A fight with oil and gas
Despite losses to Keystone XL and other big projects, a Houston man and his father are devoted to environmental justice
Local environmental activists fight the industry that has been the lifeblood of their communities.
Bryan Parras grew up with the oil and gas industry in his backyard.
He spent his childhood in Gulfgate and Harrisburg, working-class and Hispanic neighborhoods south of the Houston Ship Channel, where railcars, tanker trucks and ships move chemicals in and out of refineries and other facilities day and night.
“It’s not just the chemical pollution,” Parras said. “It’s the noise and lights. Your entire body is being overwhelmed.”
For many in those southeast Houston neighborhoods, as it does for 80,000 workers across the city, the oil and gas industry’s blue-collar jobs and good wages provide a path to relative prosperity.
But that’s not the path Parras took. At 42, he has spent about half his life fighting the industry that contributes a large portion to Houston’s $490 billion economy.
Parras is Houston-area organizer for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign. He also serves on the board of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, or TEJAS, a nonprofit he started in 2006 with his father Juan, a longtime labor organizer and environmental-justice activist.
Taking on refineries, pipeline projects and pollution in neighborhoods, he and his father didn’t win permit fights but Parras believes victory can be measured in other ways — changing public discourse and getting people to think differently about the multibillion-dollar industry at the center of Houston’s economy and its effect on those living in its shadow.
“Look at the articles written about oil and gas in the 1980s and the 1990s and take a look at the articles written today,” Parras said. “I think there’s been a drastic change of coverage and how these issues are talked about. Public concern has shifted. People used to talk about ozone and smog but there was very little coverage on cancer-causing chemicals in fenceline communities. That changed after the environmental-justice movement emerged.”
Now Parras is in a different spotlight as one of four activists featured in a new environmental justice and indigenous-rights documentary “The Condor & The Eagle.” The film makes
its Texas premier at the Houston Latin Film Festival on March 22.
It centers around a Native American prophecy with vague origins in South America that states when the people of the condor and the people of the eagle unite, they will set humanity on a new and enlightened path.
Parras and the others interpret the condor as representing the people of the south and eagle represents the people of the north. The prophecy, they believe, means that Native American wisdom and indigenous practices of living in balance with nature will replace patriarchy and the legacies of colonialism, which they say include the polluting and discriminatory ways that companies approach the extraction of natural resources such as oil and natural gas.
Eye-opening education
Growing up, Parras had an escape from the industry that surrounded his family and neighbors. Instead of attending his neighborhood school, Parras received a scholarship to attend St. Thomas High School, a prestigious Catholic
school off Memorial Drive near the mansions of Houston’s affluent River Oaks neighborhood.
There, Parras made friends, joined the wrestling team and graduated second in his class, but the differences between his home, surrounded by industry, and his school, surrounded by immaculate grounds near Buffalo Bayou, were eye-opening.
“I noticed disparities for the first time in my life,” Parras said.
Like many of his peers at St. Thomas, Parras left Houston to attend college. At the University of Texas at Austin, he majored in psychology and philosophy — and felt liberated.
“A lot of people look down on a liberal arts degree but it’s very useful in everyday life in making you able to relate to people and understand people,” Parras said.
Shortly after graduating from UT, Parras cut his teeth as an activist while fighting the choice of a site for the future Chavez High School. The location, near Galveston Road and Howard Drive, was sandwiched between the refineries and chemical plants south of the LaPorte Freeway and the oil wells of South Houston. Pipelines owned by NuStar Energy and Enterprise Products Partners
are buried under the school’s baseball and football fields.
Parras and his father founded Unidos Contra Environmental Racism to fight construction of the school. Despite their efforts, the school opened in 2000 and today houses 2,800 students, of which more than 80 percent are Hispanic. He and his father licked their wounds and founded TEJAS, turning their attention to the Manchester neighborhood along the Houston Ship Channel.
Originally developed by the Magnolia Park Land Co. in the 1920s and touted as a “good buy” for those employed by industries along the ship channel, lots and homes in Manchester were sold for as low as $5 per month. Many of those homes are still there, but the neighborhood’s demographics and the industries around them have changed.
Today, Mexican-American families and Spanishspeaking Mexican immigrants call the neighborhood home. A nearby refinery that made fuel for U.S. bombers and planes during World War II was converted to make gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other products.
Valero Energy Corp. of San Antonio bought the refinery in 1997 and later configured it to process
crude oil from the Permian Basin of West Texas and Eagle Ford Shale.
Although Parras lost touch with his classmates at St. Thomas, becoming an activist was a contrast to the career choices of his neighbors, some of whom went into fields such as education, tech, law enforcement and even the oil and natural gas industry.
Over the past 14 years, he and his father have fought permits and pollution in Manchester and around Houston. In addition to leading marches and organizing “toxic tours” of neighborhoods bordered by industry, they encouraged residents in those communities to attend public hearings hosted by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the Environmental Protection Agency, Houston City Council and the Harris County Commissioner Court.
And the father and son have seen TEJAS grow: In 2017, it received more than $686,000 in grants, contributions and other sources, and had $359,000 in savings, according to IRS filings. As executive director, Juan Parras, was paid $44,000 and oversaw a staff of three.
During 2012, TEJAS and its members fought plans by Canadian pipeline operator
TC Energy to build the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would move crude oil from the tar sands region of Alberta to Nebraska — drawing opponents from across the nation to Houston and the Manchester neighborhood.
Joining forces
Although court challenges to the project remain, portions of the Keystone system have been built, including one linking crude oil storage terminals in Cushing, Okla., to refineries along the Gulf Coast. It was during the height of the protests for the controversial pipeline project that Parras met Yudith Nieto, one of his co-stars in the documentary.
Nieto’s family came from San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and settled in the East End neighborhood in 1999. She was born in Houston, grew up in the shadow of industry and became a youth organizer for TEJAS.
“My siblings and cousins, we all grew up with nosebleeds, asthma, respiratory issues and rashes — all levels of different ailments,” Nieto said. “We would leave the community and would get better but we’d come back and get a cold that would last a week or a month.”
Nieto attended art school and studied graphic design
but did not find her career options in Houston appealing.
“The only jobs available doing that type of work were in oil and gas making annual reports,” Nieto said. “I didn’t want to do it.”
Instead, she turned to environmental activism, through which she found another calling rooted in her bilingual childhood. Just as she did for her parents and grandparents, Nieto translated English and Spanish for those attending public hearings where there were no interpreters.
After the documentary wrapped, she moved to New Orleans, where she translates court proceedings and legal documents for Spanish-speaking immigrants.
But even after Nieto moved, Parras has kept battling.
“La lucha sigue … The fight continues,” Parras said. “It’s an ongoing battle that doesn’t necessarily have an end. But I will say that the overall arc has been towards progress. Even the industry will tell you it’s gotten better but that’s because of the struggle, the sacrifices and the works of the grassroots movement.”