Sunbelt Apartheid: South Phoenix, USA

As in so many US cities, the historical geographical construction of Phoenix, Arizona is the story of a contaminated community in the heart of one of the largest and fastest growing Sunbelt cities in the US. Racial categories and attendant social relations were constructed by European immigrants and their descendants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to produce a stigmatized zone of racial exclusion and economic marginality in South Phoenix, a district adjacent to the city center.

Racialized identifies were historically deployed to segregate people of color, both residentially and economically in the early city, founded in 1881. By the 1920s race and place were conceptually and materially interwoven in a mutually reinforcing process of social stigmatization and environmental degradation in South Phoenix. This process created mixed-minority residential and industrial land uses that survives to the present. The process and its outcome has been referred to as “Sunbelt apartheid,” whereby undesirable land uses and minorities have been segregated from “White” Phoenix. A wide range of planning and investment decisions and patterns continue to shape the human ecology of the city today.

The material effects of racial discrimination, spatial control, and unregulated land uses in South Phoenix were pronounced by the first 40 years of the city’s development. Living conditions for the poorest Latinos and African Americans in South Phoenix were dire, for which the White population generally blamed the victims. Housing consisted of a mix of tents with shacks of cardboard and scrap wood, with no water or sewage, clustered between factories, warehouses, and stockyards. The stockyards and unregulated emissions of factories and trains produced contaminated air and water in those neighborhoods. Heat-related deaths and high infant mortality were commonplace in summers when daytime temperatures often exceed 40˚C. Overcrowded housing, severe poverty, and malnutrition were prevalent as were epidemics of typhoid and tuberculosis in the 1920s and 1930s across the district. Infant mortality data from the Depression era clearly shows death rates for Blacks, Latinos, and Indians as two to three times the White rate (Buck 1936).[i]

The cumulative effects of environmental consequences in South Phoenix remain apparent, despite major changes in federal regulations, scientific knowledge of toxic hazards, and the environmental

justice movement. This reflects ongoing disregard by city officials. Environmental activists have been quick to label this discrimination and neglect as racism. The pervasive discrimination and spatial segregation that shaped the city’s early urban landscape and economy set in place processes of industrialization and residential patterns that are changing slowly in the current period of rapid urban expansion.[ii] However, environmental and social indicators attest that inferior living conditions remain in South Phenix.[iii]

[i] E.E. Buck, “A Survey of Public Health in Arizona,” (Phoenix: Arizona Statewide Public Health Committee, 1936).

[ii] Bob Bolin, Sara Grineski and Timothy Collins, “Geography of Despair: Environmental Racism and the Making of South Phoenix, Arizona, USA,” Human Ecology Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, Special Issue on ’Nature, Science, and Social Movements’ (winter 2005), pp. 156–68, https://www.humanecologyreview.org/pastissues/her122/bolingrineskicollins.pdf .

[iii] Erin Stone, “Winter air really is worse in south, west Phoenix. Here’s why,” Arizona Republic (2 January 2020), https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2019/12/31/phoenix-pollution-tends-settle-low-income-areas-heres-why/2778672001/; Lillian Donahue, “Dust, particle pollution disproportionately affect Latino and poor communities,” Cronkite News (15 May 2019), https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2019/05/15/pollution-latino-poor-communities/.

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