The Impact of Eliminating DEI Programs on Climate Justice

Dr. Laura Pulido, Professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and Geography at the University of Oregon’s Center for Environmental Futures, is our guest. Dr. Pulido discusses cultural memory, the current efforts at the federal level and across the country to erase it, and why we cannot achieve racial justice without honestly confronting a past rooted in racial violence. She also describes the Trump administration’s elimination of environmental justice programs and explains what these changes mean for all of us.

Transcript

00:10 — Rosemary (Host)
Welcome to Abuelas en Acción, a multi-generational podcast for our common good. I’m your host, Dr. Rosemary Salaya Alston, and I’m joined today by my comadre and co-host, Consuelo Zaragoza.

We’re a podcast where truth-telling meets generational wisdom—with a whole lot of corazón.

We are very much looking forward to our conversation with today’s esteemed guest, Dr. Laura Pulido. We will share her expertise and research to help us understand the forces shaping this moment in our country. Many of us are deeply worried about what is happening—the presence and actions of ICE and the National Guard in communities across the country, and the arrests and deportations of innocent people based on skin color, profiling, and preferred language. These are stark examples of how violence is being normalized in our country today.

Buenos días, Consuelo. ¿Cómo estás?

01:24 — Consuelo (Co-host)
Muy bien, gracias. Aquí en Portland, ¡cómo está la lluvia! A lot.

01:31 — Rosemary
A lot of rain over there, huh?

01:33 — Consuelo
Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Pulido, it’s an honor to have you with us and to dive into your work. I noticed that when you send emails, you include all these incredible links to information. It’s been wonderful to explore—especially the map about where white supremacy and different things are located and how that’s impacted our country. So I really, really appreciate that.

02:09 — Laura Pulido (Guest)
Thanks. I oftentimes wonder, “Why do I put all those links there?” But I’m glad somebody checked.

02:14 — Rosemary
We are so excited to speak with you today. Dr. Laura Pulido is the Collins Chair and Professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies—and Geography—at the University of Oregon’s Center for Environmental Futures.

We first became acquainted with Dr. Pulido’s work when we read her foreword to the excellent book Latinx Environmentalism. Since then, we have had the honor of hosting her as a keynote speaker at Familias en Acción’s Latino Health Equity Conference in Portland.

We’re so excited to have you and hear from you, Laura. ¿Cómo estás?

03:00 — Laura Pulido
Muy bien, gracias. Muy bien. No rain yet here in Eugene.

03:05 — Rosemary
That’s what I hear. Looking back at all that you’ve been involved with, what experiences shaped your political and scholarly perspective growing up?

03:26 — Laura Pulido
There were many experiences. I think the first one was simply the geography of Southern California, where I was born and raised. At a very early age, I became aware of segregation patterns: where Mexicans lived, where Black people lived, where Little Tokyo was, where white people lived. As a young child, I remember thinking, “I’ve got to understand this.”

Another important part of Southern California was the intense air pollution I grew up with. I was born in 1962, before serious attempts at cleaning up the air. I grew up with smoggy skies, never being able to see the San Gabriel Mountains. I also grew up with that acute burning feeling in my throat from the smog. Those were very formative experiences.

Equally important was my class and racial location. My dad was a dock worker. He was a union member, and I remember hearing at dinner every day about the idiocy of the bosses. He would talk about daily events and what happened. I remember long strikes and my dad’s activism.

At the same time, we were Mexicans living in Southern California, and I understood at a very young age that to be Mexican was to be in a racially subordinate position—though of course I didn’t have the language for it. I also observed early on the way people talked about Black people and Blackness, especially in relationship to Mexicans. That was really important in setting me on a path to become an ethnic studies scholar.

Patriarchy was also important. My dad, who I’ve described, was also a Mexican Catholic patriarch. I experienced early gender discrimination in my family and household—expectations for me as the eldest daughter, and liberties my brother had that I did not. My dad said, “If anybody’s ever going to go to college, it’s going to be your brother.”

The last thing I’ll say is activism—particularly in graduate school. That’s when I became what I call “my public self”: stepping out of the bounds of family and conventional roles as a student or worker, and taking public stances around issues—beginning with environmental justice. That shaped me profoundly. It helped me better understand the problems faced by working-class communities of color, and also made me part of—and a student of—the strategies and forms of resistance communities engage in to improve their position and challenge dominant power relations.

06:57 — Rosemary
How profound each of those roles were in shaping your lens—how you look at the world, even in terms of landscape.

You’ve said recent anti-racist struggles have made abundantly clear how important cultural memory is. We cannot achieve racial justice until we honestly engage with a past predicated on racial violence. Could you talk about the role of cultural memory in what we’re seeing and hearing today?

07:45 — Laura Pulido
I became really interested in cultural memory in 2012, when I co-wrote a book with Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng—two of my former students—called A People’s Guide to Los Angeles. We called it a radical tour guide, documenting sites of racial, class, gender, and environmental struggle in LA County’s history and landscape.

As we did that research—looking for sites people didn’t know about, vernacular landscapes—I became really interested in what we choose to commemorate. What are formal sites of recognition? How does hegemonic cultural memory work? I’ve been working on this ever since, and it’s given me great joy. I’m very passionate about it.

