relational modes of (non)attunement that contamination can produce, as well as the ways in which their work questions and redefines ideas of contamination altogether.

Ultimately, contamination as a discourse merges the concept of harm with the concept of purity. This means that, even as we talk about contamination for environmental justice purposes, we also rely on a structure that is premised on purity narratives and on racialized ideas of the “other.” Therefore, even as it is useful to trace how shifting contamination logics have produced our toxic present, I end by highlighting work that emphasizes not the fact of relation itself, but instead the quality of that relation (e.g., Murphy 2017).

Contamination—as an entangled set of logics and material accumulations—has been a central part of white settlers’ understandings of, and interactions with, the California landscape. Environmental historians have shown that the production of deserts or marshes as “wastelands” occurred in iterative co-constitution with the racialization and dispossession of Indigenous peoples (Kuletz 1998; Voyles 2015), discursive attempts to “empty” the land (Cronon 1996; O’Brien 2010), and concerns over the making and maintenance of whiteness (Anderson 2006; Nash 2007). In consonance, science and technology scholars have articulated the scientific production of “race” as a biological concept (Subramaniam 2001; Browne 2015; Benjamin 2016) and the differential racialization of Indigeneity (Byrd 2011; TallBear 2013; Saldaña-Portillo 2016). As Jodi Byrd (2011) and others have written, reducing Indigeneity to a racial category undermines Indigenous sovereignty claims by framing Indigenous nationhood as one of many racial minorities within the bounds of the United States.

Scholars across history, critical Indigenous studies, and critical geographies have shown that racialized notions of land as “productive” or “waste” then became integral to rationalizing and propelling hydraulic projects across the US West (Worster 1985; Middleton-Manning 2018; Yazzie and Baldy 2018). Hydraulic infrastructure—often called “reclamation” projects based on settler notions of reclaiming land from a wild state to its divinely intended use (Worster 1985; Igler 2005)—was actually fundamentally a project of Indigenous dispossession (e.g., Yazzie 2013; Middleton-Manning 2018; Sepulveda 2018). In response, critical Indigenous scholarship has focused on water as a key analytic of Indigenous feminisms (Yazzie and Baldy 2018; Barker 2019) and as a central aspect of Indigenous survivance (Estes 2017; Todd 2017; Gilio-Whitaker 2019; Sherwood 2019).

This paper also draws on frameworks that locate race as a product of the racial capitalist state, a way of stratifying populations to produce differentially exploitable workforces, rather than a static and pre-existing category (Robinson 1983). Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has used this framing to define racism as the “production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (2002, 28). While Gilmore theorizes from deep study of the prison industrial complex, her definition of racism can also encompass environmental injustices: group-differentiated exposure to polluted air and water is inseparable from the death-dealing effects of police violence or geographies of incarceration (Ahuja 2016; Dillon and Sze 2016; Pellow 2016). In other words, chemical toxicity—its differential nature and connection to premature death, its ability to “get under the skin” (Benjamin 2016, 3)—can be seen as a form of racism working through the materiality of the body.

These fields show the centrality of turning land into property as a racializing and colonial project with impacts that propagate through environmental justice work in the present (Gilio-Whitaker 2019). Scholars have long addressed the raced and colonial life of property (Harris 1993; Moreton-Robinson 2015; Bhandar 2018): for instance, while Cheryl Harris (1993) importantly describes the work of property logics in producing Blackness as property, racializing Indigeneity through imagined improper relationships to property was core to settler attempts to undermine Indigenous sovereignty (Moreton-Robinson 2015). This work highlights the generative links between critical Indigenous studies and racial capitalist theorizations of racial difference by showing the ways that racial logics, colonial dispossession, and understandings of land as waste co-produce each other (Coulthard 2014; Day 2016).

For instance, the racialization of the San Joaquin Valley’s wetlands as contaminating rationalized the dispossession and discursive emptying of Indigenous presence, which was foundational to the differential racialization of arrivants through labor in toxic conditions. However, it also produced the wetlands, for a time, as landscapes of resistance for runaways, rebels, and revolutionaries from the Spanish missions, offering glimpses of what Willie Jamaal Wright calls “freedom through fugitivity” (2019, 1134). Therefore, as I expand below, the multiple valences of “contaminating” landscapes offer a bridge between critical Indigenous STS writing on water (Yazzie and Baldy 2018; Barker 2019) and Black studies’ work on the contingent freedoms of marronage at the interface of water and land (Roberts 2015; Bledsoe 2017).

