SLC's Latinx Population, Environmental Racism: A West Side Story, Past & Present (Season 3, Ep. 11)

**Brad Westwood** (0:10)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history about Utah, accessible to the widest audience. Today, we're talking about the practice of redlining, housing segregation, and environmental pollution, which has been mapped within the Pioneer Park neighborhood and following the I-15 corridor north and south and across the Jordan River, to the west of what is now West Salt Lake.
Utah's history is a big place, very complex, and there's so much need for us to know it better, to understand the aspects that may have been lost or forgotten or underrepresented. This is what Speak Your Piece is all about. My guests today are first, Mariya Shcheglovitova, Utah State University, Quinney College of Natural Resource, Assistant Professor of Geography, and Emma Jones, former USU undergraduate honor student, and now University of Utah City and Regional Planning graduate student.
Hello, Mariya. Hello, Emma. So good to have you here.

**Emma Jones** (1:35)
I'm excited to be here.

**Brad Westwood** (1:37)
I'm so happy to have you here. We've been working on some things related to a serial blog called Salt Lake West Side Stories, and our latest post, post 35, was authored by these two individuals with a little help from Catherine Avilas, also from the Department of Culture and Community Engagement. She was very helpful in the translation of this research to a broader audience. Unfortunately, Catherine cannot be with us, but I wanted to just put a shout out about her work. First, some background. In 2019, at the request of Salt Lake City's Pioneer Park Coalition, and envisioned by then Pioneer Park Coalition community organizer, Vikram Ravi, he and I, we launched a public history project that continues to this day. With the help of over two dozen stakeholders and local history advisors, we convened the Pioneer Park Coalition History Committee to understand better the history of Salt Lake City's Pioneer Park neighborhood. The end result was an online serial history or blog entitled Salt Lake West Side Stories. There are now 35 posts that address a myriad of historical topics centered all around this neighborhood. What we discovered or what we rediscovered is that the history of Salt Lake City and Utah can be understood via this neighborhood. What is the city's and Utah's oldest international and industrial district? The boundaries of the Salt Lake City's original west side are as follows.
From the north, North Temple Street, and to the south, Sixth South.
West Temple Street is to the east, and then the Utah Transit Authority and the Union Pacific Tracts, and adjacent Interstate 15 is the boundaries to the west. The first west side neighborhood served as a cultural base camp, a commercial distribution hub for just about every immigrant group who settled in Salt Lake City and across the Intermountain West. Along with the ancient Utahns, well-established Utes and Shoshone and other Native Americans who resided there, and then the Mormon pioneers who came after in 1847, thereafter dozens of other pioneer groups, mostly non-Mormon, followed into this neighborhood.
They were economically motivated immigrants. They came, they were Irish, Welsh, Jews, Chinese, African Americans, Italians, Greeks, East Europeans, including refugees from the crumbling Ottoman Empire, Japanese, Syrian, Mexican, and various Latinx communities from South and Central America. All of them made the Pioneer Park neighborhood, that original Salt Lake City West Side, their first home, and in a sense a commercial base camp for other immigrants who spread out across the Intermountain West. What we're discussing today is the environmental legacy, the continuation of circumstances for good or ill from the original in-city West Side that follows the railroad lines that extended across the Jordan River to communities like Glendale, Rose Park, Poplar Grove, West Point, and many other neighborhoods collectively known today as Salt Lake City's West Side. Mariya and Emma are here today to discuss the latest Salt Lake City West Side Stories post, and that is entitled, Redlining, Housing Segregation, and Environmental Pollution in the Pioneer Park Neighborhood and Beyond. Now, we will put in the show notes the brief biographies of our two guests.
Here we go. The first question, Emma and Mariya, is this. What are the key findings of the research associated with your honors project?

**Mariya Shcheglovitova** (5:58)
Do you want to give us an outline, Emma?

**Emma Jones** (6:02)
Yeah, sure. So basically, for our project, we were looking at a variety of environmental terrestrial pollution sources in Salt Lake, and over the course of the project, we did a density analysis to figure out where the pollution hotspots are in Salt Lake City, and we ended up finding that the pollution hotspots were predominantly in the west side of Salt Lake, kind of clustered in those neighborhoods that Brad was talking about previously, these communities where immigrants, especially immigrants from the Latinx community, continue to live predominantly in Salt Lake.