2010 NACCS Chicana/o Studies Conference in April

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, pray, and eat. 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

More devastating than anything except pouring concrete on the land!

JUSTICE, AGRICULTURE & ECOLOGICAL CHANGE

Shoreline, WA.  I just finished reading a book entitled, Just food: where locavores get it wrong and how we can truly eat responsibly (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2009). The author, James E. McWilliams is an Austin-based historian with a record of progressive thought. This is not an agrifood industry PR hack. McWilliams has published what appears to be a very rational, thoughtfully-written, and well-argued book that is very critical of the so-called local and slow food movements.

Just food is filled with well-intentioned and provocative arguments. For example, early in the introductory chapter, McWilliams quotes a friend, Nina Federoff, a plant geneticist and microbiologist, who has a rather dim view of the ecological impact of agriculture: "...agriculture is more devastating ecologically than anything else we could do except pouring concrete on the land" (p. 7).

Of course, nature finds a way: Grasses, herbs, and vines growing through the cracks can undermine the best-poured plans in a matter of years.

I can think of a lot of things we do to the land that are much worse than pouring concrete over it, which is not to endorse that sort of less than mindful action. What about: War, with all the bombing, habitat destruction, and toxic waste production that entails? Or, clear-cutting forests to make room for the strip mines that then dump toxic and carcinogenic waste in lakes, rivers, and seas while poisoning the very air we breathe?

Ironically, industrial agrifood monocultures often produce all these effects and so it is easy to see why McWilliams would invoke Federoff to make such a hyperbolic point. But this approach actually perpetuates a lie and a stereotype: Not all farmers, and not all farming systems, are destructive in their relationship to the ecosystems they inhabit. Obscuring this basic idea is the major flaw of this book.

As I read further, I quickly realized that McWilliams or Federoff have probably never seen anything else but corporate agribusiness-styled "factories in the field" or well-intentioned but flawed organic corporate farms not yet weaned from monoculture practices. McWilliams obviously has never taken a slow, observant walk through a classic Maya huerto familiar or home kitchen garden.

If he had, then he would have observed that the average Maya rain forest kitchen garden has a polyculture mix of at least one thousand different types of domesticated plants, wild relatives of cultivars, and other unrelated wild plants with spiritual, medicinal, or nutritional values. That is not a typing error: One thousand (1,000) different plants in one garden plot. That is farming in "nature's image". This is where the anthropogenic disturbances of human activity can nurture and sustain native and domesticated [sic] biodiversity.

Indeed, ethnoecologists have long argued that indigenous farmers are not just principal stewards of our native agricultural crop biodiversity, they are principal architects of the wild biodiversity-rich landscape that they co-inhabit with other living organisms.

Another point in this book that is misleading. McWilliams rightly argues that humans have been modifying plants since the first human, most likely a woman with a digging stick, decided to put a seed in the ground. There is no denying that the domestication of wild plants, without which agriculture is impossible, involves the primary goal of genetic modification and control of the qualities the farmer values.

However, McWilliams oddly and mistakenly takes this as justification for the development and application of commercial agricultural biotechnology. We have been modifying genes all along, now we can do it even better with gene-splicing and dicing technologies, so why not? 

All we have to do is get our social ethics together: He admits that most transgenic crops exist for one reason: Sustaining corporate profits. He dispenses with all the philanthropic and humanitarian propaganda the industry is best at. But then he naively assumes that transgenics can be used for more noble purposes like creating new drought resistant varieties to help us adapt to climate change.

The principal problem with this argument is that plant genomics is not the same as rDNA transgenic technology. We have had knowledge of, say, the maize genome for milenia, and indeed new technology allows us to "map" the genome of a plant in a rather perfunctory manner. Mapping is not necessarily a "bad" or "unethical" act. It can provide vital knowledge of genomic diversity.

However, using this knowledge to develop transgenic organisms, that would not naturally occur within the complex nuances of plant evolution, is not just irresponsible, it is unjust to farmers, farm workers, land, water, and other organisms that would be forced to "compete" with the newly introduced organism. 

There is complete disregard in McWilliams' argument for a more thoughtful deliberation on  the precautionary principle that would have required an appeal to a predictive ecology of transgenics.

Indeed, as Mae Wan Ho and other microbiology critics of transgenics have made clear, this is the equivalent of allowing private interests to dictate the conditions that affect significant quality of life factors like evolution free of anthropogenic effects and large-scale public health and well being. More bluntly: it is an acquiescence to the equivalent of a "biological Chernobyl."

To be continued....

Systemic racism and hunger

Why kids of color go hungry

Shoreline, WA.  In the November 28 blog, I reported on a recent USDA study revealing the disproportionate incidence of hunger across different racial and national-origin groups.

The study reveals that Latina/o and other children of color suffer disproportionately from hunger and malnutrition. This central finding was cited as empirical evidence of what is essentially a form of environmental racism - the inequitable distribution of environmental "rights" and "wrongs."

Access for all to safe, nutritious, and culturally-resonant food is a fundamental aspect of the ethics of environmental justice.

From my vantage point, the structural conditions that produce systemic hunger are related to capitalism's perverse coupling of social and ecological systems in a manner that places harvest work in the hands of slave-wage laboring families with hunger-wracked children.