Finally, ever since Mary Douglas described dirt as “matter out of place” ([1966] 2001, 36), feminist and queer theorists have interrogated definitions of contamination as part of producing raced, queered, and gendered differences (e.g., Haraway 1991; Chen 2011; Fiske 2020). For instance, Zoe Todd articulates the coloniality of contamination in her 2017 piece “Fish, Kin, and Hope.” As she shows, oil itself is not necessarily toxic, but instead has been weaponized by settler society. This work elucidates not only shifting definitions of what is contaminating and to whom, but also a deeper logic of contamination based on the boundary between the two.

To this end, I also turn to feminist and queer approaches to performativity. Judith Butler ([1990] 2006, [1996] 2011) describes performativity as a process of repetitive citational practices over time, which create bodies (and gendered bodies specifically)—but also create consistent openings for subversion or re-articulation. The present, and what is made to appear common sense, in fact emerges through this iterative re-inscription of boundaries. Critical geographers have since taken these ideas up in, for instance, the performativity of place (Ahmed 2006) or property as consistently enacted (Gregson and Rose 2000; Blomley 2003). For my purposes here, performativity helps highlight the constitutive work of the boundary itself. If contamination is fundamentally about some substance, person, or thing crossing a definitional boundary—oil into water, water into oil, communities of color within the white nation—it is also a material-discursive meaning-making practice (Barad 2007).³ Yet as boundaries are consistently re-inscribed, they also become open to profound shifts over time.

Ultimately, bringing these fields together shows that the racist impacts of oil extraction and large-scale agriculture are not exceptions that can be fixed within a capitalist framework. Instead, the group-differentiated devaluing of life and relations (both human and more-than-human) through discourses of race is not exceptional, but rather fundamental to the San Joaquin Valley, both historically and in the present.

Historically, as rivers such as the Kern, Kings, and San Joaquin flowed down from Sierra snowmelt, they had no natural outlet to the sea and instead filled the San Joaquin Valley floor. Thus, even though Bakersfield receives only a few inches of rainfall a year, both swamp and desert conditions co-existed. In high-water years, the entire valley became an inland sea. Even in drier years, it was still filled with large lakes, wetlands, tule marshes, and hundreds of meandering rivers, streams, and rivulets - while land only a mile away could be dry and arid (Latta 1949, Littlefield 2022).

Both swamp and desert exceeded—with either an over- or under-abundance of water—the European ideal of arable agricultural soil. While the Yokuts had carefully managed the landscape for thousands of years, California historians argue that US settlers often found this changeable landscape unnerving (Igler 2005; Nash 2007). For instance, Lieutenant George Derby described the area near Bakersfield in 1849 and 1850 as “the most miserable country that I ever beheld. The soil was not only of the most wretched description, dry, powdery, and decomposed, but everywhere burrowed by gophers, and a small animal resembling a common house rat…The country presents the appearance of a large city which has been partially overwhelmed by the ashes of volcanic eruptions” (Derby and Farquhar 1932, 255).

Yet settlers often compared the area to Panama because of its heavy marsh vegetation, mosquitos, and heat: Miller and Lux, one of the largest land-holding companies in the nineteenth century, named their largest ranch Panama, and streets and towns across the valley still carry the name. While Panama served as an ecological term—especially once canals began to be built across the California landscape—it is also a reminder that, affectively and experientially, central California in the 1850s and 1860s was still an overseas colony for settlers as much as it was a frontier environment. Before the cross-continental railroad was built in 1869, most European settlers arrived by boat and overland transportation across Panama, which was also defined by colonial and racialized conceptions of jungles and swamps. The Panama Canal, finished in 1914, was seen as “a ten-mile-wide strip of imperial modernity” (Sutter 2015, 19), but California’s much smaller canals and ditches were accompanied by similar forms of what Paul Sutter calls “tropical triumphalism” over the unruliness of an imperial environment.

Bakersfield is named after Colonel Baker, a lawyer and colonel in the Ohio state militia who moved to what was then called Kern Island in 1863 and is credited with draining the land the town is now built on. The town’s name comes from Baker’s practice of allowing travelers to graze their animals on his fields, some of the only dry land around (Jameson 1929). However, the Yowlumne Yokuts had ancestrally occupied the floodplains of the Kern River for thousands of years (Latta 1949; Hurtado 1990; Frank and Goldberg 2011). Before Spanish contact, the Yokuts were the most numerous Indigenous group in California, living largely along Tulare Lake and the streams and rivers that fed it (Tule River Tribe 2018). While the Spanish mission system had drastic consequences for coastal populations, Indigenous groups who lived in the interior had largely been shielded by their distance from the coast—and because of the complexity of travel through tule marshes and floodplain ecosystems (Panich and Schneider 2014).

