por vida // for life: an embodied geographic approach to environmental (in)justice through photo & sound
This paper has been written to accompany the 2024-2025 fieldwork for por vida. It reflects the research process for the project and inspirations that informed these documentations.
I remember being in my late teens when I first saw my father’s gardening skills on full display. The intensity of the stinging summer sun of el Valle was lessened by the sight of flowering tomato plants and massive, healthy calabasas, whose vines were wrapping around the backyard. I had no idea that he held this knowledge of plant life, of growing foods from beginning to end – from the hopeful, uncertain seed sowing to the harvesting and cooking of what rises from the dirt. Years later, it now seems obvious to me, given his background as a campesino, that he had amassed much knowledge about the seasons, the anatomy of food crops, and the cycles of the land. However, I cannot blame my younger self, given that the associations between Latinx life and the environment in the California San Joaquin Valley tend to be overwhelmingly negative, whether it’s coming from academics or from within our own communities. Stories of struggle, poisoning, and death are far more common than stories of rich family gardens.
My own paternal family’s experience is certainly entwined with the more difficult stories though as well. Since coming to the United States in the late 1990s from Guanajuato, Mexico, they have been no strangers to rough work conditions available to los inmigrantes in the California Central Valley, be it field work, factory work, or construction. And apart from work, there are always those conditions that follow us home: toxins on clothes that have been in the fields, contaminated groundwater, poor air quality that makes it hard to breathe freely, the list continues. Yet, even with these realities in tow, I’m drawn back to my dad’s garden because it demonstrates the persistence of our lives despite these conditions. We may be caught in the ecocides of racial capitalism, but we still look after our homes and each other in the ways that we can.¹
Such perspectives and strands, recognizing and honoring everyday life lived amidst unlivable conditions, are not privileged within environmental justice discourse. While trying hard to bring attention to and change environmental injustices, the field tends to privilege the two “louder” registers of death and spectacular activism in environmental justice communities, as scholar Tianna Bruno (2023) writes. Even outside of the academy, there is a tendency to emphasize blight over life. I’ve heard the Valley referred to as the armpit of California popularly and many Californians recognize it only as an in-between towards something that always lies further north or south. However, heeding the calls of Black, Latinx, and feminist geographers and artists, I seek to know the Central Valley differently through an understanding of Latinx life, livingness, joy, care, and sense of place.
To say and to desire this is not to discount the reality of death-dealing processes, eco degradation, and the red-dot-in-a-blue-state politics of el Valle. Despite being situated in one of the most climate-forward states in the US, the Valley faces bears some of the worst air quality in the nation and water contamination is reported regularly due to industrial processing and pesticide runoff, shaped by forces like longstanding corporate agriculture regimes, oil extraction & fracking, and goods transportation along the arteries of Interstate 5 and Highway 99 (Chandrasekaran 2021; Garoupa White 2016; Schwartz et. al 2014). Further, dominant political attitudes are not only apathetic to critique of polluting industries and deregulation, but also hostile.
Take the following article I came across in my research: “State reassures growers over recent activist recruitment efforts” (Fitchette 2021). It was written by FarmProgress, which seeks to support the growth and marketing of commercial agriculture, in light of grower anxiety over a citizen air-monitoring study being conducted by the University of California back in 2021.² During the work on this project between 2024 & 2025, Latinx communities across the Valley were also on edge following local ICE raids in the final weeks of a Democratic presidential administration and the fascist rhetoric under a second-term Trump administration (Uranga and Castillo 2025) Not only is there a question of precarity for undocumented Latinx workers and families in their ability to simply remain in place, but they must also operate again within a paradigm of overt anti-immigrant sentiment. The conditions are dire. And even so, we are still here, living, breathing, trying, dreaming, being. Living, breathing, trying, dreaming, being.
The question then becomes the best way to research this. All of this life being lived. How does one even begin to capture the immensity of it? For me, the answer is art. My inspiration lies in the poets, artists, and creatives who affirm that poetics are “a vital necessity of our existence”, as Audre Lorde (1984) once put it (32). The practice of creating art allows us to see the contours of life, relationships, and landscape. Creative fieldwork in particular, art that is created from the place you are studying, makes room for embodied listening and noticing, as well as encourages presence and the creation of a relationship to place, whether with the land you are walking on or with the people you meet along the way.
Thus, this project insists on not only a more humanized way of talking about Latinx spaces but also on an embodied methodology that rejects the colonial research tradition of objectivity. My own artistic background as a landscape photographer and student filmmaker has led me to combine the practice of photography and sound recording as methodologies to explore the different dimensions of my home in the southern Central Valley, Tulare County, California. The hope is that in proposing an embodied geographic approach, we can arrive at an understanding of environmental justice that transcends the view of the brown body as either activist or as biological entity permeable to toxins, and towards one that honors the brown body and everyday agency.³ This extended artist statement-research paper hybrid will walk through my theoretical approach, a geographic history of Tulare County through the study of Black & Indigenous landscapes, and my thoughts around using photo and sound.
