This panel offers four 15-minute papers that trouble boundaries between Latina/o studies and the environmental humanities. While Latina/o studies emphasizes social justice in relation to race, migration/immigration, the... [ view full abstract ]
This panel offers four 15-minute papers that trouble boundaries between Latina/o studies and the environmental humanities. While Latina/o studies emphasizes social justice in relation to race, migration/immigration, the U.S./Mexico border, gender, and sexuality, the field seldom considers environmental ideas in Latina/o literature and culture. Similarly, ecocriticism emphasizes earth-centered scholarly visions by examining the pastoral, space and place, and biosemiotics, but has not substantively engaged how Latina/o cultural productions resist environmental degradation. Moreover, some strains of environmental studies emphasize privileged perspectives over people of color and the poor. This panel addresses these gaps by highlighting how Latina/o literature and culture imagines environmental issues as integral to social justice. The papers (un)discipline environmental studies from the standpoint of Latina/o studies, while rethinking Latina/o studies from ecocritical perspectives.
Scholars like Rob Nixon, Laura Pulido, and Sarah Jaquette Ray note that environmental issues are not value neutral. Our panel demonstrates how Latina/os use cultural sites to contest environmental marginalization. Ranging from engagements with queer theory and animal studies, to disability and transportation/migration studies, the panel blurs boundaries between environmental justice and Latina/o studies. Our goal is threefold: to valorize new archives of environmental thinking, to challenge environmental discourses that naturalize racism and American exceptionalism, and to expose innovative environmental thinking in Latina/o literature and culture. Our papers pressure the boundaries of both fields, making a case for why Latina/o environmental representations matter.
Drawing on queer and animal studies, Rodríguez argues that, despite the mainstream embrace of We the Animals that reads the family conventionally and comprehends the text’s sense of animality as a surface-level metaphor, the multitude of species in Torres’ human-animal kingdom signify an array of queer sexual practices, environments, and subjectivities that take risks of desire, exclusion and belonging seriously. Minich’s paper examines the film McFarland USA’s use of a “white savior” narrative by considering the film’s setting: a well-documented cancer cluster. Minich places the UFW documentary The Wrath of Grapes and Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints into conversation with McFarland USA to demonstrate that omitting McFarland’s disabled history reveals the discursive processes through which environmental injustice becomes unrecognizable as violence. Moya’s work builds on intersections between disability studies, environmental studies, and Latina/o studies by examining Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came With Them. Moya argues that metaphors of amputation and disease describe the debilitating effects on a Mexican American community of the urban landscape brought into existence by Los Angeles freeways. The novel is thus a linguistic testament to the characters’ will for meaning in the face of invisibility and societal disregard. In a related context, Wald recasts narratives of immigration/migration by questioning the environmental humanities’ privileging of long-term settlement leading to ecological consciousness. By reflecting on depictions of buses and bus stations in Rigoberto González’s Butterfly Boy and Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came With Them, Wald highlights technologies of transportation that facilitate and constrain mobility, and thus how transportation unevenly shapes place-based identities. Vázquez will chair and moderate the session, with Villa responding and providing framing comments for the Q&A.
