Until recently, mainstream American environmentalism has been a predominantly white, middle-class movement, essentially ignoring the class, race, and gender dimensions of environmental politics. In this provocative collection of original essays, the environmental dimensions of the Chicana/o experience are explicitly expressed and debated. Employing a variety of genres ranging from poetry to autobiography to theoretical and empirical essays, the voices in this collection speak to the most significant issues of environmentalism and social justice, recognizing throughout the need for a...

Mexican Americans have traditionally had a strong land ethic, believing that humans must respect la tierra because it is the source of la vida. As modern market forces exploit the earth, communities struggle to control their own ecological futures, and several studies have recorded that Mexican Americans are more impacted by environmental injustices than are other national-origin groups. In our countryside, agricultural workers are poisoned by pesticides, while farmers have lost ancestral lands to expropriation. And in our polluted inner cities, toxic wastes sicken...

Born of more than ten years of field research, this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary work explores the complex intersections of technology, class, gender, and ecology in the transnational milieu of Mexico's maquiladoras, foreign-owned assembly plants located along the United States border. Using a full palette including survey research, oral history, discourse analysis, and site ethnography, the author delineates the "dialectics of domination and resistance in the maquilas," and develops a telling critique of labor-process theory-a critique grounded on his extensive study of actual workplace...