NACCS XXXVII
Seattle, WA
April 7-10, 2010

Grand Hyatt Seattle 721 Pine Street, Seattle, Washington, USA 98101

 

Chicana/o Environmental Justice Struggles for a Post-Neoliberal Age

Since the 1960s and the farm worker anti-pesticides campaign, environmental justice has emerged as a potent and principal force of activism and self-organization in Chicana/o and other communities of color. Grassroots environmental justice movements have transformed the theory, ethics, and practice of environmentalism and changed the way we think and talk about the environment. In contrast to notions of the environment as separate from humans, either as “wild nature” or as exploitable “natural resource,” environmental justice activists define the environment as the place where we live, work, play, and worship. Our communities have challenged the neoliberal regime of privatized environmental planning and deregulation while promoting the re-valuation and empowerment of place-based “traditional” ecological knowledge. Youth, and especially Chicano males, are an especially overlooked and vulnerable population subject to acts of environmental racism including the ecology of fear created by criminalization and marginalization of young people in urban spaces. Chicana/o struggles demonstrate that environmental justice is more than resistance against racism in environmental law, planning, and regulation. It also involves a search for “ecological democracy” and environmental self-determination by our communities that are disproportionately impacted by the dominant neoliberal model for the destruction of the Earth and her peoples. These struggles are often rooted in collaborations with Native American and other indigenous peoples.

Environmental justice links social justice with ecological resilience and poses significant questions for Chicana/o Studies and its historic benign neglect of ecological issues: What is the contemporary and future outlook for Chicana/o struggles around the material conditions of our existence? How do environmental justice struggles reflect our experiences in the daily-lived encounter with structural violence and historical trauma? What are the strategies of environmental justice used by our communities to supersede the fragmented identity politics of the past three decades and embrace the resurgence of collaborative social action-oriented research? How does the environmental justice movement promote our struggles to move toward a post-neoliberal age?

Acceptance notices will be sent via email by January 31, 2010. Questions should be sent to Chair-Elect, Devon G. Peña via email: dpena@naccs.org.