Through formal commemorative practices, these are the stories we tell ourselves about how this country came to be.

08:47 — Consuelo
And what we clearly see is a clear—

08:51 — Laura Pulido
—effort to avoid difficult topics, particularly around the racial past: colonialism, settler colonialism, slavery—all in pursuit, we argue, of white innocence. It’s very important for the white nation to have moral legitimacy. That’s one of the ways it derives power and maintains its place.

In the early 1970s, as a result of activism in the late ’60s and early ’70s, we begin to see a slow-moving arc to shift the story. The beginnings of Black Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies—saying: we need a more accurate story, a fuller and more robust story of this country and how it came to be. And that includes us—we’re active actors in this story.

Over time, especially by the 1990s and early 2000s, cultural memory begins to change in the United States. Different stories are told. There’s acknowledgement—like at Monticello and Jefferson—of Sally Hemings as the mother of many of his children, an enslaved woman, and how institutions had to respond in tours and materials.

I often talk about an important starting point in this more recent chapter: Bree Newsome—around 2015 or 2016—climbing the South Carolina State House and taking down the Confederate flag, for which she was promptly arrested. That was a big opening salvo: “No—we’re going at it.”

This intensifies after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Then we see toppling of monuments—Columbus, colonizers, slavers, Confederate statues—especially in the South.

What we’re living through now is backlash to that. It was changing too much. It challenged white innocence by demanding a reckoning and changing the narrative of the U.S. So there’s an effort to stop it.

In the first couple months of Trump’s presidency—Trump 2.0—he passed an executive order about “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” He ordered the Smithsonian to review everything and eliminate programs that “degrade American shared values” or promote ideologies inconsistent with federal law—anything related to DEI. This shows the political stakes of cultural memory. It has become, once again, a site of intense contestation—as it should be.

12:48 — Consuelo
Yeah. Watching what happens day-to-day with this new administration, it feels like cultural norms we thought were established are going down.

My abuelitos Zaragoza were from Mexico. My grandpa came over and worked as a laborer, then on the railroad, and retired from that. What gets me is people do not recognize the gente of Mexico and what they’ve done for this country. We look at state names, culture, music—everything. The Bracero Program—bringing folks over to work because no one else would, because of the war. People don’t have that memory.

14:05 — Laura Pulido
And why the impact is now—and then making it look like—

14:11 — Consuelo
—folks are coming over and just taking advantage of the United States. Anyway, I had to say that. It really bothers me.

14:26 — Laura Pulido
Thank you for saying that. I had not made a sufficient connection. We’ve been looking at National Historic Landmarks—2,700 federally sanctioned landmarks—and we found Latinos are the most underrepresented in the stories being told of the nation.

The connection you’re making between portraying Latinos as “takers”—here to take advantage—and the lack of cultural memory that we’ve been here for hundreds of years in this country… that’s a great connection.

15:08 — Rosemary
It feels like a common thread through your work—correct me if I’m wrong—like a chalkboard being erased.

15:20 — Laura Pulido
Yeah.

15:21 — Rosemary
We’re erased. And it’s continuing—taking the chalk off the board so we keep thinking we didn’t have anything to do with the building, the creating, the ways of knowing in this country.

15:50 — Laura Pulido
Absolutely. I like that metaphor. It exists metaphorically, but it’s also material now.

16:08 — Rosemary
So many Americans are feeling overwhelmed by the chaos and the dismantling of government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency. Many of us are unaware of specific climate protections that have been eliminated, or how these changes will affect our communities and lives.

Can you talk about environmental racism, and what you see taking place during this current administration?

16:44 — Laura Pulido
In Trump 1.0, he didn’t really go after environmental justice directly. He went after deregulation, which has implications for environmental justice, but he didn’t target EJ as such. I don’t think they knew what it was, and I don’t think they had the capacity.

That’s not the case in Trump 2.0. They’ve learned. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 includes recommendations around environmental issues, including environmental justice.

This spring, I taught a course at UO on Environmental Racism. We did a collective research project to identify all the environmental justice programs, policies, actions, and personnel impacted by the Trump administration up to that point. What we saw was effectively a wholesale dismantling of environmental justice infrastructure at the federal level.

What was especially surprising was how they did it. In Trump’s first two days, he issued two executive orders against DEI—ending “radical and wasteful” DEI programs, and another about “restoring merit-based opportunity.” Under the mantle of those orders, they eliminated EJ at the federal level. The speed was breathtaking. They didn’t go through the regular route of environmental regulation; they went in through the DEI track, which had been demonized.

Some examples: elimination of the Department of Justice Office of Environmental Justice—those were people who might take on lawsuits on behalf of communities disproportionately impacted by polluters. That no longer exists. They went after the EPA EJ screening tool that communities used nationwide, even globally. EPA EJ grant programs were eliminated. EJ staff were fired. Federal and regional EJ offices were closed. The National Environmental Justice Advisory Council was dismantled—one of the first things created in 1994 when Clinton issued the EJ executive order. EJ has been erased from the EPA website. EJ lawsuits and settlements, sometimes years in the making, were terminated.

