Among the homes, schools, daycare centers, and churches of Los Angeles' Wilmington neighborhood, hundreds of pumpjacks extract oil, their dinosaur-like heads bobbing up and down.
A predominately working-class and Latino immigrant community of 58,000, Wilmington sits atop the third-largest oil field in the continental United States. Five oil refineries release steam from nearly 200-foot stacks, their pipes and tanks clanging and hissing. Many of Wilmington's residents work in the oil industry or in the nearby port, one of the country's busiest. The Los Angeles Times called the neighborhood, wedged between freeways and the port about five miles from Long Beach, "an island in a sea of petroleum."
But for 16-year-old Samantha Montes, Wilmington is just home: She calls it "the best neighborhood I could have grown up in," because of its close-knit community. "You never feel like you're left out of it."
[For more of this story, written by Mimi Kirk, go to https://psmag.com/environment/...il-with-green-spaces]
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