Panels, Roundtables, and Other Events

To cultivate conversations across ethnic studies, the environmental humanities, and other fields, I have organized a variety of events:

“Latinx Counterpublics,” Latinx Studies Association Biennial Conference, Tempe, April 2024.

In the US public sphere, Latinxs are often reduced to mere numbers—to checkmarks on census forms, data points in demographic surveys, and statistics about economic sectors. However, Latinxs cannot be contained in these quantitative frameworks; through our experiences at the thresholds of the Americas, we have developed distinctive approaches to individual and collective life. With the US public sphere increasingly unjust and joyless (to invoke our conference’s theme), this panel pushes forward the conversation about Latinx counterpublics—the social networks that have taken shape as Latinxs have looked at, listened to, and engaged with media. In the theoretical tradition that extends from Nancy Fraser to Michael Warner to José Esteban Muñoz, this panel centers on an open-ended provocation: How have Latinxs participated in (or been excluded from) the US public sphere, and how have we created (or turned our backs on) our own counterpublics? Beyond that, this panel raises a series of historical questions: How have Latinxs employed elite aesthetic forms (like the novel and the lyric), and how have we experimented with popular practices (such as crónicas and corridos)? How have Latinxs appropriated old media technologies (from the pen to the printing press), and how have we invented new communication strategies (like el paquete semanal)? How have diasporic webs sustained relationships across space and over time, and how have deeply-rooted communities rallied around site-specific concerns? Finally, how do the preceding inquiries reveal possibilities and/or problems in media studies, performance studies, print culture studies, and other intellectual formations?

Anita Huizar Hernández (Arizona State University): Discussant

Evelyn Soto (Rutgers University), “Zavala and the Spaces of US Democracy”

Carlos Alonso Nugent (Columbia University), “‘Representantes de la Raza Latina en el país del Dollar’: Latinx Counterpublics in the Mexican Revolution”

Tatiana Reinoza (University of Notre Dame), “Quince: Justice and Joy in the Prints of Serie Project”

Alberto Varon (Indiana University), “The Joys of Contemporary Latinx Opera”

“Ecocriticism and Ethnic Studies,” Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Biennial Conference, Portland, July 2023.

Ever since Lawrence Buell drew his famous distinction between “first-wave” and “second-wave” ecocriticism, the standard story about the field has been one of diversification: if ecocriticism emerged in the 1990s as the study of white nature writing, it evolved in the 2000s and 2010s by engaging different genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, classes, castes, and more. A quick glance at a journal issue or a conference program proves that this story is true enough. But while it is clear that ecocriticism has come to include a far wider range of human communities, it is harder to characterize how the field has interacted with these communities’ intellectual traditions—and in particular, harder to characterize how the field has drawn on, departed from, and otherwise related to ethnic studies.

With the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences convening a conference on the theme of “reclaiming the commons,” this panel explores what readers of William Cronon might call “uncommon ground.” While recognizing the indissoluble interdependence of all-too-human communities and more-than-human environments, the panel hopes to reckon with (un)productive frictions across ecocriticism and ethnic studies. Among other things, it asks, how have these fields coevolved, and how have they worked at cross purposes? Around what places, periods, or issues have they developed mutually transformative dialogues, and in what contexts have they continued in isolated monologues? Insofar as ethnic studies can be separated into subfields—Black studies, Latinx studies, and so on—which have played particularly pivotal roles in ecocriticism, and which have been pushed aside? Why?

To answer such questions, this panel features four presentations. In “Creating and Contesting Race and Nature along the Colorado River,” Carlos Alonso Nugent reinterprets media by John Wesley Powell (1834–1902): whereas the environmental humanities have credited these media with raising environmental awareness, Nugent engages ethnic studies to show how they have entrenched environmental unconsciousness. In “Weighed in the Water: On Vicissitudes and the Photograph of Emmett Till,” Jonathan Howard reads a recent piece of environmental sculpture alongside one of the US Civil Rights Movement’s galvanizing photographs, emerging from the depths with new insights into the entangled histories of all-too-human races and more-than-human environments. In “Environmental Justice Culture Beyond Ecocriticism: Origins, Archives, Forms,” Rebecca Evans reexamines the 1982 Warren County, NC anti-PCB protests; where others have seen “historical-political contexts” that draw derivatively on white environmentalisms, she reveals “strategic aesthetic texts” that use the world-making power of Black culture. Finally, in “Abolitionist Environmentalism and Pacific Resurgence,” Aimee Bahng follows the human rights lawyer Julian Aguon to Guam and the poet-activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner to the Marshall Islands; in so doing, Bahng assembles an “abolitionist environmentalism that draws on the tenets of ethnic studies thought to counteract the optimization models of extractive, racial capitalism.”

