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Join us via Zoom on Wednesday, June 1st!

Affirming Abundance: Mexican American Culture, Abolition, and #LandBack

In this lecture, Ybarra will reflect on the idea of wilderness and environmentalism for Mexican Americans. Ybarra’s new practice of birdwatching precipitates a question. Whereas in her scholarship and teaching she argues that Mexican Americans do not identify with conventional environmentalism or the idea of wilderness, how can she understand her new practice of paying attention to birds?

In other words, what lessons emerge from contextualizing within the broader structures of coloniality and capital the Mexican American knowledge and practices that can be too narrowly defined as “environmental?” This essay affirms abundance in ways that resonate with the values of abolition feminism and in critical coalition with Indigenous land restoration as accountability for colonial violence, making a case for #LandBack instead of wilderness.

About Dr Ybarra

Priscilla Solis Ybarra is a writer and Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Texas. Her publications include Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment (University of Arizona, 2016) and co-editor of Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial (Temple University Press, 2019). For 2021-2022, she is Clements Senior Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America at Southern Methodist University. She is also one of the 20 individuals selected for the inaugural class of the Rethink Outside Fellowship, which elevates and supports leaders and storytellers who transform the outdoor equity narrative. She and her mother Maria Higinia feed the wild birds and the squirrels at their home in Denton, and her partner Chas and their dog Numpa split their time between Denton and Whitehorse, South Dakota. You can find some of her bird photography via #ChicanaBirder.

The June Chapter meeting:

Date: Wednesday, June 1, 2022

Schedule:
6:30 Camera Roll
7:00 Introduction and Announcements
7:20 Featured Presentation
8:45 Adjournment