American consumers enjoy their Mexican green papaya at mid-winter while distancing themselves, cloaked no doubt in comfortable self-interested unawareness, from the connections between indulgence in the niceties of global commodity chains and the structural violence experienced as persistent hunger by the field workers and their children and families.

There is a saying in South Texas that keeps popping into my head, like an unwanted musical tune that keeps repeating: "In the Valley, grasshoppers eat better than farm workers."

I am faced with a desire to explain how such an inhuman and marginalized condition can be allowed to exist.

I ask: What does this all have to do with our unacknowledged complicity in a systemic problem? This is a deep structural problem and cannot be wished away by resorting to a given multitude of individual actions involving an appeal to so-called "green" (pro-environment) and "blue" (pro-labor) consumerism.

To be just and resilient, our food systems will have to break through such forms of complicity in all their banal forms including those posing the danger of succumbing to a "green" or "eco-friendly" version of globalized free market fundamentalism. The market is dead. Long live the "green" market!

Over the past three weeks since I first read the USDA report, I have been reviewing the theoretical literature on racism. This led me to re-read a book by one of my graduate school mentors, Dr. Joe Feagin. I studied with Professor Feagin at the University of Texas in the 1970s and early 80s. His book is entitled Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (2005). For a preview click here.

I wish to quote extensively from this book because it provides one of the clearest and most persuasive definitions of racism that allows me to explore how hunger and food injustice are systemically linked to a structure that maintains white privilege and perpetuates racial domination across the circuits of the food system.

This seems an especially urgent task today given the premature celebration, in the aftermath of President Obama's election, of our presumed transformation into a more just and harmonious "post-racial" society. Feagin:

I undertake a major effort in what might be termed "leukology"; that is, a focused study of the reproduction of white power and privilege in this society over several centuries...As I will demonstrate, systemic racism encompasses a broad range of racialized dimensions of this society: the racist framing, racist ideology, stereotyped attitudes, racist emotions, discriminatory habits and actions, and extensive racist institutions developed over centuries by whites.

The Leukology of Food Racism

I am fascinated by Feagin's use of the term "Leukology." Leukocytes are, of course, "white blood cells" and they play a major role in defending the human body from infectious agents.

To extend and further subvert the metaphor, I want to propose that we can examine the food system for evidence of structural processes and group practices that constitute a similar society-wide defense of the integrity of the system of white privilege as it pertains to that most essential of all human biological and social reproductive activities - food and nutrition.

The aforementioned USDA study was released durng the first week of November (2009), but two years earlier in December 2007, the National Council of La Raza issued a similar report on "hunger and food insecurity within the Latino community."

That report, Sin Provecho: Latinos and Food Insecurity, examined the effectiveness of food assistance programs in allaying hunger and food insecurity in the Latino community. It found that nearly 20 percent of Latina/os suffer from "limited or lack of access" to nutritious food each year, compared to 12 percent of all Americans.

The NCLR study was prescient but the problems of hunger and malnutrition in Latina/o and other communities of color is actually much, much worse than many of us imagined. And it was bad even before the current economic meltdown, the end of which is not yet in sight from the vantage of the poor who are not privy to the joys of the "jobless recovery" apparently benefitting the Wall Street Mandarins.

However, neither USDA or NCLR reports seek to explain the underlying causes of widespread and persistent hunger among Latina/o children and youth. What causes this apparent racialization of hunger?

One place to start is by recognizing that our foodways have been "colonized" several times over. After conquest, we were told to stop eating corn; that corn was the food of inferior races. Indeed, the Mexican cientifico, or positivist philosopher, Bulnes divided the world into the superior northern temperate "wheat-eating" races, inferior "corn-eaters" of arid and tropical zones, and the cowardly avaricious "rice-eaters" of the "Orient" [sic].

Anthropological research has long held that "we are what we eat." This is not just a cultural notion, it is an essential component of "biopower" - that is, the technologies and strategies for the production of particular types of subjects (meat-eaters, corn-eaters, vegans,whatever) as political projects of domination and/or resistance.

The destruction of heritage cuisines is in this way as much a biopolitical act of structural violence as any act of war like the passing of smallpox-infected blankets to freezing Indians [sic] by Amherst in 18th century North America.

We can clearly see in such acts the presence of racist framing, racist ideology, stereotyped attitudes, and racist emotions: "They were savages and needed to be cleared away to make room for the march of the superior civilization." "They were just wasting everything and not using nature and her resources for economic development and the creation of wealth." "They are lazy and cowardly and could not be assimilated." "We feared the dark interior and needed to sweep away the untamed wilderness and the beasts and savages that dwelt there."

Then we became "assimilated" and joined the Big Mac Super-Size me ranks of obedient fast food eaters. This colonization is killing our children and youth as alarming rates of childhood obesity and diabetes amply demonstrate.

If the reports had asked the question, it seems likely they too would have had to face the evidence and admit that our current globalized and commodified food system, dominated by a handful of transnational corporations, constitutes a fundamental form of environmental racism - the disproportionate experience of hunger, coupled with disparate access to healthy, local, place-based food sources, constitutes a form of structural violence that cannot be eliminated without taking on the structures that support white privilege.