In their liminal state between water and land, the tule marshes were nearly impossible to traverse without a boat, serving as a landscape of marronage: “those difficult terrains that marginalized, hunted, and exploited people have made habitable” (Wright 2019, 1). As Wright describes, marshes and wetlands were often places of partial freedom for maroon communities escaping chattel slavery in the eastern United States. For instance, the Great Dismal Swamp became a place of refuge for enslaved canal laborers, maroons, and Indigenous Peoples, including members of the Powhatan Confederacy and the Tuscarora, many of whom had also been enslaved or indentured (Sayers, Burke, and Henry 2007). In this way, lands that were racialized as contaminating or unsuitable for settlement also became places of partial freedom and resistance.

The tules emerged as a crucial line of defense for the Yokuts during Spanish colonization and the imposition of missions along the coast (Bernard 2015; Panich and Schneider 2014). For instance, in the Great Chumash Uprising of 1824—the same year that Mexico took control of the region—the Indigenous people at the Purisima, Santa Inés, Santa Barbara, and San Fernando missions revolted and many took refuge in the tules. As Fray Sarría, a Spaniard, wrote, “the Indians from Santa Bárbara had fled to the valley of tules…the neophytes then re-grouped on a small island in a large lagoon which was surrounded by dense tules along its shore. The path to the lagoon was defended by a muddy and marshy area. People on horseback could not pass through without experiencing extreme difficulty and danger” (Beebe and Senkewicz 1996, 277).

Under Mexican rule, colonial attention to the tules shifted to military raids on Indigenous villages—though the tules had also become a site for fugitives from the Mexican army (Arkush 1993; Panich and Schneider 2014). Historians describe the Yokuts establishing villages and defenses within the thickets and marshlands of the valley, in geographies that could confound the open-field battle tactics preferred by mounted Mexican troopes (Sandos 1985; Beebe and Senkewicz 1996). As Brooke Arkush writes, “they constructed trench systems fortified with timber stockades within these dense thickets, and through various means (especially obscene language and gestures) induced the soldiers to enter them” (1993, 630). In response, the Mexicans tried to destroy these thickets whenever possible.

This is not to imagine a glorified sense of resistance, but to think differently about racialized logics of contamination in the transformation of the Buena Vista area’s tules into fields and farms. Sites of marronage often become so because they already present difficulties to capitalist and colonial imaginaries of productive land, and thus are figured as “waste,” dangerous, or evil—yet these categorizations deepen as rebels, runaways, and others considered “criminals” inhabit those spaces as well (Bonilla 2015; Wright 2019).⁴ Not only were California wetlands seen as useless for settler forms of agriculture and potentially a danger to settler whiteness. As historically a haven for mission runaways and rebels, the project of turning tules and shallow lakes into dry fields was also crucially one of colonial control.

Scientific knowledges also propelled the racialization of these landscapes. Until the late nineteenth century, most Euro-Americans believed that the permeability of the body created its race. As Kyla Schuller (2017) describes, whiteness was premised on sensitivity and permeability: white settlers saw themselves as more susceptible to diseases than non-white people.⁵ Therefore, scientists and public health officials worked to protect white settlers from the miasmas that were thought to arise from the swamps and cause malaria, scrutinizing white women’s reproductive capacities in particular (Nash 2007). However, malaria had in fact been brought to San Joaquin Valley mosquitos by a band of fur trappers from British Columbia in 1833; it was a distinctly European disease that devastated Indigenous communities in the 1830s. Seen from this vantage point, draining the swamps reflects deep-seated anxieties around maintaining California settlers’ whiteness in the face of a racialized and contaminating landscape. As Linda Nash writes, “If European bodies could in fact physically change to survive in a new climate, would they still be European? More to the point, would they still be white?” (2007, 30)

The tule marshes, therefore, were co-constitutively racialized as contaminating, not only through the threat of miasmas and marsh vapors to the white body, but also in the potentially contaminating elements of runaways, bandits, and Indigenous resistance to the settler body politic. These connections were part of a fundamentally material-discursive processes of landscape change, as I describe below.

While one distinct Kern River tumbles out of Kern Canyon from the Sierras, in the 1850s and 1860s it spread into a delta of many shifting and unpredictable channels upon meeting the valley, including the South Fork, Panama Slough, Old River, and later, New River. In fact, the original name of the area was Kern Island (Morgan 1914). At the time of Baker’s arrival, many Yowlumne Yokuts families lived on the riverbanks, as well as a few settler families, all of whom used boats as their dominant mode of transportation along the river channels and sloughs (Rolle 1996). Anecdotes describe fence posts sprouting into trees because the water table was so high and shifting rivers that flooded settlements overnight.

