Ecological Borderlands

Body, Nature, and Spirit in Chicana Feminism

Christina Holmes

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780252082016, 9780252040542
• eBook ISBN: 9780252098987
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Environmental practices among Mexican American woman have spurred a reconsideration of ecofeminism among Chicana feminists. Christina Holmes examines ecological themes across the arts, Chicana activism, and direct action groups to reveal how Chicanas can craft alternative models for ecofeminist processes.
 
Holmes revisits key debates to analyze issues surrounding embodiment, women's connections to nature, and spirituality's role in ecofeminist philosophy and practice. By doing so, she challenges Chicanas to escape the narrow frameworks of the past in favor of an inclusive model of environmental feminism that alleviates Western biases. Holmes uses readings of theory, elaborations of ecological narratives in Chicana cultural productions, histories of human and environmental rights struggles in the Southwest, and a description of an activist exemplar to underscore the importance of living with decolonializing feminist commitment in body, nature, and spirit.
 

CHAPTER 1

Borderlands Environmentalism

Historiography in the Midst of Category Confusion

The ecopolitical scope of subaltern environmentalism might be impossibly broad and diffuse in its political impact: corporate accountability, cultural and media criticism, worker organization, human rights, indigenous self-determination, social justice, international solidarity, sustainable development, worker health and safety. This is an ambitious wish list, but also a necessary consequence of the heterogeneity at the grassroots, a heterogeneity which constantly moves toward transnational spheres of interaction and cooperation.

—Soenke Zehle, “Notes on Cross-Border Environmental Justice Education”

Category confusion is a crucial component in threshold theories. When we enact threshold theorizing, we shift “betwixt and between” established categories, enacting what I've elsewhere described as both/and/neither/nor thinking—negotiations between (and within) affirmation and negation—that facilitate the invention of additional possibilities.

—AnaLouise Keating, Transformation Now!

Chicana and Mexican American women's diverse ecological practices might be understood as a form of subaltern environmentalism that is not readily grasped through categories of analysis such as ecofeminism or environmental justice, but if we begin inquiry within the category confusion that ensues, we may find new directions for building ecological alliances. While mainstream environmentalism has focused on issues such as climate change and wildlife preservation, and the environmental justice movement has critiqued the largely white and middle-class bias of the mainstream movements and organizations (e.g., Greenpeace, Sierra Club), the environmental justice movement is overdetermined by a focus on toxicity. This focus stems from the origin of the environmental justice movement, which began as a response to the placement of landfills and burning facilities in the communities of people of color. Ecofeminist literature shows a broader array of concerns, such as the gendered effects of toxicity; the fact that women are more likely to live or be employed in areas that are ecologically fragile; women's efforts to create spiritual connections to the land; and representations of women's connection with the natural environment in art and literature. The environmentalism of the activists collected here encompasses ecofeminist and environmental justice concerns and enlarges them. It raises questions regarding the devaluation of ecological knowledge that is based on a long-standing awareness of the land and wildlife that many communities in the Southwest have tried to retain. As Zehle's epigraph shows, a diverse movement toward epistemological and ontological modes of decolonization is emerging in this environmental praxis. This chapter makes its way through category confusion in the ecological borderlands and positions activist histories through an interdisciplinary lens that better captures the multiplicity of Chicana and Mexican American women's environmentalism in the Southwest.

To tell decolonizing histories, this project details not just the stories that have been told about Chicana and Mexican Americans’ environmental activism but also probes alternative sources and movements for new points of connection across environmental histories. This effort takes up Emma Pérez's call to multiply and fracture groups in ways that resist their easy consolidation into a monolithic, reified entity such as the “Chicano community” (1999);¹ it does the same with the notion of “environmentalism” as it disrupts the narrative of America's history of environmentalism. To this end, I discuss the limitations of mainstream environmental movements for their exclusions of Chicana/o and Mexican American activists and perspectives. I then address how ecofeminist and environmental justice movements may have improved on some of the failures of the mainstream movement but still fail to recognize Chicana/o and Mexican American struggles in their complexity. Finally, I turn to alternative sources from which to understand these struggles. Using an interdisciplinary framework, this chapter looks at activism such as participation in marches, boycotts, and justice-oriented organizations and at cultural production and the stories artifacts tell about communities and their relationships with the environment and more-than-human world. Ecofeminist studies often focus on social science approaches or humanistic approaches to study, but rarely do scholars bridge the disciplinary divide in theorizing women's relationships to their environment. Environmental justice researchers, on the other hand, have been largely preoccupied with social science approaches to human-nature relations and miss the role of cultural production in the construction of ecological subjectivities.²

