Forum on Literatures of the Environment

 
Terrell Dixon, "Letter," PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1093-1094.

ALONG THE United States-Mexican border in the lower Rio Grande valley, the borderlands, once rich in flora and fauna, have been transformed into a radically postnatural landscape. The four million acres of brushland that covered the valley as recently as seventy years ago have been reduced to 160,000 acres. Since half this remaining brushland is on tracts of less than seventy-five acres, land suitable for wildlife habitat is now almost nonexistent. Toxic pollution from insecticides and herbicides creates enormous threats to the health of the land and of its people. Working to illuminate and counter this devastation are two important texts, each by a writer who has family roots deep in the region and who knows the border from both sides. Arturo Longoria's Adios to the Brushlands (Texas A&M UP, 1997) delineates the advance of environmental degradation and its effect on the spirit, and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands-La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute, 1987) interrogates the patriarchal values that have shaped the dominant culture's destruction of the borderlands.

Longoria wants to construct his discourse in the tradition of the classic American nature-writing text. The biologist turned investigative environmental reporter turned college teacher would like to privilege the traditional Thoreauvian nature walk--attentive, respectful, contemplative: "I have long felt that a day without a walk is a day lost and without purpose" (80). In the postnatural world of the Rio Grande Valley, however, nature has been so marginalized that Longoria must also construct his narrative as an expanded interrogation of still-significant issues first set forth by Rachel Carson over thirty-five years ago. Like Carson's Silent Spring, Adios to the Borderlands is, in part, an elegy for healthy landscapes now lost; it chronicles how the widespread use of agricultural toxins feeds the area's high cancer rates, how the bulldozer and the root plow have transformed the delta from a dense riparian monte of lakes, ponds, meandering tributaries, and lush woodlands into an area of windswept desolation. Longoria, like Carson, writes for restoration; he believes that it can be fostered through meaningful environmental education.

Gloria Anzaldúa dedicates her thoroughly transnational text "a todos mexicanos on both sides of the border." Her preface presents Anzaldúa as a border woman, growing up between two cultures, "the Mexican (with a heavy Indian influence) and the Anglo (as a member of a colonized people in our own territory)." Her life as a lesbian of color raised as a Catholic has made her skilled at mitigating those dualities of status that characterize the borderlands. Her text, with its complex code switching from English to Tex-Mex to the northern Mexican dialect to Castilian Spanish to Nahuatl, conveys the myriad crosscurrents of life in the borderlands. Through it all, she draws strength from the natural world; she says in her preface, "La Madre Naturaleza succored me, allowed me to grow roots that anchored me to the earth." Anzaldúa has helped her family farm the land, and she is attuned to the damage done when farms are subsumed into massive agribusiness. Anzaldúa clearly articulates the cultural meaning of the border: "it is to distinguish 'us' from 'them"' (5). She knows that this division underlies the hate and the exploitation that support the dominant patriarchies in their social and environmental degradation.

These texts illustrate both the environmental destruction and the cultural origins of that destruction in national borderlands created to enforce ethnic, economic, and class divisions. It would be a mistake to separate these two texts entirely from the growing body of Chicana and Chicano environmental literature. From the celebration of nature in Rudolfo Anaya's classic novel Bless Me, Ultima (Tonatiuh-Quinto Sol Intl., 1971) to such strongly ecofeminist works as Helen María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (Penguin, 1995) and the toxic work environment stories in Ana Castillo's So Far from God (Penguin, 1993), it is clear that contemporary Chicana and Chicano literature advances a substantial critique of environmental degradation. By voicing the damage that the dominant culture visits on those whom it marginalizes, this literature resists those national narratives that privilege metastasizing suburbs and environmentally debilitating consumption, and it emphasizes the absence of environmental justice in them.

Nonetheless, while presenting the devastation of the borderlands and the harm done by the political borders, the texts by Longoria and Anzaldúa do occupy a special place. They emphasize the truly transnational aspects of the growing environmental crisis, and in so doing they begin the important work of moving beyond national narratives that, however putatively environmental they may be or seek to become, remain to some degree limited. Texts like these enlarge the study of environmental literature and make the all-important connections between ecological degradation and nationalism. Such texts not only help move nature away from the margins and into the center of cultural discourse but also help authorize the all-important interrogation of national borders themselves, their economic and racial origins, their social and environmental consequences.

It is increasingly clear that globalization mandates that effective environmental change be supported by networks taking shape across borders. Such transnational movements are not new (they fueled both the suffrage movements and the antislavery movement), but they are more and more necessary, and, as such alliances grow, they will delineate further the damage done by traditional political borders. In this context, it is helpful to take note of what biologists describe as the edge effect--that is, the tendency for natural life, the flora and fauna of a region, to be richer in transition zones, those borders where fields intersect with woodlands, rivers meet deserts, and so on. By illustrating the tragic environmental consequences that accompany the arbitrary political divisions between the United States and Mexico, these two texts also suggest the possibilities for effective restoration that can come with natural, instead of national, boundaries.

TERRELL DIXON
University of Houston, University Park