Nalleli Cobo started suffering from asthma, nosebleeds and headaches.
When we started campaigning, we noticed that we weren't the only community being affected.
There are 580,000 angelenos that live within a quarter of a mile or less to an active oil and gas well.Most are low-income communities of colour. Whenever I go somewhere to talk about this and I say I'm from Los Angeles, people are like: "Oh! That's awesome, the Walk of Fame, Hollywood, celebrities..."image copyrightI am one of the cofounders of South Central Youth Leadership Coalition and along with other organisations we sued the city of Los Angeles in 2015 for a violation of the California Environmental Quality Act.
At the same time, I am a normal kid. I am obsessed with makeup, I am a dancer, I love travelling and I am in college.Getty ImagesCobo's activism has been praised by Hollywood figures such as Mark Ruffalo and Jane FondaFor a while I kept it quiet because it was such a scary word to process. The "C word" is something you never expect to hear at such a young age.But we were fortunate enough to reach our goal through a crowd funding campaign.
Physically and emotionally the hardest thing was getting a radical hysterectomy. It took me 6 weeks to get out of bed.My oncologist still doesn't know why I got cancer; they have been able to know by doing tests that it is not genetic.image copyright