Theorizing in Place: Searching for Life
This is a geographic project that borders on autoethnography and I very much situate my research practice within bell hooks’ paradigm of theory as liberatory practice. Theory as a space for healing that makes sense of lived realities and “a place [to] imagine possible futures, a place where life [can] be lived differently” (hooks 1991, 61). This is primarily because I come to this as someone who was born and raised in the southern Central Valley to poor working-class immigrant parents. Perhaps this is also why I am not as much interested in stopping at the acknowledgement of death-dealing processes and spectacular activism, if not in also highlighting how people survive and resist in their everyday lives, even if in the smallest of ways.
The decision to focus on Tulare County and to specifically entangle my family’s story feels important to discuss as well. Photography scholar Elizabeth Ferrer’s analysis of Latinx photographic production focused on family resonates here. Ferrer (2021) notes that “probing biography and family narratives becomes not so much an exercise in nostalgia as a means of reckoning, of confronting histories that can be painful or unresolved but also affirming and transformational" (119). For these reasons, I found the opportunity to interview, photograph, and sound record in and around places I grew up frequenting to be incredibly powerful. Paradoxically, creating this work has asked me to reckon with the ways I am also an outsider with respect to the landscape. For example, I am not a local of every community in Tulare County. In fact, I grew up primarily in Visalia, California, which I would deem an “agricultural suburb” and a profoundly different experience from nearby unincorporated and more thoroughly rural communities. I would also contend that once you hold a camera or a sound recorder, you become an outsider to some extent, as an artist and even more so as a researcher. This is then one challenge my practice presents me with—to navigate, and perhaps lean into, the tension of insider-outsider dynamics in order to listen and document well.
My search for ideas around Latinx life and livingness is also inspired by theorizations I have come across while studying at the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, namely those coming out of the field of Black geographies. Works such as those of Saidiya Hartman, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Clyde Woods have provided rich insights into the afterlives of slavery, the relations between race and space, and the power of institutions to shape everyday life. In addition, I am lucky to have been taught by scholars such as Dr. Tianna Marie Bruno, author of the paper “More than just dying: Black life and futurity in the face of state-sanctioned environmental racism”. Within this work, drawing on the work of Katherine McKittrick and other Black geographies scholars, Bruno problematizes the way environmental justice studies tend to relegate impacted communities to a biocentric understanding, on the terms of premature death and unlivable conditions. She quotes McKittrick, “a certain analytics of flesh (rather than humanity) is academic currency…I want to know black life differently” (Bruno 2024, 73). In sum, “Black geographies calls for us to be cautious of totalizing people, places, and landscapes to death, decay, and blight" (86).
This call brought me back to the writings being produced about Latinx communities in the context of gentrification in numerous of my urban geography courses. The most blaring example was discourse around the San Francisco Mission District, in which academics heavily emphasized the tech boom that caused speculative housing development and rampant displacement while less often referencing the continued survival of a Latinx immigrant community and cultural memory. While doing research around La Mision a couple of years ago, I heavily resonated with the argument articulated by scholar Leslie Kern, author of Feminist City and Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies, stating scholars must be cautious of condemning places as gone or their losses inevitable. In the context of por vida, making photographs and sound recordings of Latinx spaces in Tulare County insists that the Central Valley cannot be reduced to simply its environmental hazards.
This particular point is what can be read of the Valley through the lens of Latinx geographies. As Lorena Muñoz and Megan Ybarra co-write, Latinx geographies is a nourishing space for “scholars hungering for an attention to [the] agency of Latinx alongside recognition of the violence they face” (Muñoz & Ybarra 2019). They affirm that it provides a space where we can write from our experiences of everyday life. When looking at the foundations of the field, space for Latinx geographies has actually been pioneered by scholars studying the environment, such as Laura Pulido, who has written extensively about environmental racism and environmental justice in Los Angeles, the Central Valley, and the Southwest (Pulido 2017; Pulido 2000; Pulido 1996). Latinx geographies also has the exciting opportunity to draw on relational methodologies and alternative ways of knowing that stem from Latinx-Chicanx studies, such as testimonio, autoethnography, and queer of color critique (Muñoz & Ybarra 2019).
