Ecopathographies and Latinx Literature: Ecocritical Turns in Literature and Medicine and Medical/Health Humanities

In this project, I read Cherríe Moraga's acclaimed play Heroes and Saints as an ecopathography, a genre identified by Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, to illustrate how Latinx literary depictions of labor should be understood as creative, cultural, historical, and political enterprises rather than mere reports of farmwork sufferings. I suggest that the language of this subgenre classification ("eco" and "pathography") allows us to think simultaneously about ecologies and literature and health and debility-about the environmental humanities alongside the medical/health humanities. Informed by Rob Nixon's concept of slow violence and Thom Davies's slow observation as well as Stacy Alaimo's framework of trans-corporeality, this project joins scholars who seek to understand the experiences of environmental injustice among working-class Latinx people as well as learn from the embodied knowledge that Latinx populations have.