Moving temporally from the nineteenth-century to the twenty-first century, and shifting spatially around the Americas and across the Pacific, these four presentations thus illuminate the uncommon ground among fields that are reexamining life on our precarious planet.

“Cultures of the US–Mexico Borderlands,” American Studies Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, November 2022.

Twenty-five years after Gloria Anzaldúa published Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, the US–Mexico border is still “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” As Anzaldúa would have predicted, this “bleed[ing]” is both violent and vital, destructive and constructive; anytime “a scab forms it hemorrhagesagain, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture.” However, in ways Anzaldúa failed to see, this “blood” does not flow from a single Chicanx “country,” but rather through two settler states, dozens of Native nations, and countless migrant communities: the “blood,” in other words, does not flow from a single “border culture,” but rather through a range of border cultures.

With the American Studies Association planning its 2022 Meeting around the theme “the Roof is on Fire,” this panel features four papers that engage with the embers of the US–Mexico borderlands. In “Remapping the US Invasion of Mexico,” Karl Jacoby retells two little-known but all-important stories: before, during, and after the War of 1846–48, many Mexicans waged a guerilla war against better-armed US forces; however, these and other Mexicans also joined their northern neighbors in a wider war against Native peoples. Advancing this analysis of competing colonialisms, Carlos Alonso Nugent’s “Mescalero Apache Imagined Environments across the US–Mexico Borderlands” interprets an historical irony: although the Binational Boundary Commission (1849–57) tried in its media to push Indigenous communication practices into a primeval past, it ended up helping Mescalero Apache pictographs transmit socially-specific survival strategies through multiple futures. Taking up a few of these futures, Simón Ventura Trujillo’s “New Mexican Folk Ecologies and Agricultural Modernity” casts new light on Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, Gilberto Benito Cordova, and Maurus Chino; in Trujillo’s reading, these conflicted folklorists show how the biopolitics of agriculture has variously eliminated and failed to eliminate Indigenous ways of knowing land. Charting a similar complexity in a different environment, Héctor Peralta’s “Noches Latinas in Kumeyaayland” draws on ethnographic work with the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians; focusing on the monthly concerts that the Viejas Casino calls “Noches Latinas,” Peralta reveals how place-specific leisure and tourism industries reframe relations among Natives, Latinxs, and whites.

In keeping with Anzaldúa’s boundary-breaking style, this panel brings together scholars with commitments in geography, history, literature, and other (inter)disciplines that interface with critical race and ethnic studies. Although it will pull these presentations together in a response from Mary Pat Brady, the panel will not strive for definitive answers, but will instead draw on and develop a growing awareness of our diverse border cultures. In both elite forms (like the novel and the lyric) and popular practices (such as crónicas and corridos), in both physical mobilizations and media technologies (from the pen to the printing press to social media feed), these border cultures have continuously redefined themselves, each other, and their environments. Even as the US and Mexico double down on deadly practices, these border cultures are very much alive. 

“Environmental Humanities Across the Americas,” Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University, February 2022 (online due to COVID-19).

Short talks from Macarena Gómez-Barris (Pratt Institute), Gisela Heffes (Rice University), Kristina Lyons (University of Pennsylvania), Victoria Saramago (University of Chicago), and a conversation moderated by Carlos Alonso Nugent (Vanderbilt University).

As part of the “Environments” theme at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, and to celebrate Vanderbilt’s new Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies, this panel brings together four scholars who are recharting the relations among the human and more-than-human inhabitants of the Hemispheric Americas. Despite their distinct disciplinary backgrounds, these four scholars are drawing on and contributing to the interdisciplinary project of the environmental humanities. However, while many members of this field remain grounded in the Global North, these four scholars are focusing on both the deeply-rooted communities and far-flung diasporas of the Global South. Engaging variously with Latinx peoples in the US, with Black and Indigenous peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean, and with migrants moving beneath and beyond these geographies, the four scholars are asking some much-needed questions: How and why have the Americas been at the center of the geological epoch that has been called the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, and related names? How and why have the Americas played pivotal roles in settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and other planet-altering processes? Conversely, how and why might the Americas—particularly the Black and Indigenous Americas—offer us different ways of depicting and dwelling on our planet? How and why might the inhabitants of these continents teach us to remain resilient amidst prolonged droughts, sudden disasters, and the rest of our ever-changing environments?

