Oil riches and health inequities: Comparing experiences in the petro-states of the United States and Mexico over the 20th century

Both the United States and Mexico emerged over the twentieth century as leading sources of the world's oil, yet via very different political economies of resource extraction. These differences wrought contrasting consequences for the health and well-being of those in oil-producing regions. Into the 1930's, private companies, many of them increasingly multinational, handled petroleum production both in the American states of California and Texas and in Mexican oil producing states such as Veracruz. But with the expropriation of 1938, the federal government's Petroleros Mexicanos itself took charge over Mexican oil production. To determine just what the long-term health and other consequences were of such starkly diverging pathways of resource development, I've been conducting an extended, ongoing study “on the ground,” of the environmental health history of Texas' Beaumont-Port Arthur area and of Veracruz's Coatzacoalcos-Minatitlan area. My paper seeks to pull together some preliminary conclusions about the hazards and health issues faced these two petroleum-rich regions, one in the developed and the other in the developing world. I'll consider differences, and related inequities, in the built environment and urbanizing, in public health institutions and their reach, in the local distribution of health risks by race and class, and in health-related activism.