Disdain for swamps and deserts was codified in a series of nineteenth-century legislation, including a series of Swampland Reclamation Acts and the Federal Desert Land Act (Worster 1985; Igler 2005). These acts offered ownership if settlers “improved” the land through either irrigating or draining: the creation of private property was seen as the antidote to the Valley’s “polluting areas,” as Aaron Sargent, a US senator from California and major proponent of the Federal Desert Lands Act, characterized them. Instead, as he wrote, “enterprise stands ready to create taxable property there…Our streams must be taken from their useless and shifting beds and given the widest scope. Then we may create an empire here, of health, prosperity, and development” (quoted in Igler 2005, 95).

In 1857 the California legislature gave a group of settlers the rights to drain the swamp land between Tulare, Buena Vista, and Kern Lakes. Colonel Baker acquired the rights from them and hired thirty Indigenous laborers from nearby Fort Tejon—where many Indigenous people had been forced to move throughout the 1850s and 1860s—to begin digging canals and building levees (Morgan 1914; Jameson 1929).⁶ Even with the labor of thirty people, however, this might have been an impossible task until a large flood in 1861 diverted much of the Kern River to the north (Cuen 1944). Baker, then, simply put a headgate in what remained of the old South Fork of the river; this became the town ditch. Baker began selling the precariously dried land to settlers, which became the emergent settler town of Bakersfield.⁷ The land around the new Kern River subsequently became the Kern River Oil Field after the Elwood Brothers struck oil in 1899 (Francis 2016). Over time, settlers built a network of canals, all of which drain the Kern to either irrigate high-value crops or inject as steam into the oil field. Today, the Kern River runs dry partway through Bakersfield.

This history exemplifies the performative work of contamination itself within reclamation projects. Not only were the wetlands racialized, but racial formations were also rearticulated through shifts in the landscape. For instance, Wallace Morgan, a San Joaquin Valley booster writing in the early 1900s, reported that many of the Yowlumne Yokuts left the area after the flood of 1861: as he writes, the flood left “the land dryer and rather more suitable for the habitation of civilized men. It made it less desirable for the Indians” (1914, 57). Morgan’s description implies that the flood itself “reclaimed” and civilized the landscape by digging a new river channel, remaking the land in the image of white settler land use. In doing so, he naturalizes settler agriculture and naturalizes Yokuts’ dispossession through their ostensible incompatibility with the post-1861 flood landscape.

Instead, what Morgan describes as the sudden departure of a few families was one moment in a much longer and larger series of colonial processes. Settlers—who arrived in increasing numbers during and after the Gold Rush—let their pigs, sheep, and cattle graze freely, destroying the tule bulbs and wetland ecosystem required for traditional food gathering and land management. They overfished the lakes and rivers, cut riparian forests for buildings and firewood, overhunted the tule elk and antelope, and burned large swaths of tule land to clear it (Gilbreath 2020). Settler militias led violent assaults against Indigenous villages, such as the Tule River Indian War or the Mariposa War, and laws such as the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians legalized the enslavement of Indigenous children within white homes (Hurtado 1990; Frank and Goldberg 2011; Madley 2016).

In 1851—ten years before Baker’s arrival at Kern Island—fourteen leaders representing the Chunut, Wowol, Koyeti, and Yowlumne Yokuts had signed the Treaty of Paint Creek with US representatives. This treaty established two reservations in the area: the Tule River Reservation and the Tulare Lake Reservation. However, the US Senate decided in a closed session on July 8, 1852, not to ratify this treaty or the seventeen others that had been negotiated in California, instead sealing them from public view for fifty years (Frank and Goldberg 2011). The non-ratification left the Tule River and Tulare Lake Reservations, according to settler law, open to be claimed as private property.⁸

Also in 1851 the Federal Land Commission Act appointed a commission to validate land claims from either the Spanish or Mexican government. All lands not claimed within two years would become public US land. This long, drawn-out process bankrupted many Mexican land-grant holders, who were forced to sell part or all of their land and cattle to pay often exorbitant legal fees (Almaguer 2008). The Mexican rancho economy, largely based on cattle ranching, was also racialized as non-white and, furthermore, threatening to California’s emergent white liberal democracy because it required large tracts of land. Small farms, instead, were considered the underpinning of the liberal subject and liberal democracy more broadly (Mead 1920; Worster 1985). Both the California Supreme Court and then the US Supreme Court would also eventually declare that the end of the Federal Land Commission process effectively extinguished, within settler law, all aboriginal title claims for California tribes. By the 1861 flood, the US government had already been forcibly moving Indigenous communities—many of whom had already moved once to Fort Tejon—to the Tule River Farm, a nascent reservation (Latta 1949). Yet the Tule River Indian Tribe’s own records remember that many refused to go at all, or repeatedly returned from the reservations to their homelands (Frank and Goldberg 2011).⁹

Ultimately, this history shows the impact of racializing a landscape as contaminating, and the performative, material-discursive work of a logic of contamination that separates the civilized fields of private property from the unruliness of marshes or deserts. Linearizing the Kern River, and draining its surrounding wetlands and marshes, was part of extending settler control but, more broadly, functioned as a material-discursive process that transformed land, relationships to land, racial formations, and understandings of contamination. In other words, hydraulic engineering functioned according to a racialized logic of contamination, which not only acted on bodies and lands but also developed co-constitutively with them. This process produced and reproduced the same racial capitalist logics of contamination and bordered purity—but, as we will see, the contours of those logics have radically shifted over time.

