Venezia Ramirez stands in a windowless room in the lab at the University of Southern California’s Health Sciences Campus. She wears a medical mask and gloves. She pulls out a plastic Ziploc bag filled with soil from a family’s yard in Southeast Los Angeles, which she collected herself using gloves and a soil sampler. It looks like typical dirt, but it’s full of toxic, lead-contaminated soil.
Ramirez, 25, has long, dark hair that reaches almost to her waist. She grew up in Norwalk, California, in Southeast Los Angeles County, and works as a research coordinator at USC’s Environmental Justice Research Lab. In the lab, she demonstrates something she has done hundreds of times: testing soil for lead levels.
She attaches an old-school, laser-gun-looking machine called an XRF analyzer to the bottom of a small platform. This portable machine measures the soil for 24 types of heavy metals, including arsenic and lead. Ramirez places the bag of soil on the machine, and after two minutes, the computer next to it generates a reading: 800 ppm of lead.
State-approved lead levels are 80 ppm. The sample is analyzed three more times, confirming the same result. No level of lead is safe, but this is far beyond acceptable.
Outside the research room, the hallway is lined with gray filing cabinets. Each drawer is filled with soil samples — hundreds of plastic Ziploc bags, each labeled with a number written in black Sharpie. They were collected from 100 different yards — three samples from each yard — within a 4.5-mile radius of the Exide battery recycling plant in Vernon, California.
For decades, the plant spewed lead and other toxins that settled on nearby low-income, predominantly Hispanic communities like Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, Commerce, Bell and Maywood. The contamination has affected 10,000 properties within 1.7 miles of the plant and many more outside that radius.
After Exide went bankrupt in 2015, abandoning the site, cleanup costs have totaled more than $750 million, largely covered by California taxpayers. By 2024, more than 5,000 lead-contaminated properties have been cleaned in the surrounding area, though as many as 10,000 properties are believed to be contaminated. It’s the largest environmental cleanup in California history, with many homes still awaiting remediation.
Research, including recent findings from the American Journal of Public Health, shows that Latinos and African Americans are much more likely than whites to live near hazardous waste sites, pesticides and heavy traffic emissions. Many Latino community members have led efforts to hold the company accountable for the pollution. Groups like Communities for a Better Environment and East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice have been at the forefront. As a young Latina woman, Ramirez’s role in the fight is no coincidence — it’s a continuation of this legacy.
Ramirez got involved with the Exide contamination issue as a college student at UCLA. Her journey there was unexpected even to her. Growing up on free and reduced lunch in high school, Ramirez received a waiver to apply to four California State Universities and four University of California colleges. She never thought she’d get in.
“Had it not been for that waiver, I would have never applied to UCLA,” she said, “because I didn’t think I was good enough. And then I got in.”
She started out as a pre-psychology major. She said she wanted to be a superintendent, but then she took an environmental science course and immediately loved it.
“I’m like, oh my gosh, that’s my calling,” she said. “I love Earth. I feel like it is one of my purposes in life to take care of Earth.”
Ramirez switched her major to environmental science. Because of Exide, she chose Earth science as her concentration. She wrote a research paper on whether sunflowers can help remove lead from soil, focusing specifically on communities impacted by Exide.
In one environmental science course, Ramirez learned about GIS mapping. The overlays revealed something that disturbed her: oil wells and refineries clustered over Latino and Black communities. “I feel like something in me turned on,” she said. “It turned into a responsibility for me to protect not only Earth, but my community.”
She joined East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice in 2021. The nonprofit advocacy group has played a key role in collecting soil samples for USC’s research.
“It’s always this collaborative environment where we ensure that East Yard is at the forefront of every decision,” Ramirez said, emphasizing the community-oriented approach of her research. She aspires to bridge research and advocacy to improve health equity in her community.
The study at USC’s lab is called “Get the Lead Out!”, and soil sampling wrapped up about a year ago. Ramirez collected many of these samples herself, knocking on community members’ doors and asking them to volunteer their yards for testing. To do this, she put on gloves and used a rubber mallet to hammer a metal core sampler into the ground. She placed the scooped soil into plastic bags to bring back to the lab.
“Thank you, soil,” she said, after collecting the sample, “for contributing to our research project.”
When elevated lead levels were found, East Yard members would call the homeowner, share the results, and direct them to helpful resources. They use Google Docs, which is more accessible to the community than Microsoft Word, as it is free, does not require software installation, and can be accessed from smartphones.
Community advocacy and inclusion have been especially important for the Get the Lead Out! study because of widespread distrust in government institutions.
“If we’re talking about the communities surrounding Exide, that’s predominantly low-income, Spanish-speaking, undocumented,” Ramirez said. “So there’s already a fear for our neighbors to go to the doctor for fear of deportation. There’s already a fear of medical mistreatment, likewise by the legacy of institutions like USC or other hospitals that can take advantage of Spanish-speaking patients.”
The mistrust toward the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) stems partly from its history of mismanagement. The DTSC was initially responsible for monitoring Exide’s operations but failed to prevent illegal pollution practices. This lack of enforcement deepened public distrust in the DTSC’s ability to manage the cleanup.
That distrust has worsened because the cleanup has been painstakingly slow, and lead remains in some yards that were supposedly cleaned. Among homes that had already been cleaned, Ramirez said more than 90% had at least one soil sample that exceeded 80 ppm. This recontamination comes from massive plumes of soil and dust stirred up during cleanups. The contamination zone also extends beyond DTSC’s official 1.7-mile radius, which is why USC’s Get the Lead Out! study measured soil in a much larger, 4.5-mile radius.
Understanding community and cultural issues makes it essential for local residents to serve as advocates. Some community members are resistant to having their yards cleaned and need one-on-one conversations to understand the reports.
“It’s really important to have that dialogue with community members,” Ramirez said. “To make sure they understand the results of the report, because sometimes scientists don’t really do that, or researchers don’t really do that.”
Ramirez also reflected on why so many women of color are leading the charge in research and nonprofit roles to combat lead poisoning.
“I feel like that makes sense because it’s like we take on a motherly role, like, in our communities,” she said. “I think in Latina culture, the burden we have on our shoulders is being a provider for our family, having so many cultural responsibilities as a Latina daughter.”
DTSC does have one new resource available for the community: “office hours.” Offered twice a week, community members can come to ask questions and learn more about how to get their homes cleaned.
In early October, Madiha Jamal, program analyst at DTSC, said only two community members had stopped by so far, even though she’s there for four hours on both Tuesdays and Thursdays. On the other hand, when the Los Angeles Department of Public Health paired up with Ramirez’s lab this summer to offer blood lead testing, the turnout was great.
“We had 70 people attend, which is more than they had in the entire year,” Ramirez said.
Ramirez currently works her full-time job at the Environmental Justice Research Lab, does part-time research on racial equity and emissions by the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and is pursuing her master’s degree in sustainable engineering from USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. With her master’s, she hopes to make bigger changes.
“I want to gain more technical expertise to help enforce strong regulations, so we can avoid other Exide Technologies in our communities.”
She said she plans to stay in Los Angeles and move toward more consulting work. The bigger picture — ending reliance on fossil fuels — matters. “I want to focus on how to implement greener technologies to remove the very harmful ones, so we can have a better quality of life.”