“Ecomedia and Empire,” Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Biennial Conference, July 2021 (online due to COVID-19). 

For decades, the term ecomedia was little more than a convenient catch-all for photographs and films that engage explicitly with environmental issues. In recent years, however, ecomedia has acquired additional meanings: most concretely, it has become a basis for comparing the signifying strategies (verbal, visual, or any combination thereof) that humans use to represent nonhumans; more abstractly, it has become a way of acknowledging the extent to which media (from printed pages to internet servers) can be both human and nonhuman. Drawing on and developing these and other meanings, this panel explores the relations between ecomedia and empire. At some points, this panel sees synergies between its two key terms—it sees how maps have made it possible for states to control distant peoples, or how films have become saturated with the very radiation they seem to simply portray. At other points, this panel highlights tensions—it explains how African and Afro-Caribbean conceptions of nature have penetrated plantation ecologies, and how Mescalero Apache pictographs have pierced through settler imagined environments. Because it sees ecomedia and empire for both their problems and their possibilities, this panel is able to revisit an old question about ecocriticism: if this field emerged through the celebration of capital-N Nature, and if it evolved by exploring a wider range of subjects (not just men, but women; not just whites, but racialized peoples) and spaces (the city as well as the country; the toxic workscape as well as the pristine wilderness), then it how will it reckon with a dizzying diversity of media?

To consider how ecomedia have related to empire, this panel features four presentations. In “Metamorphosizing Ecomedia,” Monique Allewaert reinterprets Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705): whereas other scholars have associated this text with either modern science or anti-modern botanical practices, Allewaert sees it as a threshold where both conceptions of nature have transformed themselves, each other, and their mediations. In the next presentation, “Mescalero Apache Pictographs Beyond US and Mexican Settler Colonialisms,” Carlos Alonso Nugent interprets an irony: although the US–Mexico Boundary Commission (1849–57) tried to push Indigenous ecomedia into a primeval past, it helped Mescalero Apache ecomedia persist through an array of futures. In the third presentation, “Arctic Ice and Figures of ‘Vanishing,’” Hester Blum situates recent images of polar bears on ice in the older iconography about “vanishing” Natives; then, seeking aesthetic and political alternatives, she shows how Indigenous ecomedia register temporal acceleration and dilation of the imperial Arctic. In the final presentation, “Documenting Radiation and Songs of Displacement,” Rahul Mukherjee defines radiation as a more-than-human phenomenon (squeaking, scratching, and popping) that accompanies its all-too-human archiving (in Vladmir Shevchenko’s Chronicle of Difficult Weeks [1988], RP Amudhan’s Radiation Stories: Manivalakurichi [2010], and other nuclear test films); like the other presenters, he then explores ecomedia that critique toxic extractivism (Biju Toppo’s Kora Raje, 2005). On this note, the panel opens to others who, in keeping with the conference theme, can help us see ecomedia and empire as sites of “emergencE/Y.”

“Writing Race, Class, and Gender in the Anthropocene,” Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Biennial Conference, UC Davis, June 2019.

We are living in the Anthropocene, a geological epoch in which we wield power over the entire planet. But who, exactly, is the “we” in that sentence? As an imaginary, the Anthropocene allows “us” to understand “ourselves” as members of a species that is transforming “our” planet. As a material phenomenon, however, the Anthropocene divides “us” into disparate groups—whites and people of color, upper classes and working classes, men and women, citizens and refugees. How, in Bruno Latour’s terms, can we track the translations between nonhumans and humans? How, from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s perspective, can we straddle the thought rifts between the planetary and the global? How, ultimately, can we reconcile a universal human problem with our particular social positions?