Further, while Baker’s work is narrated as part of white progress here, no part of the reclamation process was inevitable. Instead, he built the town ditch more at the mercy of natural conditions than through planned and coordinated action. The southern San Joaquin Valley would continue to flood repeatedly, destroying multiple irrigation systems, until the Kern River was dammed by Lake Isabella, above Kern Canyon. Further, the broader project of reclamation only progressed through repeated actions over time that, in various ways, cited ideas of proper landscapes that themselves were in flux over time. The performative production of this landscape reminds us that none of this was inevitable, and points to the multiple cracks, seepages, and other possibilities that surround us.

Today, public health discourses continue to link the Valley’s air to ill health—yet instead of marsh vapors and malaria, the concerns are primarily pesticides and hydrocarbons. Breathing these toxins now is not seen as detrimental specifically to the white race in the way that breathing nineteenth-century swamp air was. The valences of environmental contamination have shifted, such that whiteness is often positioned as—and produced through—environmental privilege and invulnerability to premature death.¹⁰ Today, chemical toxicity in the San Joaquin Valley disproportionately affects low-income Latinx groups, producing clear group-differentiated exposure to premature death through farmworkers’ occupational proximity to pesticides and fertilizers, or residents’ proximity to oil fields or storage tanks. Even as a logic of contamination remains consistent, these shifts in who and what is contaminating/contaminated are part of the racialized differentiation that racial capitalism both produces and requires, and show that contamination itself is an active part of white settler place-making.

The next morning, as Kyle and I pored over the FLIR footage, my head suddenly felt like it was free-falling through space. I felt dizzy and nauseous; any time I moved my head, the vertigo returned. We had gotten clear footage of hydrocarbon plumes coming off storage tanks and bubbling up from the ground where an underground pipe was later confirmed to have broken. I also saw myself, tiny, standing directly underneath a plume of hydrocarbons rolling off the flare.

That evening, I drove with Cesar to Lost Hills, a small community just east of one of California’s largest oil fields, where he and a resident took a bucket air sample. As we drove back, his phone rang repeatedly: the FLIR footage was circulating widely on Twitter. As Cesar described the hearings leading up to the City Council ordinance hearing, he suddenly interrupted himself: “Do you see it? It’s a pesticide cloud.”

I stared, but only saw almond trees and power lines. “I think I missed it,” I said.

“That’s another thing you kind of have to be attuned to,” he said. “You’ll probably start to see them after a while.”

He rolled up both our windows, frowning. “It’s still here, with us.”

“You still smell it?”

“Yup.”

“What does it smell like?”

“Like the bottom of a shoe.”

If, historically, settler understandings of the San Joaquin Valley as contaminating propelled its draining and irrigation, that work also produced it as, today, in fact toxic to bodies. Today, this toxicity is largely contested through air monitoring: air often has a more immediate effect on the body and is the most straightforward medium to sample. This turn to air also registers the ways in which the violences of colonial capitalism are as immediate as the next in-breath—or what Simmons (2017) might call “settler atmospherics.”

Yet contamination can also produce forms of intimacy (Chen 2011) and political organizing (Aguirre 2021). I spent most of my time with people who, upon encountering pesticides or hydrocarbons, purposefully smelled more deeply: for instance, Cesar’s sense of smell is the best measure of whether he should take a bucket sample there. While this increased their individual exposure, they saw it as a way of decreasing collective exposure. In this section I discuss the contemporary affective and emotional valences of encountering contamination and the forms of relationship it can produce.

Thinking of my own vertigo that morning, and the deep unease it produced, I reiterated to Cesar that it must be hard, choosing to breathe in that air. But even as I asked, the question felt hollow. I am not from Bakersfield and have predominantly lived in places of environmental privilege, but most residents here don’t have a choice: anyone who lives here must breathe this air. Exposure is still group-differentiated, however, depending on where people live and work. Neighborhoods directly downwind of pesticide spraying or oil fields, such as Lost Hills, experience much deeper effects. And outdoor laborers—particularly farmworkers—are one of the least protected and most exposed groups (London et al. 2011; Garoupa White 2016). This is part of racial capitalism’s biopolitical logics: people who breathe this air routinely are exposed to premature death at the most intimate level of the lungs and heart.