EJ still exists in some states, especially blue states like Oregon, but it no longer exists at the federal level. It’s been truly breathtaking.

20:55 — Consuelo
Hearing that hurts. It hurts your head to think that it happened—and is happening—and how quickly everything was dismantled. I don’t understand how so many people think it’s business as usual.

21:32 — Laura Pulido
It’s not business as usual. Before the election, some politically involved students told me they were thinking of not voting—like, “What difference does it make?” And I said, “Oh my god—this is one of the most consequential elections you can imagine. You cannot sit this out.” But there are so many reasons people aren’t invested. There’s so much happening you can’t keep track of it all. We have to acknowledge that.

22:17 — Consuelo
Laura, you wrote about the Oregon wildfires in 2020 and the spread of racialized misinformation. What did that moment reveal about race and politics in Oregon?

22:39 — Laura Pulido
That was the first essay I ever wrote about Oregon. I had to do a lot of work to understand Oregon—its history, demographics, and geography—which I really enjoyed.

The fires were horrendous. For days we couldn’t go outside because it was so smoky. Communities were devastated—like Blue River near the McKenzie, and areas outside Portland like Sandy were heavily impacted.

This was on the heels of the protests in 2020. Political tensions were high, including street fights. Then, in September, these devastating wildfires hit. In some impacted, more red-leaning communities, people blamed Black Lives Matter activists and Antifa for setting the fires—attributing them to arson.

This showed a denial of climate change—despite evidence that the fires were intensified by climate change—and also a denial of white supremacy. It made me think about how climate justice research hasn’t sufficiently engaged with the right. There’s a lot of research on vulnerability—how communities of color are disproportionately impacted by climate harms—but much less on how it’s connected to white supremacy.

In Europe there’s a more established tradition of studying climate and white supremacy, often framed as blaming immigrants. In the U.S., because we have high levels of explicit climate denial, it looks different. It becomes linked to denial of white supremacy as well as denial of climate change.

27:15 — Consuelo
From all of that, and all of your research—what do you think the future looks like for us?

27:38 — Laura Pulido
I’m not overly hopeful. The level of dismantling we’ve seen—there’s no way we can build back anytime soon what has been dismantled, even if there’s a Democratic presidency next.

Environmental regulation, civil rights law, climate work—these are decades in the making, built bit by bit through law, policy, practice, and activism. And they’ve been dismantled in one fell swoop.

We will not go back to what we had. We may have something different. It may even be better, because what we had wasn’t great either—there were problems I’ve written about.

My best hope is determination—that we keep fighting. That’s the only way it changes. I’m hopeful for the creation of a broad-based movement committed to democracy and the rule of law. Never thought I’d say that, but it would be wonderful.

A massive movement rooted in civil society is the only way forward. We can look to other countries that have faced similar situations and learn from what they’ve done.

29:41 — Consuelo
Thank you. Sometimes I think, “Oh my gosh, it won’t be the same.” You talked about dismantling protections for the environment. There was always more to do, but now we ask: Where do we go? How do we protect our communities and environment?

During the 2020 fires, I also think of farmworkers and migrant workers in the fields. I don’t remember the number of people who died, but the lifelong impacts—the lack of water, breaks, masks, what people needed—so much of that didn’t happen.

30:48 — Laura Pulido
Absolutely.

30:49 — Rosemary
I want to add: my dad was a cotton picker. He remembers being out at 3:00 in the morning, and they would spray fields with Agent Orange.

31:09 — Laura Pulido
Wow.

31:09 — Rosemary
We’re still there to some extent, and we’ve also made progress in different ways. What I appreciate about your work, Laura, is how you bring together geography and ethnic studies, and help students understand why both matter. I hadn’t seen it that way before reading your work.

When I see the teardown so quickly of things that took forever to build, I want to remind our listeners: as people, we’ve been through many things—mental health challenges, daily struggles—and not to feel like there’s no hope.

What you gave us today is hope—even if it means broad-based movements. We know what has worked. We know that talking matters. Your students are getting more than readings—they’re going to experience a different way of seeing. For example, I’ll never look at a museum the same way.

32:45 — Consuelo
Yep.

32:46 — Rosemary
The Statue of Liberty—what went into that? Whose backs broke to build it? Our stories need to be heard. We so appreciate your time today. It’s valuable.

Anything else you’d like to add, Consuelo? Dr. Pulido?

33:39 — Consuelo
También gracias. The information you shared and how you enrich your students has an incredible impact. I wish I were a student now so you could be my professor. Muchas gracias, and good luck in all that you’re doing. I hope we meet again in person one day.

34:16 — Laura Pulido
I’d like that very much. And you all keep doing the great work you’re doing. The idea of the podcast is fantastic.

34:25 — Rosemary
For our listeners, before we sign off: in this dialogue today—and at our kitchen tables—when we look at anything about history, I’d like you to ask the question: What’s missing here?

Thank you to our listeners, and to Verde Action for making Abuelas en Acción possible today. Please share our podcast with your friends and families. We hope you’ll join us next time. Gracias.