At 9, Nalleli Cobo slept sitting up.
She did it so she wouldn’t choke on her own blood while her nose bled at night, in her apartment in South Los Angeles, nine meters from an oil well. She had asthma, nausea, and spasms so severe that her mother had to carry her because she became paralyzed. Her mother, grandmother, and brother also began falling ill without explanation.
What Nalleli didn’t know was that she lived next to the largest urban oil field in the United States, and that 580,000 Angelenos—the majority of them low-income, Black, and Latino—were breathing that same air. She and her mother went door to door until a senator heard her concerns, the EPA investigated, and the facility closed.
Years later, at 19, a cancer with no known cause stopped her in her tracks. In January, she beat the disease. Today she studies law and continues demanding something as simple as clean air, regardless of the ZIP code where you were born.
