Latino Labor: Intersection of Environmental Justice and Unconventional Oil and Gas Scholarship and Production in the U.S.

Keywords: gas, oil, Latinos, labor, EJ
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

The development of new extractive technologies such as fracking and horizontal drilling in the mid-2000s led to the rapid expansion of unconventional oil and gas production (UOG) in the U.S. West and other top crude oil-producing states. Geographers, including Julia Haggerty and Kathryn Walsh, have mapped "impact geographies" and the complex group of actors of UOG production (Haggerty, 2018; Walsh et al., 2020).While these scholars raise important dimensions of UOG production's social and environmental impacts, they have paid little attention to the presence of Latinx bodies in the industry or in oil boomtowns, despite strong evidence that UOG industries heavily recruit male Latino workers of varying nationalities and legal statuses into this sector. The Latinx population of North Dakota—the state at the center of the UOG boom to become the second-largest oil producing state in the nation—nearly doubled between 2010-2015 and between 2000-2020 North Dakota had the highest Latinx growth rate in the country. Because UOG scholarship in geography has not attended to the presence of Latinx bodies, they have not considered how race shapes the social and environmental impacts of the industry. This paper charts a research agenda at the intersection of environmental justice scholarship and geographies of unconventional oil and natural gas production, to argue for the necessity of exploring the racialized geographies of socio-environmental hazards in unconventional oil and gas production across the U.S. West and other regions.