My Dissertation
A/Effective Pollutants: Queer Geographies of Environmental Justice in Southeast Los Angeles
A/Effective Pollutants traces the relationships between queerness and ecological violence through the lives of queer Latinx youth and the Environmental Justice movement in the working-class Latinx industrial enclave of Southeast Los Angeles. By drawing upon this relationship, this dissertation joins scholarship in Ethnic studies, Queer studies and Environmental Humanities to unravel a complexity in environmental justice movements and scholarship, one that specifically highlights the ways the movement has been co-opted through the state and as such must encompass a full analysis of racial capitalism. This projects further offers a different framework for environmental justice by describing the ways queer Latinx youth in Southeast Los Angeles have used the remnants of racial capitalism’s ecological disasters to find glimpses of the future that environmental justice demands. I offer a multi sensorial mode of reading film, art, sound and space which tells us about the affective relationships between youth and spaces such as abandoned train tracks and industrial warehouses and how they have been used as sites where Latinx youth sense glimpses of freedom through warehouse parties, spaces for sexual exploration and other forms of coming into one’s identity. I center the affective uses of space through movement across various spaces, the smells of toxic chemicals, and the blaring sounds of music through the walls of abandoned industrial warehouses. Simultaneously, this project describes the ways queer Latinx youth interrogate environmental justice and help us understand new possibilities within geographies of ecological violence.
Chapter 1
Geographies of Odor: (Un)mapping the Fluidity of Racialized Queer Excess
A multi sensory mapping of Southeast Los Angeles that describes the ways queer youth navigate the fluid geographies of industrial space. By reading through examples such as Mosquita y Mari (2012) and mapping projects like Queering the Map, this chapter unearths a toxic entanglement in the midst of the disasters of racial capitalism. I propose geographies of odor as a mode through which we read beyond the limits of legality toward a disruptive trespassing practice of space.
Chapter 2
Fighting for Life: Queer Youth Resistance and an Environmental Afterlife
Through a series of interviews and archival research, this chapter focuses on the ways queer youth choose to become involved in environmental justice organizing. My conversation in this chapter is framed by understanding how queer identities have shaped, ruptured and created new understandings of organizing in the community and how notions of ecological violence are reframed toward new possibilities of what I call, an environmental afterlife.
Chapter 3
Moving Mountains: Familiar Failure and the Ecology of Queer Latinx Kinship
This chapter employs historical methods to uncover how U.S. imperialism was foundational to environmental degradation by promoting notions of white heterosexual nuclear family and the importance of industrial labor. I juxtapose this history by proposing that Latinx families in the early ‘90s created different notions of what family meant and queer kinship networks further contributed to a new way of understanding questions of relationality.
Chapter 4
On the Impossibility of Environmental Justice
This chapter argues that the concept of environmental justice, which is grounded in communities free from any form of ecological violence is inherently an impossibility. In other words, because environmental justice is rendered under the concept of justice--a category of the state relying on a colonial temporality and predicated on the death and exclusion of Black people, the framework, as I argue is a deadly negotiation. By reviewing case studies through non-profits and state agencies I offer a queer and abolotionist analysis toward a worldview through which we may have the opportunity to find different proximities toward freedom.