A couple of years ago, Dianna Thomas spent a week away from her home in Lubbock’s Chatman Hill neighborhood. When she returned, she got into her car, which had been parked in the driveway, and found a thin film of grease on the glass windshield. “I was like, what in the world?” she says. She sat in her car for a moment before she realized it had come from the cottonseed oil mill four blocks from her house. “If that film is on my car, am I not breathing that in also?” she says.
Thomas, 76, grew up in the tight-knit neighborhood tucked behind Interstate 27 on Lubbock’s east side. The Pyco Industries oil mill has loomed over the area since before she was born—her father worked there, along with many of her neighbors. But in the late 1970s or early 1980s, she says, something changed—the mill started using chemicals that wafted over the neighborhood. “This has caused a lot of health problems for a lot of people that live in the area,” she says. “The air quality is very bad. If you go out at night and you look up, you can see a haze in the sky.”
In 2018, as Lubbock began the process of updating its comprehensive land use plan for the first time in 30 years, Thomas joined neighbors and activist groups asking the city to remove industrial zoning from East and North Lubbock, where most of the city’s black and Hispanic residents live. While 52 percent of Lubbockites are white, according to the U.S. Census, 71 percent of Chatman Hill’s residents are black. In North Lubbock’s Guadalupe neighborhood, 80 percent of residents are Hispanic.
