Environmentalism

My memories of growing up in Chicago’s Logan Square include seeing several family friends lose appendages in work-related incidents and reading countless pamphlets about asbestos and lead paint. The Latino/a population in the US continues to be disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards in both urban and rural settings, hazards that include higher odds of occupational injury in industrial, farming, and construction jobs (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health 2004). But my memories also include staring at pine trees in my yard and dancing in snow. There is variety. One would think ecocritical analyses of Latino/a literature – rich with accounts of the Amazon or the agricultural Midwest or farmworkers’ unions or trips between the urban Northwest and the Caribbean – would be easy to find, but articles originate in different departments under different scholarly headings. Environmentalism in literature, which can fall under ecocriticism or nature writing or environmental justice studies (to further the confusion, the term environmental justice also points to environmental social justice issues outside of literary studies), was acknowledged as an area of study in the early 1990s, mainly with explorations of texts that described the rural US through the eyes of non-Latino/a white authors. Nature was viewed as a benign and peaceful place to visit for renewal, a place to be preserved but also a place in danger because of human pollution. Ecocritics came from English, anthropology, modern language, and education departments, among others. Despite the many departments open to this field of study, ecocritics have quickly admitted that the origins of ecocriticism had a narrow view. Cheryll Glotfelty is widely cited as the first ecocritic to acknowledge that ecocriti-

cism began as “a white movement” and that its future would lie in “interdisciplinary, multicultural and international” connections (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996: xxv). However, Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic, in their introduction to “The Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriticism,” argue that scholars like “Gloria Anzaldúa had already laid the groundwork for expanding what could be defined as ‘environmental texts,’” (2009: 8). Scholars of color had already been writing explorations of environmental issues found within literature by people of color, and their view included urban environments and the effects of environment on various peoples. Adamson and Slovic cite T.V. Reed’s “Environmental Justice Ecocriticism: A Memo-Festo” (1997) – which Adamson published, in a different

version, in her anthology, Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics and Pedagogy (Adamson et al 2002: 145-62) – as a “[blueprint] for justice-oriented, multi-ethnic environmental literature scholarship” (Adamson and Slovic 2009: 7). Adamson and Slovic also reference “The Principles of Environmental Justice” (1991), penned by the Delegates to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, as a guideline for leaders/scholars who might serve as advocates for people of color (Adamson and Slovic 2009: 6). However, Andrea Campbell, in “Reading Beyond a Universal Nature: My Hopes

for the Future of Ecocriticism,” argues that despite the positive changes that have occurred between the largely pastoral view of nature held within the articles of the first wave of ecocriticism and the multidisciplinary, multicultural and multi-spatial view of environment in ecofeminist, eco-queer, and environmental justice articles of the second wave of ecocriticism, the field needs to do more. Note that even though ecocriticism moved away from a pastoral view of nature, the multicultural texts explored in the second wave did not necessarily move away from that view. Nonetheless, Campbell argues against the idea that the first wave of ecocriticism is the purest form of the literary study, as she points out some have argued (2010: 16-17). Her hope is that, “ecocriticism can go beyond connecting readers with nature and analyze what constitutes those connections and how they vary as well as what severs those connections or keeps them from forming in the first place” (2010: 19). What we find within this argument, and what Campbell is arguing against, is the placement of issues of color in a marginal ghetto within ecocriticism. Environmental justice has become the term often used for environmentalism for

people of color, but that is a limited view of the concept, which I think Campbell would agree with. It is equally important to see how the environment of the suburbs has been damaging to populations of white middle class or working class Americans within texts such as Esmeralda Santiago’s America’s Dream or even Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, as it is important to see how children suffer from environmental pollution in Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets. John Steinbeck and Junot Díaz both have works where non-Latino/a and Latino/a characters face hazards in rural environments. Furthermore, the original goals of ecocriticism need not be associated with a white or Western aesthetic. Latino/a demographics do not confine the population to urban settings; massive numbers of Latinos/as live in suburban and rural settings, too. Latinos/as have strong relationships with natural settings, through family ranches, Caribbean beaches, the mountainous regions of South America or the varied parks, gardens, and green spaces throughout the US. Many Latinos/as will, naturally, want to read literature to feel closer to nature and Latino/a authors have myriad references to natural settings in their texts, allowing such study. I list some of the authors who have already done substantial work within the field

of environmentalism in Latino/a literature, but I must admit that the field is changing every day. When I began my doctoral work on race and place in US Caribbean Latino/a works, in 2006, I could not find many scholars who explored Latino/a literature with an ecocritical lens. A search now, however, yields many more results that are both current and more than ten years old. Articles that were harder to find just a few years ago are readily available today. Some of the more recent studies follow.