“Doesn’t Matter if It’s Crack or . . . Pesticides, AIDS, It’s All the Same Shit”: Body-Land Metonymies in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints

Abstract

Abstract This article closely examines Mario Valle, the seroconverted Chicano gay male minor protagonist in Cherríe Moraga’s play Heroes and Saints (1992) as a case study of Chicanx environmentalism informed by a materially metonymic body-land relationship. The article addresses Mario Valle’s HIV+ status not as a peripheral aberration but as integral to the play. The play renders legible the entangled impact of environmental toxins—pesticide poisoning and AIDS—as necessary to understanding the soothing metonymic acts of substitution queer care makes possible. AIDS and pesticide poisoning, this article argues, are mutually reinforcing and intra-acting embodied parts of an environmental, soil, and land-based whole. Through Moraga’s recuperative lens of “Queer Aztlán,” AIDS can finally be understood as its own unique environmental issue alongside agrochemical usage rather than as a separately delineated social concern of individualized risky behavior. The poetic potential of metonymy does not solely focus on individual human actors in service of one another. Rather, such a literary device considers the environmental nesting potential of part/whole substitutability: human, non/human, and more-than-human parts continuously generate connection and care beyond the borders of skin and soil. There is no membrane of separation between toxic bodies and toxic lands. Characters in the play often fulfill alternative roles, abilities, and bodily parts—a sister acting as a substitute child, lesbian lover, nourishing/nourished mouth for a sibling—in order to alleviate the suffering caused by acts of environmental degradation. Although truncated by enforced forms of toxicity, such contaminated bodies negate negation, producing canceling forms of negativity that are neither anti-relational nor driven toward death. Rather, these body-land relationships reinscribe the possibility for toxic bodies to perform acts of emotional labor and alleviate suffering in the face of forcibly foreclosed futurity.