The Uneven Development of Industrial Hazards: Lead and Oil in the U.S. versus Mexico, 1930-1990

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (public Law 111-5). The project is an historical study of select industrial hazards in the United States and Mexico, from the Great Depression to just prior to the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994). The project is a direct outgrowth of NSF-funded conferences that have explored the history of industrial hazards as an interdisciplinary "contact zone," where the history of science and technology has increasingly met up with environmental and health history, geography, other social sciences, and the labor and economic history of globalization. The research question is how did the mid-to-late twentieth-century trajectory of industrial hazard history in developed nations compare to that in developing ones? The project uses a comparative hazard history of lead smelters and oil refineries in the United States versus Mexico to answer this question. The investigation begins with how these industrial processes materialized through "global assemblages," as portable corporations, technology, and expertise forged adaptations to particular locales. Research concentrates especially on expert and lay framings of key hazards in these industries: lead and sulfur dioxide around smelters, and benzene as well as hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide around refineries. Contrasting approaches to the perception, investigation, interpretation and prevention of hazard are examined, as these coalesced among a variety of experts as well as relevant non-experts in both nations. The project also tracks the ways each identifiable approach to industrial hazards changed over time. These differences in approach are analyzed for how they may have reflected differences in political economy, regulatory strategies, in funding and support for particular types of investigation and oversight; as well as in the respective local and national balances of power. More detailed environmental, archival and oral historical study and comparison of a few local industrial sites is conducted: the lead smelters at El Paso, Texas and Chihuahua City, Chihuahua; and the oil refineries at Beamont/Port Arthur, Texas and Poza Rica, Veracruz. Intellectual Merit: The project (1) tests the potential and limits of a biographical approach to industrial processes and toxins, as scientific objects, for integrating socio-cultural and constructivist insights with materialist methods of political economy and environmental history; (2) clarifies just how unevenly industrial hazards in these two nations evolved, and why; (3) compares the turns in these two nations to a more precautionary science, law and politics of industrial hazards, by concentrating on evolving regimes for understanding, monitoring and controlling low-level exposures to lead and benzene in particular; (4) compares the ways hazards inside these workplaces came to be related to those imposed on local communities, environments, and consumers. Broader Impacts: The resulting book offers the first in-depth comparison between the history of industrial hazards in a developed and a developing nation. It provides a precedent for many further studies of this as yet under-examined but ever more important contrast. Methodologically, the book provides a new model for how more culturalist and materialist styles of scholarship may blend and effectively speak to one another, and for how historians of science and their disciplinary neighbors may address the newer world-scale narrative of globalization. A secondary impact is providing important historical context and insight for contemporary practitioners and policy-makers.