2010 Chicana/o Studies Conference (April 4-7): "
Scoping the Theme of the Annual Conference:
Environmental Justice Struggles for a Post-Neoliberal Age
Devon G. Peña
Writing as NACCS Chair-Elect (2009-10)
As we continue preparations for the annual conference of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) in Seattle this coming April 4-7, I have been tracking news relevant to the theme of our annual gathering in Seattle. There are plenty of signs indicating that the theme of environmental justice was a wise and timely choice.
Take for example the issue of ‘food justice.’ A recent UN report states that there are more than 1 billion people going hungry and thirsty each day. In the United States, the Department of Agriculture just released a report noting that for the first time in three decades hunger has increased. There are now close to 50 million people, 17 million of them children, going hungry each day in our hyper-consumer, neoliberal society.
The USDA study confirms that Mexican-origin and other Latina/o people are still among the most vulnerable populations at risk of ‘food insecurity,’ which is USDA doublespeak for hunger and malnutrition. Our youth in particular are negatively affected and alarming rates of childhood obesity and diabetes are clearly a call for action against a food system that is slowly killing us off in the fields and at the table. See the blog entries below of 12/12 and 11/28.
Another recent study by the EPA demonstrates that Latina/o populations are still the group most likely to be subjected to cumulative and multiple environmental risks. We suffer multiple exposures and cumulative effects because contaminated water, air, soils, and foods affect the places where we live, work, play, and pray. This combines with our lack of access to health care and low-income status to create numerous cascading effects that threaten the health and wellbeing of our communities. Governmental neoliberal practices have led to a decline or marginalization of the participation of our communities in environmental decision-making, and much of this is due to the persecution and profiling of our communities as ‘illegal’s.’ A community’s perceptions of risk are now considered leading factors affecting Latina/os as a vulnerable population.
The corporate-controlled global food system, along with the carbon-based energy economy to which it is irrevocably linked, is a major source of contemporary struggles for the right to not go hungry. Indeed, corporate monopolization of our food systems has become the focus of widening social movements for social justice and ecological democracy through the revitalization and resurgence of local community-based food systems. This is the struggle for ‘food sovereignty’ that has become a hallmark of environmental justice organizing across the world. The corporate-dominated global food system is being resisted by millions of people in localities spread across the world. These movements seek fundamental transformation of the privatized enclosure of all life that the agro-biotechnology factories in the fields have come to represent.
Food justice is the preeminent environmental justice struggle of our time because it addresses an issue that affects every living organism on the planet and not just every person. The way we make and consume food impoverishes and sickens farm workers, but it also destroys our soils, ecosystems, water, and biodiversity. Climate change is a direct result of our corporate agribusiness model that contributes at least 25 percent of the planet’s global emissions of methane and carbon dioxide, principal components driving the process of climatic change.
The emerging efforts to rebuild local communities in the face of such globalization depend on resurgent direct actions for place-based prosperity and democracy. The struggle for environmental and food justice challenges neoliberal ideology at its core by rejecting globalization, privatization, the notion that rights are tied only to selfish ‘rational’ individuals, and the commoditization of life and living systems.
The same NAFTA-induced diaspora that led to the movement of Mesoamerican peoples forcibly displaced from their ejidos and homelands has produced a new subjectivity that is perhaps best illustrated by a sign I saw at the L.A. May 2006 mass protests against racism and oppression of immigrants: ‘No somos ilegales, somos obreros transnacionales.’ The sign was carried by a large group of Zapotec and Mixtec workers who are part of the diaspora remaking L.A. as transnational suburb of indigenous peoples aptly named, ‘Oaxacalifornia.’
Pollution does not stop to check in at the border inspection station; neither do the transnational workers or the Monarch Butterfly. The trans-boundary nature of the struggle against neoliberal enclosures is a major factor redefining the prospects for environmental justice. Multinational non-governmental organizations are circulating these struggles beyond borders in ways that creatively bring Zapatista communities together with progressive and radical networks for environmental justice everywhere.
One of the goals of the 2010 NACCS Conference is to bring these movements together with activist scholars and researchers to rekindle our organization’s commitment to conduct social action-research our communities want us to engage in to nurture more effective struggles for social and environmental justice.
There are numerous challenges facing the environmental justice movement in Chicana/o and other communities of color. Among these are the pervasive influence of neoliberal strategies that continue to be enacted within governmental agencies and the NGO community. This includes a continuing disconnect between federal environmental justice policies and the civil rights laws that had sustained direct action in decades past. There is a looming threat posed by the shift toward genomic informatics including toxicogenomics and mass genotyping that could further reduce democratic participation in the assessment of risk or discourses on environmental and public health that will lie beyond the reach of the average person. This is the problem of the ‘scientization’ of environmental justice as discursive shift that requires we educate ourselves with critical knowledge of these new domains of risk science.
We must redouble efforts to prevent the reduction of environmental justice to rational-choice calculations based on quantitative cost-benefit analysis. Such an approach begets the formula: ‘We all get an equal piece of the same rotten carcinogenic pie.’
The number of outstanding submissions for papers, panels, roundtables, and poster sessions is an encouraging sign of the relevance and concern our communities share with issues related to environmental and social justice. We have dozens of proposals focused on the 2010 conference theme and anticipate a momentous and history-making gathering. We look forward to seeing everyone in Seattle on April 4-7, 2010.
This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2009 issue of the NACCS Newsletter. To join NACCS, please visit: NACCS Home Page"
(Via Environmental & Food Justice.)
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