In addition to consulting sources from varying sites of activism, this historical review is also a regional one that highlights Chicana/o and Mexican American activism in the U.S. Southwest, including Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—states that border Mexico and that comprise the region from which Chicana/o borderlands theory grows. These states also share ecological characteristics to which their populations have struggled to adapt under changing political and economic conditions. Borderlands theory may be useful to understand ecoactivism in the region if it is seen not only to refer to the symbolic and material conditions of life on the border, but also to displacement from ecological belonging and strivings to reroot. Laura Pulido exhorts the importance of regional histories such as this; she notes that several processes intersect to shape people's lives and their relationships to this land in particular: “economic restructuring, internationalization, and immigration” (2009, 280). These processes shape both the relationships possible among people and those between people and the land, yet they also yield unique directions for resistance. Given a history of forced displacement across the region, this chapter concludes with an analysis of strategies that affirm a sense of community without reification. It affirms a sense of place-belonging without incurring either lococentric xenophobia or loss of a transnational framework that can strengthen and enliven environmental movements.

Limitations of Mainstream U.S. Environmental Movements

American environmentalism, like American feminism, is told through a wave model of historical advancement: the first wave tracks the progressive conservation and preservation movements of the late 1800s, which emerged as a response to the overhunting of big game and the massive deforestation from development. These movements led to the formation of national parks and the forest service. The second wave of the contemporary environmental movement gathered momentum in the 1960s and 1970s with a focus on environmental toxicity, which broadened the conservation scope of the earlier movement. The third wave began in the 1980s with the recognition of an increasing number of hazards (e.g., acid rain, ozone depletion, poor air quality, and accelerating species decline and extinction). This era saw a fracturing and diversifying of the mainstream environmental movement. Diversification has occurred in both the specialization of organizations (e.g., campaigns to save endangered species, clean up water pollution, or slow climate change) and in ideological orientation. More radical movements such as deep ecology, ecofeminism, and environmental justice challenge and in some cases expand the work of mainstream environmentalists.³ The proliferation of environmentalisms does not represent a failure of solidarity. Rather, “this increased diversity has allowed environmentalism to fill (and create) many niches within our society and, as in nature, increased diversity may lead to greater resiliency in social movements” (Dunlap and Mertig 1992, 7). Resiliency is important to note, although we should disrupt the narrative that situates all environmental activism as an outgrowth of mainstream efforts. The mainstream environmental movement bolstered American identity by exclusion, protecting the well-being of middle- and upper-class white citizens while invisibilizing and exploiting indigenous, working-class, immigrant, and racialized communities. While the wave model offers a starting point to understand current environmental activism, a historical context that starts with the lives and histories of those living in the borderlands during these historical shifts paints a different picture.

EMPIRE THROUGH WESTWARD EXPANSION AND CONSERVATION

The history of westward expansion across the United States is popularly framed as inevitable, as Manifest Destiny—a rightful claiming of land and its riches—yet it was a fraught process in which tensions about gender, race, class, and sexuality were tied to the land. Antonia Castañeda's frontier history in California reviews the records that were drafted by popular historians of the time (bankers, lawyers, and other elites). The records reveal racialization at work: they narrativize Mexican men as lazy and dangerous; women were largely absent from their accounts, yet when present, there were clear demarcations between “Spanish” women, elites who were seen as “morally, sexually, racially pure,” and “Mexican” women, who were “immoral, and sexually and racially impure” (1990, 9). These stereotypes reflect the social Darwinism of the time that used biological and social claims of inferiority to legitimate war and expansion. Simultaneously, such representations constructed a counter-ideal of white Victorian femininity and, although Castañeda does not note it, of white masculine virility and work ethic. Women were racialized and sexualized differently depending on the needs of Anglo settlers; marriage into wealthy “Spanish” landowning families required the deracination of some women against the hyperracination of others. The racialization of indigenous and mestizo populations in the Southwest provided ideological justification for westward expansion and the integration of Texas; it reinforced a consolidated post–Civil War American identity against the new other. Castañeda writes that the second half of the nineteenth century, from the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo onward, marks Mexican Americans as dispossessed, suspect citizens in a new nation, made “foreigners in their native land” (2001, 120).

