In minority neighborhood, kids' risk of cancer soars

HOUSTON - Like so many of their poor and working-class Hispanic neighbors, Rosario Marroquin's family settled in the southeast Houston neighborhood of Manchester a generation ago because the clapboard houses were cheap, the streets were safe, transportation was convenient and downtown was only 20 minutes away.

It was an ideal neighborhood, except for the coughing spells, the nosebleeds, the burning odors and the acrid smoke.

Marroquin's family, like most everyone else in the neighborhood, did their best to ignore all that, because few could afford to move anywhere else. And they tried not to notice the dozens of oil refineries, petrochemical plants and waste disposal sites expanding all around them, their towering smokestacks and huge storage tanks lining the Houston Ship Channel, the city's principal outlet to the sea.

But then the cancers started to appear. First the neighbor in back, then another across the street, then a boy down the block. And finally, in 2003, Marroquin's son, Valentin, came down with leukemia at age 6.

The reality of living in the city's most toxic industrial zone—in the middle of the largest concentration of petrochemical plants in the United States —grew inescapable.

"The factories say they were here first, and I understand that," said Marroquin, 27, an apartment leasing agent who has lived in Manchester her whole life. "I understand that we need all this industry for our nation's economy. But when you look at the pain of a child in the hospital, why can't these plants do something better, invest more money in pollution controls?"
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