Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial

Description

The whiteness of mainstream environmentalism often fails to account for the richness and variety of Latinx environmental thought. Building on insights of environmental justice scholarship as well as critical race and ethnic studies, the editors and contributors to Latinx Environmentalisms map the ways Latinx cultural texts integrate environmental concerns with questions of social and political justice.  Original interviews with creative writers, including Cherríe Moraga, Helena María Viramontes, and Héctor Tobar, as well as new essays by noted scholars of Latinx literature and culture, show how Latinx authors and cultural producers express environmental concerns in their work. These chapters, which focus on film, visual art, and literature&;and engage in fields such as disability studies, animal studies, and queer studies&;emphasize the role of racial capitalism in shaping human relationships to the more-than-human world and reveal a vibrant tradition of Latinx decolonial environmentalism. Latinx Environmentalisms accounts for the ways Latinx cultures are environmental, but often do not assume the mantle of &;environmentalism.&; Contents Foreword / Laura Pulido Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Why Latinx Environmentalisms? / Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray Part I. Place: Racial Capital and the Production of Place 2. Greenwashing the White Savior: Cancer Clusters, Supercrips, and McFarland, USA / Julie Avril Minich 3. The National Park Foundation's "American Latino Expedition": Consumer Citizenship as Pathway to Multicultural National Belonging / Sarah D. Wald 4. "A Story Is a Physical Space": An Interview with Héctor Tobar / Shane Hall 5. Speculative Futurity and the Eco-cultural Politics of Lunar Braceros: 2125–2148 / Christopher Perreira 6. Sun Ma(i)d: Art, Activism, and Environment in Ester Hernández's Central Valley / Jennifer Garcia Peacock 7. "An Organic Being in the Middle of Chicago": An Interview with Ana Castillo / Priscilla Solis Ybarra and Sarah D. Wald Part II. Justice: Expanding Environmentalism 8. Environmental Justice and the Ecological Other in Ana Castillo's So Far from God / Sarah Jaquette Ray 9. "We Carry Our Environments within Ourselves": An Interview with Helena María Viramontes / David J. Vázquez, Sarah D. Wald, and Paula M. L. Moya 10. "Between Water and Song": Maria Melendez and the Contours of Contemporary Latinx Ecopoetry / Randy Ontiveros 11. "Justice Is a Living Organism": An Interview with Lucha Corpi / Gabriela Nuñez Part III. The Decolonial: Alternative Kinships and Epistemologies of Futurity 12. Memory, Space, and Gentrification: The Legacies of the Young Lords and Urban Decolonial Environmentalism in Ernesto Quiñonez's Bodega Dreams / David J. Vázquez 13. Postcards from the Edges of Haiti: The Latinx Ecocriticism of Mayra Montero's In the Palm of Darkness / Ylce Irizarry 14. "Against the Sorrowful and Infinite Solitude": Environmental Consciousness and Streetwalker Theorizing in Helena María Viramontes's Their Dogs Came with Them / Paula M. L. Moya 15. Oedipal Wrecks: Queer Animal Ecologies in Justin Torres's We the Animals / Richard T. Rodríguez 16. "The Body Knows and the Land Has Memory": An Interview with Cherríe Moraga / Priscilla Solis Ybarra Afterword: What Is Absent; Fields, Futures, and Latinx Environmentalisms / Stacy Alaimo Contributors Index