Cesar described how residents become attuned to different smells—this is part of why CCEJN takes bucket air samples where residents complain of fumes. He told me there’s an instrument called a nasometer; you hold it in your nose, and it measures the air quality as you breathe in. “But just like it’s best to use your hands to knead out knots because your hands feel them, it’s best to use your nose because it’s the best sensor,” he said. In other words, breathing this air is also a process of attunement. In fact, toward the end of the drive, when Cesar pointed out pesticides again, I did smell it: earthy, like dirt, a little like compost.

“Yes, like the bottom of a shoe!” he said.

If it takes work and consistent attention to become attuned, however, it also takes effort to avoid becoming attuned, as Nicolas Shapiro (2015) shows. One geologist who grew up in Oildale, surrounded by the Kern River Oil Field, said her family would likely not believe their water was toxic unless someone official literally came to their door to tell them—and maybe not even then. Chemical entanglements can be so common that they form a regime of imperception: the everyday nature of chemical exposure is what increases risk of premature death—yet this very mundanity is also what can make it invisible (Murphy 2006). In response, organizers work to destabilize the normality of exposure.

(Non)attunement is also often a function of the social and economic stratifications of the Valley, surfacing through differentiations of race, class, or gender. White oil proponents often registered discomfort or indifference at my lines of questioning, or repeated that they and their families also live here—and they wouldn’t do anything to hurt their families. One former oil worker took a deep inhale and asked me, “You smell that? That’s the smell of money.” While this orientation can be described, like Shapiro (2015), in terms of white masculine investments in impermeability, these desires to downplay or disregard toxicity also emerge from the ties between white working-class economic security and the emergence of the fossil economy.

They also point to the shifting tactics of settler colonial environmental projects, away from the nineteenth century’s explicit discourses of white vulnerability and toward contemporary environmental racism’s positioning of whiteness as invulnerability to premature death. Within the framework of what Cara New Daggett (2018) calls “petro-masculinity,” assertions of chemical non-contamination shift the threat of contamination onto feminist, queer, or racialized threats to a nostalgic white patriarchal America.

Attunement and non-attunement both signal the material-discursive production of bodies in relation to chemical signals, in part through the differential exposure that racial capitalism produces. What a body can sense is fundamentally produced by its history and lived experience; the material-discursive specificities of regimes of imperceptibility are linked with, for instance, not spending time in proximity to oil and gas sites. My body, for instance, was incapable of sensing chemical effects until residents trained me over time. Other non-attunements are similarly part of a material-discursive apparatus that includes links between whiteness, masculinity, and commitments to impermeability. Ultimately, contamination can never be defined in the abstract but instead emerges along specific lines of lived history.

In conversations, organizers continuously shifted back to the intimacies, forms of relationship, and future visions that propelled them, registering other responses to contamination beyond a desire to maintain an uncontaminated purity. A year after my drive with Cesar, I stood with Rosanna Esparza above the Cawelo Water District, where produced water from the Kern River Oil Field is cleaned and sent downstream to irrigate crops. Both of us already had headaches and the hydrocarbon fumes were almost palpable. I asked if she was ever nervous about her own health. She answered,

Oh yeah, absolutely. Uh-huh. And I say not everybody can do this, and those of us who have a commitment to environmental justice, just know that you're giving up something. You're giving up a lot. Like part of your life, and your health. Because we definitely take risks. What's important to recall or remember, though, is that I won't put myself in the path of danger if I see it. If I'm taking you to see Cawelo, we're not going to be there very long. The point is, this is a reality that I live with in my community that is part of the problem that we have in Kern County.

Esparza is fully aware that her work exposes her to toxicity, and in fact, we weren’t there for long. But she went on to talk about the employees who drive the trucks here, the detention center that is downwind, and the remnants of oil by-products in the water that will go on to irrigate crops (Cart 2015). There is no such thing as an uncontaminated body. Instead, addressing contamination in this way propels organizing and relationships.

We can see also this in the continuity between the Committee for a Better Arvin (CBA) and the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) labor and environmental organizing. CBA was formed in 2007 as a small group of residents, largely through the support of Gustavo Aguirre Sr., who spent decades organizing with the UFW. CBA’s bylaws and written documents are the same as those of the UFW Worker’s Committees—“I don’t have any idea why that would be!” Aguirre joked, shrugging his shoulders. But, jokes aside, CBA’s overarching frameworks of leadership development, deep community engagement, and collaborative decision making are also direct results of the UFW (Aguirre 2021).