In effect, the signing of the treaty, the dispossession and seizure of lands belonging to Mexican Americans, and the westward migration of white settlers during the Great Depression reterritorialized the American Southwest, erasing the history and presence of existing indigenous and mestizo communities. In so doing, white settlers rescripted the land as the “rugged West” to be dominated and developed by incoming settlers. This action also included setting certain areas aside to maintain controlled zones of “pure wilderness.” In fact, the reterritorialization of the Southwest is an effect of legislation that is often perceived to represent the earliest roots of the U.S. environmentalist movement: programs to set aside national parks and wildlife areas (Ybarra 2007, 2). The wilderness ideal is criticized by contemporary scholars for its rural focus that renders urban spaces unimportant to the environmental movement, but is less often recognized for the role it played in “Americanizing” the West through the dispossession and othering of Mexican and indigenous Americans.

The second and third waves of environmentalism can also be reoriented by virtue of their exclusions. The second stage of the environmental movement emerged in the 1960s and 1970s with a focus on environmental toxicity, and the 1980s onward saw a further fragmentation and diversification of environmental movements. Occurring alongside new social movements such as the women's liberation movement, the antiwar movement, and nationalist movements such as the Black Panthers and the Brown Berets, activists borrowed strategies and rhetoric from other movements of the time and those that preceded them, such as the civil rights movement. However, little sustained critique of the classed, raced, and gendered nature of environmental security reached the mainstream organizations at this time. African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos were organizing in grassroots efforts rather than participating in mainstream environmental organizations (Freudenberg and Steinsapir 1992). “Racial-ethnic activists involved in environmental issues did not always articulate them as such…and others were simply opposed to the environmental movement itself, seeing it as a challenge to civil rights activism” (Pulido 2009, 276). There are many reasons for this, one of which is the antipathy toward the perceived protection of “nature” and the continued ignorance of human suffering based on racial, ethnic, and class oppression in communities populated by people of color. Especially in the case of the Southwest, the protection of the land came at the cost of stripping indigenous and Mexican American people from their rights to land.

EMPIRE AND THE NIMBY MENTALITY

Although many conservation-based organizations continued to grow throughout the past several decades, grassroots activists increasingly focused on human health problems. The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring galvanized environmentalism at the time. It exposed the dangers that pesticides pose to human and ecological health, greatly increasing the visibility of the movement. Following the explosion of interest in Silent Spring, Carson and others made advances in research that showed the dangers of incinerators, chemical runoff from industrial sites, and other hazards. With this new information, environmental organizations made concerted efforts to reduce or relocate toxic hazards such as pesticide spraying, incinerator or nuclear-plant placement, and so on; this environmental approach has come to be known as not in my back yard or NIMBY. Activists in the environmental justice movement argue that race and class backgrounds of populations matter tremendously in the ability to prevent toxins from entering a community. A consequence of the NIMBY mentality is the relocation of toxins from the neighborhoods of those with relatively more privilege and power to communities that have fewer resources to defend themselves. Benjamin Chavis has called this environmental racism—“racial discrimination in environmental policy-making and the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of people of color communities for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and the history of excluding people of color from leadership in the environmental movement” (qtd. in Adamson, Evans, and Stein 2002, 4). Perhaps the two most important examples of environmental racism across the borderlands region include the industrialization of agriculture in the U.S. Southwest and the maquiladorization along Mexico's northern border.

The industrialization of agriculture in the United States, including the advancement of pesticide technologies, coincided with the implementation of the Bracero Program (1942–64) that encouraged Mexican immigration to meet the needs of agribusiness in the United States. Federal policies like the Bracero Program encouraged Mexicans to immigrate under conditions that increased their vulnerability (Peña 2005, 97). The othering process that continued through the Bracero Program produced an exploitable labor force even as it produced areas of the West as either wilderness/conservation zones or development zones. Development zones subject both the earth and the laborers to toxic chemicals while the workers labor long hours in backbreaking conditions. The Bracero Program may have ended in 1964, but Mexican Americans and immigrants from Mexico and Central America continue to be exploited and poisoned in agricultural fields across the Southwest. Without an immigration system in place that formally welcomes workers, immigrant laborers may have even fewer protections now than in the past when the Bracero Program was a recognized government policy. The concealment of agribusiness and its laborers, along with the concentration of pesticide use in farming that largely employs vulnerable populations, should be considered part of the NIMBY mentality; the costs of environmental degradation are distributed differentially, fostering security for privileged citizen-consumers and invisibilizing the land and bodies that bear the brunt of costs.⁴

