Every day hundreds of semitrailers full of toxic materials rumble in and out of Kettleman City, an isolated farming town astride Interstate 5, midway between Los Angeles and Sacramento. Those trucks are headed to a toxic waste burial site three miles west of town, the largest landfill west of Louisiana. Residents of Kettleman City detest this dangerous traffic. When Chemical Waste Management, owner of the landfill, launched plans to construct a new toxic waste incinerator, residents of the city labeled it "a landfill in the sky" and banded together to block Chem Waste from any more toxic facilities in a town where the water is so tainted that it is unfit for drinking, and children suffer unusually high rates of leukemia. "Do you think we'd have this toxic mess here if we were a community of rich people," asked Mary Lou Mares, a lettuce cutter who has lived in Kettleman City most of her adult life. "Our rights have never been taken seriously." Led by a coalition of farm workers and farmers, hundreds of citizens of Kettleman City formed El Pueblo para El Aire y Agua Limpio (People for Clean Air and Water), a multi-ethnic coalition whose aim was to stop the proposed incinerator. In a David-and-Goliath struggle, El Pueblo was able to block the incinerator and limit Chem Waste's plans for expansion.
