The Houston Ship Channel, a 52-mile strip between Houston and the Gulf of Mexico, is one of the busiest seaports in the world. With more than 600 facilities, the channel is a major hub for the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. All day and all night, these facilities pump toxic and noxious pollutants into the air and water, sometimes setting the night sky ablaze with their flares. The plants and their pollution pose such a grave threat to the surrounding communities—which are overwhelmingly low-income, English-limited communities of color—that Amnesty International has declared them “sacrifice zones.”

These ominous and, frankly, ugly plants are so ubiquitous to the Houston landscape that both Yvette Arellano and Shiv Srivastava, the powerhouse duo behind Fenceline Watch, never questioned their presence growing up. “We thought this was normal,” Arellano, who uses they/them pronouns, says. “I thought that every city, every town had oil, refinery or chemical plants. I just thought that that was a part of how cities run. Every city has a landfill. Every city has a city council.”

But eventually, after a journey into activism that wove through economic inequality, immigrant rights, and food justice, Arellano found themself staring at the petrochemical problem in their own backyard. For Srivastava, the message hit a little closer to home when he watched his parents get sick: his father with cancer and his mother with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) even though there was no family history of either.

As he watched his mother get sicker and sicker, it was Arellano, his friend from law school, who pulled him into the advocacy world. “At first I was reticent, because it was kind of normal,” Srivastava says. “As I learned more—simply because of the amazing advocacy that Yvette was doing—I started to volunteer.” Eventually, Srivastava joined Arellano at TEJAS, which organizes for environmental justice in the Houston area. He then followed them when they left to create Fenceline Watch in 2020.

When the two struck out on their own, they knew that language access and language justice had to be at the center of everything they did. “In Houston, we have like a million people that are considered linguistically isolated,” Srivastava, who is of South Asian descent, says. “We have a huge Spanish-speaking population. My parents spoke English, but understanding the colloquialisms, fully being able to communicate with the person on the telephone wasn't always easy, so I would find myself having to be a proxy for my parents.”

Arellano nods as Srivastava describes the common experience of the children of immigrants who often have to stand in the gap for their parents. “I was that kid having to translate from my mom to the landlord and the doctor and utility companies,” they told me. Therefore, Fenceline Watch designed their advocacy to operate at the nexus of language access—including plain language summaries—and stopping petrochemical plants.

Fenceline’s approach to the petrochemical industry goes beyond any specific facility and calls for a functional revolution.

“For us a functional revolution is a multi-pronged revolution,” says Arellano. “It's one that accepts taking to the streets. It's one that accepts direct action. It's one that engages voters and calls for the protection of communities throughout the intersectional spectrum.”

In addition to their traditional advocacy, Fenceline Watch with partners in their community work to organize informational webinars, guide community members through disaster response, and make sure to inform them about public comment periods so they can make their voices heard. 

With so many facilities along the skyline and more on the horizon, Fenceline Watch’s long-term plan is to advocate themselves out of a job. When asked where they see the organization in ten years, Arellano says “I want to see the work fully embedded in our government structures. And I want to see us in a history book.”