In addition to agricultural production, the maquiladorization of the border zone as a result of the Border Industrialization Program and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) reflects the NIMBY mentality. The ecological destruction and violence against women on the border is unprecedented. Locating production on the northern border of Mexico separates capital from labor, removing the social, economic, and environmental costs of the production of goods consumed in the United States and elsewhere (Biemann 1999); production does not occur in America's backyard, but in the free-trade zone just across the border. Maquiladoras primarily draw young women from other regions of Mexico for employment that supports not only their own livelihoods, but those of their families as well. While industrialization of the border and the subsequent economic and physical violence to women and the environment is a product of the political and economic relationship between the United States and Mexico, similar phenomena can be witnessed across the globe. This phenomenon has caused physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva to ask, “Are we going to move into a[n] era of environmental apartheid, where the North becomes clean and stays rich while the South stays poor and becomes the toxic dump of the world?” (qtd. in Platt 1998, 142).

Interrogations of Environmental Justice and Ecofeminist Activism

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

The environmental justice movement critiques the NIMBY mentality by recognizing the roles that race, class, and (to some extent) gender play in environmental issues. Environmental justice is broadly defined as “the right of all people to share equally in the benefits bestowed by a healthy environment. We define the environment, in turn, as the places in which we live, work, play, and worship” (Adamson, Evans, and Stein 2002, 4). Unlike mainstream environmental organizations, the environmental justice movement draws a more racially and class-diverse group of constituents together and is largely mobilized by grassroots efforts responding to specific local harms, such as high levels of toxins in a local water source. Despite greater attention to the role of privilege in one's experience of environmental security, the movement has its limitations (or, at the least, popular genealogies of it do).

The literature of environmental justice most closely associates the movement with African American grassroots activism. Genealogies of environmental justice that primarily situate the movement as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement (Bullard 1999; Bullard and Wright 1992) and studies that exclusively highlight the burden of ecological devastation borne by African Americans (Bullard and Wright 1992; Taylor 1989) serve an important function—they make clear how health and environmental well-being has always been a racial project and they show how civil rights rhetoric and organizing strategies such as boycotts and protests helped stage successful campaigns. However, these genealogies risk reifying the movement and excluding other histories because they situate the movement solely within a U.S. national context, occluding struggles that occur outside the United States as well as a transnational perspective such as that foregrounded by Vandana Shiva. Last, a strong focus on equal human rights to a healthy environment emphasizes the movement's anthropocentricism.

Aside from its historical framing, another limitation of the literature is its disciplinary narrowness. Until recently, the literature of environmental justice has almost exclusively derived from the social sciences (Sze 2002; Peña 1998a). Undoubtedly, the justice movement has legitimized itself through studies such as the Commission for Racial Justice's report (1987) that revealed evidence that communities of color are disproportionately burdened by the placement of hazardous waste. In wielding the epistemic authority of quantitative data toward social and environmental justice aims, grassroots activists and their allies have influenced policy and coerced corporations to work with them to improve waste output from the production process. Chicana/o and Mexican American grassroots activists have used these strategies and others to raise their concerns and earn allies. However, efforts that do not fit the narrowly sociological mold or demonstrate active resistance through protests, picketing, political pressure, or litigation are not easily recognized as belonging to the movement. Chicana/o and Mexican American activists have deployed a variety of strategies toward the aim of public education and community-wide resistance, including the use of theater of the oppressed (e.g., Houston and Pulido 2005), literature (e.g., Viramontes 1996), and murals (e.g., Hernández 2003), for example. The multiplicity of these struggles—that they cannot be easily identified by disciplinary eyes as belonging to a Chicana/o nationalist, workers’, or environmental movement; that they employ a variety of tactics to subvert oppressive interlocking systems of racism, classism, sexism, and coloniality—situates them in the interstices of movements and disciplines. This interstitial borderlands environmentalism is easily misrecognized.

Finally, much environmental justice literature remains androcentric. Some authors note that women make up a large percentage of the activists in the movement (Visgilio and Whitelaw 2003; Prindeville 2003; Peña 1998a), bu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Ecological Borderlands: Connecting Movements, Theories, Selves
• 1. Borderlands Environmentalism: Historiography in the Midst of Category Confusion
• 2. Misrecognition, Metamorphosis, and Maps in Chicana Feminist Cultural Production
• 3. Allegory, Materiality, and Agency in Amalia Mesa-Bains's Altar Environments
• 4. Body/Landscape/Spirit Relations in Señorita Extraviada: Cinematic Deterritorializations and the Limits of Audience Literacy
• 5. Building Green Community at the Border: Feminist and Ecological Consciousness at the Women's Intercultural Center
• Conclusion. Bridging Movements with Technologies for the Ecological Self
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author