And as seen within my own experience of finding my way to Latinx geographies, there is much to be learned from Black geographies. As geographer Madeline Cahaus (2019) affirms, who puts the two in conversation, the former would not exist without the latter. Apart from the disciplinary work of Black geographers to make space for the formation of Latinx geographies, Cahaus also identifies the places in which a universal Latinx identity has obscured certain identities (including Black & Indigenous), as well as the role of anti-Blackness in shaping the borderlands & the logics that produce the struggles of today’s US Latinx communities (2019). To this, I would add the importance of addressing settler colonialism and the way today’s environmental injustices are shaped by the initial dispossession of land from native peoples. Such strands are brought into my photo and sound work at sites like Allensworth, a historical autonomous Black town established in 1908, and in my attention to waterways. These are also explored further in the section below, which frames the land-based struggles of the Yokuts people and Black histories of Tulare County.
The Land and Where It Sits
I wanted to very intentionally use this project as an opportunity to 1) center Tulare County, which is less often a focus of the San Joaquin Valley in comparison to, say, Kern County in EJ literature, and 2) to explore underlying Black & Indigenous histories of this contemporarily Latinx landscape. After all, it is what journalist Max Arax deems one of the most engineered landscapes in history, noting in an interview that the ‘human hand has altered [it] in a way that few places have been altered’ (Cotsirilos 2023). But how did it come to be? To the latter point, one of my primary interests in framing the place known as Tulare County was understanding how it has been shaped by the processes of colonization & capitalism. And further, to specifically understand how the contemporary landscapes of agriculture, environmental injustice, and Latinx labor that I am familiar with have been shaped by the appropriation of Indigenous lands and anti-Black logics.⁴ I believe these are key to decolonial environmental justice research and landscape art practices.
My key methods for exploring these histories were archival methods, primarily through photographs, and consulting secondary historical literature. Beginning with Indigenous landscapes of Tulare County, which is situated upon Yokuts land, We Are the Land: A History of Native California was a powerful resource as the authors Damon Akins and William Bauer contend with how industry and railroads profoundly altered the San Joaquin Valley, particularly in terms of water. During what is popularly known as the Gilded Age, beginning around the mid-1860s, “surveyors and engineers identified sites on Indian land to build dams for water storage for agricultural and increasingly urban use” (Akins & Bauer 2021, 178). By the 1870s, the once fecund wetlands of the Central Valley, the Tulare Lake, as well as its underground aquifers dried out (179). Scholars like Vivian Underhill have eloquently connected this conversation on water reclamation in the Valley to discussions on racial capitalism and feminist critiques of science. Underhill highlights how logics of contamination and private property, necessary for hydraulic projects, articulated racial formations of the ‘other’ & settler sovereignty claims, which legitimized extractive projects on Indigenous lands (Underhill 2022).
As fertile soils became turned over to the agriculture industry and ranchers, the Yokuts people lost not only access to the soil and water themselves but also the flora and fauna that functioned with them (Akins & Bauer 2021, 178). One case study of such flora lies in deergrass, a bunchgrass named for its ability to hide and protect fawns, though it also provided habitat for many other creatures in the Central Valley’s once perennial grasslands. Deergrass became stamped down and eaten by cattle, and was further impacted by the “[spread] of agriculture and exotic grasses, the damming of streams and rivers, and then suburban housing development,” as Kat Anderson (2005) notes in Tending the Wild (201-202). Also a critical plant used by Indigenous women for practices such as basketry, deergrass could no longer be gathered in sufficient quantities due to the compromise of its environmental conditions.
These changes normalized the landscapes of “ordered abundance” that I have seen come into view through my camera lens (see Fig. 1). This is an idea borrowed from photography scholar Richard Steven Street, which he uses to characterize early agricultural photography in the Central Valley, articulating the status quo of high agricultural productivity and uniformity (Street 2005, 11). Thus, these late 19th-century changes to waterways marked a shift from overt & genocidal settler violence to assaults on Indigenous ways of life in connection to water, land, and culture (Akins & Bauer 2021, 180). I believe there is a parallel between this dispossession and reordering (racial, social, and ecological) that Yokuts people experienced and the slow violence inflicted upon Latinx workers and residents today in the context of contamination. It is also important to recognize the continuance of Yokuts life despite the arrival of settler epistemologies in the 20th century. For example, despite attempts to displace them through homesteading and non-Indigenous settlement, Yokuts people continued to work the land, even while on reservations, entering the wage labor market as a way to resist dislocation (see Fig. 2; Akins & Bauer 2021, 167).
Learning this history helped me to politicize the strict order of Tulare County’s agricultural landscapes and build a sequence of photos that could pay homage to the previous presence of water, as well as the lifeways that were impacted by private irrigation and damming. Said simply, understanding these histories reminds me that what we see today in the Central Valley has not always been, a reading that fits in with Black geographic thought and a critical visual arts practice. To me, a foray into landscape history also opens up the possibility to imagine new futurities. It was not always this way and does not have to continue to be this way.
