Toward an Inclusive Eco-Cosmopolitanism: Bilingual Children's Literature in the United States

Abstract

Despite the proliferation of ecocritical work in the United States in recent years, two areas of potentially enriching study remain marginalized in scholarly discussions: literature for Latino bilingual–bicultural audiences and literature intended for children. Bilingual–bicultural children's titles represent a unique set of texts that operate within American literary traditions, in the broadest sense of cultural production from the Americas, and yet they offer important divergences from an environmental and ecocritical discussion in the United States in which discourses of localism have long dominated. In an era of globalization and displacement in the hemisphere, bilingual children's texts offer different tropes of place in stories that take into account the accelerated deterritorialization of people in the Americas, particularly in Mexico and Central America. Bilingual children's stories with ecocritical themes bring new perspectives to bear on the landscape of American ecocriticism because they challenge children and scholars to conceive of an environmental ethics sensitive to diverse cultural perspectives and the realities of globalization. As artistic expressions of the realities of globalization and displacement, illustrated bilingual children's texts can make a fascinating contribution to projects involving what Ursula K. Heise calls eco-cosmopolitanism, a discourse she offers as an alternative or counterpoint to localism (59). Heise makes the provocative assertion that “the environmentalist emphasis on restoring individuals’ sense of place … becomes a visionary dead end if it is understood as a founding ideological principle or a principal didactic means of guiding individuals and communities back to nature” (21). She argues instead for an environmentalism that fosters “an understanding of how a wide variety of both natural and cultural places and processes are connected and shape each other around the world, and how human impact affects and changes this connectedness” (21). Bilingual children's texts by alternative presses feature original stories by Latino and Latin American authors and represent a literary praxis in which a central concern is precisely this interconnectedness of cultural and natural processes in the Americas. Those titles with broadly defined environmental themes are especially relevant to conversations within ecocriticism, especially as scholars consider what an inclusive eco-cosmopolitanism might look like in the context of migration and deterritorialization within the hemisphere.