As Aguirre told me, “Convincing people to take action is giving them hope. Sometimes because they are dealing with some issues, they believe that it's normal for them to just deal with that. But part of the job of an organizer is, what you are coming to deal with is not fair.” As he expanded,

“You are not happy drinking polluted water, are you willing to do something? Or do you want to continue drinking the polluted water—and your kids, how are your kids? Ahhh! Okay. Do you want to protect your kids’ health or what?…Just guiding them, helping them connect with the situation and how it is affecting them and how it can be changed. Giving them hope.”

As CBA members described to me, they began focusing on a Superfund¹¹ site east of Arvin, but soon focused more broadly on pesticides and oil fumes. They also continuously prioritize relationships and leadership development. For the City Council ordinance, CBA knocked on doors and collected thousands of signatures. But they had also been active in the community long enough that they had supported the election bids of younger Latinx City Council members.

As Aguirre’s description of organizing articulates, part of the work of racial capitalism is to normalize toxicity into imperceptibility. In this context, the public education and leadership development of environmental justice organizers does the work of destabilizing a produced normal.

Today, the Tule River Tribe is working toward building a small reservoir to meet their water needs. Their current reservation land, in the mountains east of Fresno, is only fed by the small South Fork of the Tule River, groundwater, and a few small springs. As articulated in Tribal documents and testimony in state legislative hearings in 2007 and 2009, these waters “barely serve the current needs of the Tribal community on the Reservation” (Garfield 2009, 5). The Tribe reached an amicable settlement with downstream users in 2007, and now await state legislation funding the reservoir.

As Ryan Garfield, speaking in 2009 as the chairman of the Tule River Tribe, said, “Once the settlement is fully carried out, the Tribe will join other Indian nations in the United States, by turning its ‘paper’ federal reserved rights to water from the South Fork Tule River into actual ‘wet’ water” (Garfield 2009, 2).¹² Funding the reservoir, they add, would settle their claims of fraud and misconduct that date from being removed repeatedly from promised reservation land from the 1850s until 1873. The Tule River Tribe’s ongoing struggle for water is a reminder that, in addition to the immediacy of air pollution, settler colonial processes continue to function through (lack of) access to water (Yazzie 2013; Estes 2017; Sepulveda 2018; Gilio-Whitaker 2019).

In 2019 the Arvin City Council setback ordinance passed in a packed house, three-zero with two members absent. While three hundred feet is a relatively small setback, it sets an important precedent for an area dominated by the oil economy. Industry opposed it vehemently as emboldening environmental justice activists across Kern County. As Willie Rivera, then a member of the Bakersfield city council and spokesperson for the trade group California Independent Petroleum Association, said, “Every notch in [activists’] belt, I think, empowers them to keep biting off more, and that concerns me” (Thompson 2019). Environmental justice activists do see it as an important first step: "It might seem like it's small, only 300 feet, but for us, it was a really big accomplishment," Estella Escoto, President of CBA, told a reporter for Inside Climate News in 2018 (Kane 2020).

More broadly, environmental justice organizing not only combats chemical exposure but also points to important ways of redefining contamination. Rather than attempting to maintain an uncontaminated purity, Esparza and others address it as an ongoing fact of life. Their approach also extends the UFW’s commitment to building power within communities through issues such as pesticide exposure. If part of the work of racial capitalism is to make contamination imperceptible and to deny the sensitivity of racialized peoples, then taking these interconnected embodied empiricisms seriously is deeply political work. Organizers such as Aguirre and others are indeed deeply concerned about the environmental impacts of agriculture and oil—yet their goals exceed those concerns. Instead, they are ultimately focused on building power and leadership.

While hydraulic engineering and later air pollution function according to a logic of racialized contamination, their impacts on environments and people have produced and reproduced those capitalist and racial logics. Contamination remains a racialized sense of bordered purity, but precisely who and what is at risk of contamination has shifted alongside settler and white supremacist tactics and land use changes. Tracing these shifts shows the co-constitutive relationships of water, land, and their settler colonial and racial capitalist transformation. Ultimately, this analysis shows that environmental contamination not only emerges from histories of dehumanization and dispossession, but is also a central aspect of racial capitalist and settler colonial processes themselves.

It also points to the necessity of finding other ways to conceptualize environmental harm. Although contamination combines the concept of harm with the concept of purity, contact - and being changed by that contact - are not inherently harmful. Instead, much more specificity about chemical impacts and effects is necessary to fully articulate harm. In this vein, work such as Murphy’s (2017) articulation of decolonial chemical relations centers the relationality we each carry with not only chemical forms but the lands and water around us. Todd, too, begins from recognizing the fossils of Alberta oil as “a paradoxical kind of kin” (2017, 104), and then proceeds to ask what ethical kinship might mean, emphasizing the necessity of tending to that “reciprocal relationality” (107). This mode doesn’t refuse the inevitability of contact; instead, an “openness to alteration” (Murphy 2017, 500) holds space for articulating harm but also includes the possibility of recomposing, redefining, and moving toward more ethical forms of relation.

