Decolonial Environmentalisms
Decolonial Environmentalisms
Climate Justice and Speculative Futures in Latinx Cultural Production
A critical examination of the environmental movement and the Latinx voices that are shifting how to think about a future shaped by climate change.
In Decolonial Environmentalisms, David Vázquez argues that the mainstream environmental movement is implicated in racial capitalism, not least through its ignorance of environmental justice as it pertains to Latinx people. Through close readings of eco-minded novels, films, visual art, and short stories by Chicanx, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban American, Peruvian, and Central American culture makers, Vázquez surfaces diverse Latinx visions for an equitable and sustainable humanity.
In the creations of Helena María Viramontes, Ester Hernández, Salvador Plascencia, the printmaking collective Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICA, and others, Vázquez locates a bracing critique of racist elisions and assumptions in hegemonic environmentalist thought. At the same time, he shows that the roles of Latinx people in the exploitation of the US West and the ruin of Indigenous communities are ripe for self-examination, in hopes of sparking reform. Indeed, Decolonial Environmentalisms is a work of guarded optimism, finding glimmers of possibility even in dystopic science fiction. The overlooked experiences of Latinx people, Vázquez suggests, can inspire environmental movements capable of transformative advocacy.
Decolonial Environmentalisms is an extraordinary contribution to Latinx studies, a field in which there is immense concern about environmental injustice but few scholarly resources to address it. This is important and necessary work that will change the way scholars in both the environmental humanities and Latinx studies approach their work. The book makes clear its grounding—and its intervention—in both interdisciplinary Latinx studies and ecocriticism. The coda, with its meditation on hope, offers both an exciting personal voice and a fragile and speculative, but nonetheless powerful, vision of where the environmental imaginaries elucidated in the previous chapters might take us.
I cannot sing the praises of Decolonial Environmentalisms as loudly and forcefully as I would like to on the page. This book is truly exceptional and will in no time take its rightful place as a necessary text in Latinx literary and cultural studies. With its simultaneously rigorous and accessible style and its unflinching aim to initiate deep thinking and action pertaining to environmental justice, Vázquez’s vibrant book is activist scholarship at its best.
David J. Vázquez is an associate professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University.
- Introduction. Mapping Decolonial Environmental Imaginaries in Latinx Culture
- 1. Ecocosmopolitanism, Toxicity, and Solidarity: How Latinx Farmworker Texts Imagine Race, Space, and Authority
- 2. Memory, Space, and Denizenship: Commemorating 1960s Activism, Nostalgia, and Urban Environmental Preservation
- 3. Echoes of Manifest Destiny: Race, Space, and Violence in the Latinx Anti-Western
- 4. The Ironies of Dystopian Environmental Futures: Science Fiction, Hope, and Decolonial Optimism in Sabrina Vourvoulias’s Ink and Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer
- Coda. A Concluding Meditation on Decolonial Hope
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