To engage with these questions, this panel brings together new work on literature, art, and other media. It centers on an open-ended provocation: How do race, class, and gender illuminate and/or invalidate “our” position in the Anthropocene? Beyond that, it raises a series of historical questions: How have writers and artists of color developed new ways of representing environments, and how have they drawn on preexisting conventions? How have formerly colonized peoples illuminated environmental crises, and how have they reproduced ideological blind spots? How have working people supported mainstream environmental movements, and how have they developed unconventional strategies for socio-ecological struggle? How have diasporic webs depicted environmental issues that permeate across spatio-temporal scales, and how have deeply-rooted communities taken up site-specific concerns? Finally, how do the preceding inquiries reveal possibilities and/or problems at the intersections of Ethnic Studies, Postcolonial Studies, the Environmental Humanities, and other intellectual formations?

The panel features four papers from different fields of literary and cultural studies. In the first paper, Stacy Alaimo considers feminist, queer, and indigenous environmentalisms that account for multi-scalar entanglements while evading tenacious Western epistemologies that position the knower above and beyond the scene. In the second paper, Carlos Alonso Nugent shows how Latinx migrant farmworkers and their allies use their socially-specific perspectives to challenge the interlocking systems of racism, capitalism, and ecological toxicity. In the third paper, Gabriela Nuñez argues that Latinx activists use bicycling narratives to imagine spaces of environmental “paradise” as alternatives to spaces of exclusionary “fire.” And in the fourth paper, Jennifer Wenzel explores the tensions at the heart of Anthropocene apocalypse narratives, which imagine the consequences of carbon accumulation in the future by representing the realities of capital accumulation in the present.

As it recovers the past, this panel orients itself towards the future. Engaging with the “fire” that is increasingly enveloping our “paradise,” it tries to learn how literature, art, and other media can help us engage with environmental conflicts. Respecting the differences that divide and define us, it asks how different writers, artists, and culture-makers have imagined social and ecological change. 

“Genealogies of Latinx Eco-Media,” Latinx Studies Association Biennial Conference, Washington, D.C., July 2018.

This panel explores the genealogies of Latinx eco-media, defined broadly to include literature, visual art, film, music, and everything in between. As Euro American fantasies like the pristine wilderness and the balanced ecosystem become increasingly untenable, it looks to Latinx eco-media for aesthetic, conceptual, and political alternatives. And as the effects of climate change become increasingly pervasive, it recovers Latinx strategies for reimagining—and ultimately, transforming—human communities and nonhuman environments.

This panel centers on an open-ended provocation: is it possible to theorize “Latinx eco-media,” or do we need to distinguish between national traditions (i.e. Chicanx vs. Puerto Rican), historical periods (i.e. nineteenth century vs. twenty-first century), and aesthetic forms (i.e. texts vs. images)? Beyond that, it raises a series of historical questions: How have Latinx authors and artists developed new ways of representing environments, and how have they drawn on preexisting conventions? How have Latinx literature and art illuminated environmental crises, and how have they reproduced ideological blind spots? How have Latinx eco-media supported social movements, and how have they developed unconventional strategies for socio-ecological struggle? How have diasporic webs depicted environmental issues that permeate across space and proceed over time, and how have deeply-rooted communities taken up site-specific concerns? Finally, how do the preceding inquiries reveal possibilities and/or problems at the intersections of Latinx Studies, the Environmental Humanities, and other intellectual formations?

To take up these abstract questions, this panel focuses on concrete case studies. In the first paper, Jennifer Garcia Peacock shows how Chicanx artists and architects used eco-media to expose the inequitable division of land, water, and power in greater Fresno. In the second paper, Carlos Alonso Nugent argues that Reies López Tijerina experimented with radical eco-media, cultivated a Chicanx counterpublic, and developed new ways of dwelling in his increasingly precarious environments. In the third paper, Sarah D. Wald describes how the non-profit organization Latino Outdoors reconciles aesthetic strategies, media technologies, and political practices from both Euro American and Latinx traditions. And in the fourth paper, Priscilla Solis Ybarra argues that Latinx artist-activists in post-Harvey Texas and post-wildfire California excavate the layers of colonialism and capitalism at the heart of climate change. Despite the many differences that are elaborated in their individual paper proposals, then, all four of these scholars use the interdisciplinary methods of Latinx Studies to explore the political potential of Latinx eco-media.

As it recovers the past, this panel orients itself towards the future. Putting the “Now” in “Latinx Studies Now,” it asks how literature, art, and other media can help us engage with droughts along the US-Mexico border, climate disasters in the Caribbean, and environmental conflicts throughout the Americas. Even as the new paradigm of the Anthropocene asks us to think as a species, then, this panel tries to learn how Latinx writers, artists, and culture-makers have imagined social and ecological change.