La Teja Shall Sing

Abstract

This chapter explores how long-time neighborhood activists helped build the CVSP into the nation’s most significant environmental-justice movement by mobilizing the radical histories, strong place attachment, and “socially thick” landscape of community organizing in the working-class neighborhood of La Teja. It examines the role of La Teja’s community media, the environmental-education efforts of teachers at a local special-needs school, and children’s creative-art projects in raising awareness of neighborhood lead poisoning and generating critical environmental consciousness. The chapter conveys the spirit and poetics of murga, a popular musical theater genre of Carnival. In paralleling the poetic structure of murga, the chapter seeks to capture the inventive, narrative, hopeful, and performative dimensions of environmental-justice movements.