Mapping Decolonial Environmental Imaginaries in Latinx Culture

Abstract

Abstract Mapping Decolonial Environmental Imaginaries in Latinx Culture addresses a growing dialogue between antiracist environmental humanities and Latinx studies scholars that emphasizes how Latinx creativity expresses decolonial environmental values. Even as we face a racial crisis in the US, there is a looming, similarly daunting challenge in environmental change. Locating forms of progressive environmental ideas that think simultaneously about race and racialization is crucial if we are to meet these twin challenges. This essay introduces a mode of comparative analysis that places multiple genres and forms (novels, films, visual art, and short stories) created by authors from multiple Latinx communities (Chicanx, Puerto Rican, Peruvian, and Central American) into conversation. This comparative approach provides a more nuanced account of how Latinxs from multiple racial, class, gender, sexual, and other identity positions think about and represent environmental ideas. As the legatees of colonialism and racism, Latinx artists have much to say about combatting, circumventing, and, at times, proposing remedies for oppression and environmental harm as complex, interrelated phenomena. These authors and artists comprehend racial capitalism as directly causing environmental crises that perform in concert with racism and colonialism.