Campesinos, Environmental Racism, and Ecotheatre: Toward an Inclusive Environmental Education Through BIPOC Storytelling

Abstract

Environmental education in historically White schools of education has typically emphasized science, outdoor, or STEM education rather than environmental racism, environmental (in)justice, or the environmental justice movement. This focus often deemphasizes the role of structural injustice and state-sanctioned violence in environmental issues as well as BIPOC peoples’ environmental activism, thus contributing to the erasure of the long history of BIPOC environmentalisms (D. Taylor, 2009; 2016; Wald et al., 2019). Scholars, however, have begun to address this omission (Haluza-DeLay, 2013). This dissertation contributes to this discussion and extends it by theorizing and presenting a BIPOC storytelling approach for teaching the difficult and traumatic history of environmental racism in the U.S. (Bullard et al., 2008). By examining BIPOC storytelling, specifically campesino ecotheatre—El Teatro Campesino’s Vietnam Campesino (1970) and Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1994)—as literary case studies (Tiedt, 1992), this dissertation makes visible BIPOC environmentalisms, particularly the environmentalism of the poor. Unlike mainstream environmentalism, the environmentalism of the poor addresses structural injustice and state-sanctioned violence resulting in environmental degradation, adverse health effects, and social inequities in historically marginalized communities often conceptualized as sacrifice zones (Bullard, 2000; Guha & Martinez-Alier, 1997). These dangerously polluted spaces compromise the health and well-being of residents, especially BIPOC children, and interconnect in significant ways with more recent environmental struggles, including climate change. Thus, this work posits that engaging with BIPOC cultural productions representing environmental struggles can help increase awareness of lifeworlds and environmental themes and concepts not fully explored in the science or social science literature.