While property itself is performative and requires consistent re-articulation, so do the San Joaquin Valley’s fields today: their continued productivity requires continuous technological and material interventions, including fertilizers, pesticides, groundwater extraction techniques, and a statewide hydraulic system. But the ongoingness of these interventions—and the possibilities they open for doing otherwise—is a reminder of the myriad cracks, seepages, and other potentialities held in the present—in the “fulsomeness of our relations” (Murphy 2017, 501) rather than the refusal of them.

I gratefully acknowledge Rosanna Esparza, Michelle Glass, Cesar Aguirre, Gustavo Aguirre Jr., Gustavo Aguirre Sr., Kyle Ferrar, and Nayamin Martinez for their work in the San Joaquin Valley and for their conversations in thinking through the ideas in this article. In addition, I gratefully acknowledge CCEJN, the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment (CRPE), FracTracker, the Committee for a Better Arvin (CBA), and the artists of ADELANTE for their ongoing work and their generosity with their time and attention. Many thanks to Karen Barad, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Lindsey Dillon, Mayanthi Fernando, Laurie Palmer, Monica Mikhail, Holden Huntzinger, Kali Rubaii, Rowan Powell, Dan Schniedewind, and two anonymous reviewers for reading or discussing this article in its various forms.

¹ While agriculture has historically relied on the racialized exploitation of workers including Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous groups, oil has been more predominantly seen as the domain of white masculine labor and in fact was part of the uplift of racial whiteness into relative economic security in the last century.

² Ethnographic work consisted of almost twenty-five semi-structured interviews and participant observation with scientists, residents, community organizers and activists, and oil proponents at community meetings, planning sessions, celebrations, and county and city hearings. My approach was primarily guided by Indigenous feminist theory on the relationality involved in research (see Underhill and Esparza 2021). I am a white settler academic and have primarily lived in marked environmental privilege in relation to the toxicity of Kern County. Differences in access, economic stability, racial privilege, and environmental exposure framed every interaction I had in the Valley, explicitly and implicitly. Therefore, I aimed to produce a project that worked with and alongside the insights of my collaborators toward environmental justice goals. I was guided by Eve Tuck’s (2009) formulation of “desire-based research,” which proceeds from the presumption of complex personhood within and across communities. Kim TallBear’s (2014) description of research as not speaking on behalf of, but rather “standing with” others, also helped me deepen an approach to research based in building relationships—and their specificities.

³ By “a material-discursive meaning-making practice,” I don’t simply mean that contamination can be seen to work both materially (at the level of chemicals and bodies) and discursively (at the level of ideas)—a distinction that can be deconstructed even when considering chemicals, bodies, or ideas (Barad 2007). Instead, material-discursivity centers the ways in which lands, peoples, or objects have been produced as contaminated or contaminating in co-constitutive and shifting ways, and how racializing logics of contamination move and evolve through land.

⁴ As Yarimar Bonilla (2015) points out in her history of Antillean writers of marronage, the category of “maroon” is not stable: while today it is a symbol of resistance and pride, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the maroon was more commonly seen as a bandit or criminal.

⁵ Gender was also a constitutive part of this framework. As Schuller points out, if “civilized” nervous systems and bodies were more sensitive and permeable than uncivilized bodies, then they stood the risk of either being “contaminated” over time by less refined impulses or devolving into over-sensitized “hysteria.” Therefore, binary gender was understood as an important stabilizing force: in this formation, while white women might be more sensitive, white men were more rational, and the white heterosexual couple and nuclear family became the foundational unit for the propagation of civilized society (Schuller 2017).

⁶ In other words, Indigenous people were not only dispossessed of land, but their labor was also central to the work of reclamation. Later, many canals were dug with underpaid Chinese labor, until anti-Chinese sentiment was so high that companies such as Miller and Lux explicitly hired only white labor to minimize conflict with Valley residents (Igler 2005).

⁸ By 1871 the Indian Appropriations Act, which declared that the US government could no longer make treaties with Indigenous Peoples because it considered them no longer sovereign nations, had nullified these non-ratified treaties (Frank and Goldberg 2011).

⁹ Space precludes a more thorough discussion of these dynamics. For a more detailed history of this process, Gelya Frank and Carole Goldberg (2011) and the Tule River Tribe’s website (e.g., Tule River Tribe 2018) detail both the US government’s dispossession of California Indigenous nations, and the Tule River Tribe’s ongoing resistance to this dispossession.

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Vivian Underhill is a postdoctoral scholar with Northeastern University’s Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute. She holds a PhD in Feminist Studies from University of California, Santa Cruz.