AMERICAN ORANGE chronicles the ongoing, “mysterious” 58-year slow and silent death of a contaminated small town community in Mission, Texas. Like many small towns across America, Mission is inhabited by families who have lived in the town for generations. Yet, like many Southwest border towns, the American Latinos who live in Mission, are largely invisible to the American mainstream. They are mostly impoverished, uneducated, and have little resources to voice their unheard stories.
Their mostly wood frame homes are located within 100 feet of the formerly operating Helena Chemical Plant and the poison in the soil, indiscriminately, seeps its way to the area’s elementary school a block away. Here, in this tiny town, a people and a land languish in quiet suffering. Children at ten suffer brain tumors. Babies born with toxic burns are received in utero because their mothers drank poisoned water. “One lady in the neighborhood has six breasts and each lactated a few years ago when she w
The Helena Chemical Plant housed over 20 chemical companies from 1950-1972, which produced 18 different pesticides and chemicals. Eight of these chemicals and pesticides were named as part of “ The Dirty Dozen ” by the United Nations, heralded as the “ world’s most dangerous chemicals causing death, disease and birth defects among humans and animals .” Among these poisons were arsenic, DDT, and Agent Orange.