About Me

Oscar Gutierrez is a community organizer and PhD student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research is at the intersections of Queer Latinx Studies, Critical Geography and Environmental Humanities. Currently his work focuses on environmental justice movements in Southeast Los Angeles, which is where he was born and raised. At 12 years old, Oscar joined Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) and took on his first campaign against one of the largest power plants in the country, the Vernon Power Plant. After a successful win with the organization, he joined other campaigns such as the Exide battery recycling plant and the 710 corridor project. He also worked as a campaign leader for the California Fund for Youth Organizing and People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights in San Francisco. For years, Oscar has been dedicated to building power in working class industrial communities. He is particularly dedicated to building up queer and trans leadership across the nation.

His dissertation project entitled, “A/effective Pollutants: Landscaped of Environmental Justice in Southeast Los Angeles” looks at queer Latinx relationships to industrial sites to understand how notions of race, class, gender and sexuality have reshaped the social and political movement. In his most recent chapter titled, “Landing,” published in What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? The 7th Fire. Edited by Melissa K. Nelson, et al. he establishes a conversation on mourning and land-based daily living practices that defy settler colonial industrial projects. His intimate relationships to his community aim to create an understanding of how environmental justice moves beyond health and political dynamics, but also deal greatly with how low-income communities of color are understood at a larger scale.

Oscar is an alumnus of the Marina Pando Social Justice Research Collaborative (MP-SJRC), an environmental justice research program at East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice (EYCEJ) where he built collaborative community-based research on land-use and local indigenous collaboratives. His commitments to environmental justice scholarship come from his ongoing work in his community. Oscar currently serves as a member of the board of directors at CBE, a California based environmental health and justice organization where he has been a member and organizer for over a decade.

He is currently based in Los Angeles where continues to organize with his community. Oscar is completing his dissertation with the support of the NASEM Ford Foundation Predoctoral and the Robert and Patricia Switzer Fellowship.