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  • Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial ed. by Sarah D. Wald et al
  • English Brooks (bio)
Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial. Edited by Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray. Temple UP, 2019. xxi 1 + 315 pages. $115.50 cloth; $39.95 paper; $39.95 e-book.

Scholars acquainted with recent turns in Latinx literary studies and environmental humanities will be pleased to find this particular group of scholars involved in Latinx Environmentalisms . For well over a decade, coeditors Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray have been working— often together—at the various junctures of these two fields, publishing monographs and articles and organizing conference panels, roundtables, and workshops around the intersections of environment, identity, labor, place, politics, and race, especially as these relate to US minority communities. <I>MELUS </I>readers might recall the journal’s 2009 special issue on “Ethnicity and Ecocriticism,” coedited by Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic, which includes Ybarra’s essay “Borderlands as Bioregion.” Much has happened in the field over these intervening years, as is evident in the range of material this new volume engages with, including queer studies, ecofeminism, disability theory, animal studies, ecopoetics, art history, and Chicanafuturism.

The collection’s coauthored introduction discusses how, “Although literary critics have been writing about the environmental aspects of Latinx literature for at least twenty years, this is the first such collection of essays on Latinx environmentalisms in literary and cultural productions.” These essays seek to account “for the variety of ways in which Latinx cultures are often ... environmental but hardly ever identify as environmentalist,” demonstrating how these “cultures redefine and broaden what counts as environmentalism, even as they sometimes reject the term entirely” (3). From this point of intervention, the authors detail a robust overview: the genealogies of marginalization and erasure of Latinx and other minority voices from US environmentalism; their many forms of environmental engagement, practice, and identification within different environments (material, political, economic); and the arc of scholarship that has [End Page 184] attended to these histories and relations. They explicitly indicate that the environmental justice and decolonial orientations of these essays aim to fill “a vacuum of attention” attributable to “the colonialist and white supremacist ideologies embedded in the formulation of mainstream environmentalism” (3). While the coeditors affirm their commitment to the “civil rights framework” of environmental justice that emerged in the 1980s, they and other contributors also embrace an expanded “sovereignty framework,” modeled on the work of “[i]ndigenous activists and indigenous studies scholars” (2). In her foreword to the collection, Laura Pulido further elaborates that this “(de)colonial framework” includes but reaches beyond previous work in Latinx environmental studies “rooted in race, reflecting a U.S. framework,” explaining that “foregrounding the decolonial also reflects a particular moment in the evolution of critical ethnic studies, which have been heavily influenced by both indigenous and Latin American studies” (x). By introducing the collection on these terms, the coeditors are able to identify and sustain continuities between existing work in environmental humanities and ethnic studies while also steering this emerging conversation in productive and provocative new directions.

This decolonial framework is evident in the book’s three sections—“Place: Racial Capital and the Production of Place,” “Justice: Expanding Environmentalism,” and “The Decolonial: Alternative Kinships and Epistemologies of Futurity—which include ten essay chapters and original interviews with H'ector Tobar, Ana Castillo, Helena María Viramontes, Lucha Corpi, and Cherríe Moraga. In the conversations with these artists, writers, and scholars, we witness different ways in which family (hi)stories, environment, community, education (formal and otherwise), and participation in various social struggles have shaped their lives, work, and critical consciousness. Novelist, scholar, and award-winning journalist H'ector Tobar, for instance, reflects on how his becoming “a professional witness” has brought him a growing awareness “of social relationships,” “of suffering, [and] of how people retain a sense of power in a world that tries to make them feel powerless.” Fiction, he explains, “in order to work, has to be more real than nonfiction because it has to go deeper into the human experience...

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