Forum on Literatures of the Environment

 
Andrea Parra, "Letter," PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1099-1100.

THE ECOFEMINIST BELIEF that people of color have long been subsumed into the category of nature in the mainstream imaginary is confirmed by Chicano history. Issues of environmental racism compelled Chicanos and Chicanas to political and social action in the 1960s. Indeed, it was the all too real threat of pesticide poisoning that gave rise to the grassroots organization of the United Farm Workers under César Chávez. With the support of plastic and performance artists such as Luis Valdez and the popular traveling theater El Teatro Campesino, the political and the artistic coalesced in a galvanization of Chicanos and Chicanas across the nation, engendering what is now known as El Movimiento or the Chicano Movement.

Land and its reappropriation figured largely in the Chicano imaginary of that period, especially in the ethnic nationalism related to the mythic Aztlán, the sacred homeland of the Aztec people. Aztlán gave rise to a mythopoetics of which the poetry of Alurista and the novels of Rudolfo Anaya provide fine examples. The recovery of a symbolic homeland was preceded by a land rights campaign in the Southwest, led by Reies Tijerina, who represented citizens of Mexican descent whose families had been wrongfully dispossessed of their lands since the signing of the treaty of Guadalupe in 1848.

Although Aztlán and the ethnic nationalism it inspired ultimately failed to sustain a committed political activism, a renewed interest in indigenous land movements and a valorization of the connection between women and nature have recently prompted several Chicana writers to embrace ecofeminist agendas. The writings of Ana Castillo, Cherríe Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa exemplify the appeal of ecofeminism to women of color who aim to reappropriate and redefine their connection with the natural world, a political position informed by an oppositional consciousness, as theorized by Chela Sandoval. Sandoval encourages political unity without embracing the taxonomic approaches of mainstream feminism, a standpoint that allows for the blurring of clean distinctions typical of dualistic thought. Questioning the boundaries between human and nonhuman nature, ecofeminism constitutes one such oppositional strategy. On another front, Donna Haraway, whose cyborg politics undermine the radical separation of human beings and machines, rightly argues for the simultaneity of such oppositional approaches as a means of provoking the downfall of existing systems of domination.

Ecocritical literary theory, such as that advocated by Patrick Murphy and Greta Gaard, and the reworkings of contested terms like nature and environment promoted by Lawrence Buell are necessary for the reassessment of the relation between human imagination and the environment. Since constructions of nature inevitably involve naming and thus a dynamics of power, language and literary constructions must be scrutinized rigorously. As Laura Pulido points out, the prevailing conception of nature is informed by racial and class bias, often resulting in a preservationist stance that has "no place for people, even when they are a historical component of the rural landscape and habitat." Redefinition of the environment to include both urban and rural landscapes will allow for the critical study of not only the desert flowers of Pat Mora but also the freeways of Lorna Dee Cervantes and the suburban dumps and strip malls evoked in Junot Diaz's fiction.

It is worth noting that while Chicano and Chicana writers often address ecological and environmental issues in their literary production, Chicano and Chicana critics have been rather slow to take up the literary ecocritical cause, as it were. Like mainstream feminism, perhaps ecocriticism has been constituted as primarily an Anglo domain. This was certainly the impression I got at the panel devoted to ecocriticism at the MLA convention last December, where faces of color were few and far between. I believe it was Louise Westling who openly expressed her concern that ecocritical discussions had failed to attract a more racially diverse audience.

The subsuming of people of color into nature in the popular imaginary derives from Western conceptions of identity based on rigid dualistic thought that continues to prevail at the end of the twentieth century. People of color remain steadfastly present in both urban and rural landscapes yet are invisible as human beings to the mainstream eye. The persistent deconstruction of these dualisms promoted by ecofeminist philosophers such as Val Plummer and Karen Warren enable the visualization of alternative models of identity previously unrecognized by the Western eye. Ecofeminism offers one approach to the reexamination and dearticulation of these landscapes.

ANDREA PARRA
Columbia University