Transportation and Transnational Migration in Rigoberto González's "Butterfly Boy" and Helena María Viramontes's "Their Dogs Came With Them"

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.

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.