“There are pockets in Oxnard where people are from lower incomes, and that is where companies try to take advantage and put polluting projects,” said Noemi Tungui of Oxnard. She has lived in Oxnard since her family came from Mexico 21 years ago, when she was 3 years old. Tungui, a 2017 graduate of California State University, Northridge, is now working in her hometown as an intern with Food and Water Watch (FWW). She describes the problems of homelessness, lack of access to healthy food and spraying of the strawberry fields next to the elementary schools she attended. “When I was young I didn’t know it was policy or politics that we were dealing with. We could smell it and see the signs about spraying, but they never really told us it was bad for us. Now that I’ve gotten involved, and am talking to more people, realize friends growing up had asthma — this was happening to us. Something could have been done to protect us, but it wasn’t.”
Ventura County Reporter