Response to "Disciplining Environmental Studies: Latina/o Literature and the Limits of U.S. Environmentalism"

Raúl Villa will offer a response and provide framing comments for the panel. This panel offers four 15-minute papers that trouble boundaries between Latina/o studies and the environmental humanities. While Latina/o studies... [ view full abstract ]

Raúl Villa will offer a response and provide framing comments for the panel.

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.