Place, Justice, and the Decolonial
Edited by Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette RayWith a Foreword by Laura Pulido Afterword by Stacy Alaimo
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.”
Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, Shane Hall, Ylce Irizarry, Julie Avril Minich, Paula M. L. Moya, Gabriela Nuñez, Randy Ontiveros, Jennifer García Peacock, Christopher Perreira, Laura Pulido, Richard T. Rodríguez, and the editors
“This is a vital book in every sense—essential and life-giving. The essays and interviews provide a compelling, teachable engagement with a robust field within environmental studies.”
— Rob Nixon, Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor of Environmental Humanities at Princeton University and author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
“This brilliant, generative set of essays and interviews, Latinx Environmentalisms, challenges a whole host of received assumptions coursing through ecopoetics, the environmental humanities, animal studies, and interdisciplinary studies more broadly. From born again and queer animals to radical conceptions of goodlife writing, these essays open forward the complex Latinx spatial-social relations that bloggers, novelists, essayists and poets engage, thereby confounding the mainline ecocritical narratives that have too frequently ignored the extraordinary contributions of Latinx environmentalisms writ large.”
—Mary Pat Brady, Associate Professor of English at Cornell University and author of Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space
"(T)his collection underscores the formative value of the environmentalist (or not) stances of the writers we study.... As the expansive and nuanced work of Wald, Vázquez, Ybarra, and Ray in assembling and framing Latinx Environmentalisms shows, together we begin to nurture the work of critique, exposing a panoply of texts for analysis and understanding, and constructively creating the environmentalisms—and 'environmentalists'—we urgently need."
— American Literary History
"Latinx Environmentalisms is well-suited for undergraduates as well as community groups. The breadth of the volume portrays the distinction between disciplinary methodologies through each of the chapters. They exemplify the complexity of working in the area of Latinx Studies across previously set academic disciplines."
—Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
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