Waging War on Nature: Ecospaces, Ethnoecologies and Chicana/o Writings

Abstract

Since the rise of El Movimiento in the 1960s, Chicanas/os have negotiated space (urban, rural and the wilderness) as central to la raza’s struggles for legitimate citizenship in the U.S. Chicana/o ecowritings reach beyond attempts at self-definition, and construe the natural world as a battleground for the enactment of a relentless war that western civilizations have waged on both nature and indigenous cultures. The aim of this paper is to pinpoint the interrelated themes of trauma and disenfranchisement in contexts of environmental exigency and colloquy (i.e. ecodestruction and environmental racism). If greening societies is an ethical reassessment of human praxis (classified among the so-called practices de la liberación), environmental writings take the ecophilosophical angle as an essential tactic for the democratization of world affairs. Accordingly, this paper discusses Chicana/o thinkers and writers who tackle the spatio-temporal hermeneutics not in the traditional channels of collective awareness, but in the composition of ecowritings as an expression of political insurgence or as a defensive strategy in the war on nature.