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Children in low-income neighborhoods tend to be disproportionately exposed to environmental toxicants. This is cause for concern because exposure to environmental toxicants negatively affects health, which can impair academic success. To date, it is unknown if associations between air toxics and academic performance found in previous school-level studies persist when studying individual children. In pairing the National Air Toxics Assessment risk estimates for respiratory and diesel particulate matter risk disaggregated by source, with individual-level data collected through a mail survey, this paper examines the effects of exposure to residential environmental toxics on academic performance for individual children for the first time and adjusts for school-level effects using generalized estimating equations. We find that higher levels of residential air toxics, especially those from non-road mobile sources, are statistically significantly associated with lower grade point averages among fourth- and fifth-grade school children in El Paso (Texas, USA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective We advance social disorganization theory by examining homicides disaggregated by motive and gang relation and by using data from El Paso, Texas-a predominantly Latino city with high levels of immigration and poverty. Methods We analyze homicide data from the El Paso Police Department's detective logs, 1985-1995, as well as data from the 1990 U.S. Decennial Census. Results Key measures of social disorganization tend to be associated with homicide but these relationships vary across type of homicide. Immigration and percent African American show no connection with any homicide measure, while percent Latino is only positively associated with gang-related homicides. Conclusion Overall, social disorganization is useful in understanding homicide in El Paso, but race/ethnicity and immigration do not operate as predicted. These results add important knowledge to a growing literature regarding the neighborhood-level associations between immigration, Latinos, and crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Few studies have taken a conventional quantitative environmental justice approach to assessing the inequitable implications of climate change at a fine scale, such as across neighborhoods within an urban area. In this paper, we test the “environmental justice hypothesis” for climate change-related variables in the bi-national context of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua using a matched set of social indicators from the 2000 US and Mexican censuses and biophysical data related to heat, ozone and flooding. T-test results demonstrated that social marginality and climate change-related hazard exposure were generally higher in Juárez as compared to El Paso. Using spatial regression models, we found patterns of environmental injustice in the sister cities related to these climate change-related hazards. Lower social class neighborhoods generally faced increased risks from extreme heat in both cities, and from floods and peak ozone in El Paso. In El Paso, children also faced significant and disproportionate exposure to peak ozone, while female-headed households were significantly more burdened by flooding and peak ozone in Juárez. Despite the limitations of this cross-sectional study, we can expect injustices to heighten as neighborhoods at-risk now become increasingly exposed under climate change scenarios. In sum, this analysis provides a model for investigating inequities associated with future small area impacts of climate change. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua form one of the largest manufacturing complexes in the world, and provide a unique context in which to examine transnational patterns of environmental injustice. In this paper, we explore residential patterns of environmental injustice related to the location of industrial facilities (ie maquiladoras and facilities regulated by the Toxics Release Inventory) in the El Paso - Juárez metropolis, taking a comparative approach. Our results indicate a striking injustice in the raw level of industrial hazard confronted by residents on the Mexican side of the border compared with those on the US side—a direct result of location within the global economy. In terms of multivariate spatial regression results, patterns of exposure to residential hazards diverged between the two cities. In Mexico, generally marginal neighborhoods (based on low social class and higher proportions of migrants to the city) were located farther away from industry, whereas they were located closer in the US. We explain these findings on the basis of sociospatial differences in urbanization, social marginality, and industrial development between El Paso and Juárez, which reflect the two cities' juxtaposition vis-à-vis global political-economic dynamics. Future research is needed to test relationships between social marginality and industrial hazards in transnational and Southern contexts to determine if similar or divergent patterns exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to present a geographic information system (GIS)-based method for mapping risk to environmental hazards. Framed by the hazards literature, the method has been developed to specifically overcome issues of data compatibility associated with transnational contexts. The approach is elaborated in reference to a project in which risk was spatially characterized, using a suite of biophysical and social indicators, for the Ciudad Juárez (Mexico)–El Paso (USA) metropolis. Results reveal clear spatial disparities in hazard vulnerability, both within and between the two cities, based on the differential allocation of selected risk factors. The case indicates that future international analyses will be advanced by the clear definition of concepts, the systematic mining of compatible variables, and the selection of valid risk indicators based on criteria that balance the need to incorporate contextual specificity with general comparability. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]