In recent decades, marginalized and unauthorized immigrants, especially mothers, are increasingly making political inroads by way of grassroots community activism.  Drawing on four years of ethnography, interviews, and documents involving mostly Filipina Asian and Mexican Latina Environmental Justice activists in port-industrial Los Angeles, this movement is much more than an effort to spare more children and neighbors from becoming asthmatic or cancerous or to seek better healthcare for them.  Immigrant activists see the diesel and oil refinery pollution in America’s largest urban oil field as a battle against the (nativist) racism and classism that they deem responsible for over-polluting their embodied communities – the minoritized and impoverished collectives that embody the love, joy, pollution, and sickness of their neighborhoods. In response, they contest a system they deem physically and emotionally violent and neglectful.  A major focus of this talk is how I conducted the data collection and methodology for this study by way of participant ethnography, in-depth interviewing, and documents analysis and from an approach that centers feminism, intersectionality, and participatory research.