Jean Guerrero: These people are bearing the brunt of California's climate crisis
by Jean Guerrero, Los Angeles Times
Oct 29, 2021
4 minutes
When smoke appears on the horizon, Maria Salinas wants to run. She knows California's wildfires mean working in the fields as ash rains down and asthma closes off her airways.
"When you spit, the saliva is black," Salinas, a 41-year-old Indigenous farmworker and activist, told me outside the tin house where she lives in Sonoma County with her husband and four children. Salinas has no choice but to stay and harvest crops in the toxic air. She brings her inhaler to work, hoping it will prevent her from asphyxiating.
"I didn't even know what asthma was in Mexico," she told me. She was diagnosed with
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