Next, I would like to give attention to the Black histories of Tulare County. Learning about Allensworth, a rural California town governed by Black people in the early 20th century, as a third-year undergraduate was a perspective-shifting experience. Though I had been taught about Latinx movements and histories of the Valley from my community of origin, I had to reckon with the fact that I knew little to nothing about the Valley as an important site of Black migration and place-making. In the early 1900s, the Valley became an important destination for Black folks looking to escape the racial violence of the Jim Crow South, though Black migration to the San Joaquin Valley has been documented back as early as the 1880s (Eissinger 2017, 49). Many sharecroppers migrated from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi, in part inspired by a movement to build autonomous planned Black communities, boosted by the African nationalist philosophy of figures like Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, and Booker T. Washington (49). What these Black histories reveal is that the struggles as agricultural workers, as unincorporated community members, and for the right to water are not unique to Latinx communities today. In fact, such environmental injustices have much deeper roots in anti-Black logics, which structured the space before the struggles of present-day Latinx communities.
Moreover, a Black presence in the Central Valley belies the predominant association of Blackness, as well as anti-Blackness, with the U.S. South. For example, the 1960s photographic archive of photographer Ernest Lowe portrays everyday Black Valley life at home and at work (see Fig. 3). However, scholars such as Michael Allan Eissinger (2017) have noted that photos such as Figure 3b are more easily associated with the American South than the Central Valley because of the historical erasure of Black labor and anti-Black racism in California (207). Eissinger critically notes that this obscures the historical connections between agribusiness in California and the plantation logics of the pre-Civil War South (207).
Drawing further on the work of Eissinger, studying predominantly Black spaces in Tulare County also demonstrates much about the racialized nature of water and municipal services. Two examples include Allensworth and the small town of Teviston. Allensworth was a planned Black community established by Lieutenant Colonel Allen Allensworth, a formerly enslaved person who became a Union soldier in the U.S. Civil War, in 1908 (Sarah 2022). Life in Allensworth was characterized by struggles to deal with highly alkaline soil, an insufficient water supply, little access to electricity, and lack of railroad access (Eissinger 2017, 59). These, in combination, led its population to decline to 44 by 1930 (59-60). These causes of its decline were mediated by capitalist development. For example, the low domestic water supply was due to neglect by the developer, who had promised wells and a community water system, ultimately doing this only to attract settlers for profit (57). Further, a major economic blow came to Allensworth when a spur line was added to the Santa Fe Railroad around 1914, bypassing the town to instead bring commerce to the nearby historically all-white town of Alpaugh (59).
Not so different goes the story of the small town of Teviston just outside Pixley, CA, which today has a population of just over 1200 mostly Latinx residents. Teviston was once a rural community of Black farmworkers, which did not have access to a water well until 1959, and even then water still had to be distributed laboriously to individual residents (see Fig. 4; 132). Despite canals running through their land, they were also excluded from the nearby Pixley Irrigation District, lacking any access to agricultural water (72). In the cases of both towns, capitalist development and the failure of the state to provide adequate infrastructure precluded the possibility of creating liveable communities. These Black struggles for water rights and support from the state would echo what the Yokuts people had experienced. They would also foreshadow the contemporary conditions of neglect that Latinx communities face in terms of dominating agricultural business interests and the state’s handling of pesticides, nitrates, and hydrocarbons that plague the water and soils currently (Underhill 2022).
In the end, I chose to privilege these Black & Indigenous histories in my search for a Latinx geographies praxis. In their work on the subject, Lorena Muñoz & Megan Ybarra cite scholar Laura Pulido perfectly: a Latinx geographies approach recognizes the layers of landscape, moving us “beyond a singular identity politics and toward solidarity across ‘black, brown, and yellow’ communities”, while recognizing difference between communities and even within the label “Latinx” (Muñoz & Ybarra 2019).⁵ By taking this layered landscape approach, we can begin the process of transcending perspectives of the Valley as a stagnant right-leaning conservative space or as a space only marked ethnically by the migration of people from Latin America. Instead, it is a space that has been profoundly shaped by Indigenous stewards and Black workers, as well as colonialism and anti-Black racism that have both created the foundations for contemporary environmental injustices. Finally, I invite us to look at this history as not limited to the past but as part of what the Valley could be in terms of alternative land care futures and BIPOC solidarities, recognizing the ways in which we know our struggles to be intertwined.
Finally, after discussing my theoretical approach and the historical underpinnings I engaged, I find it fitting to finish this piece by engaging the questions: Why art? How does one approach the landscape in this way, and what are the precedents? What value do the forms of photography and sound recording bring to the conversation on environmental justice? To begin to answer these, I will lean on an essay that has impacted my art practice deeply. Within “Poetry is Not a Luxury” by Audre Lorde, she asserts that poetry, which I have come to view as applicable to poetics and artistic creation more generally, is not an afterthought to liberatory futures, struggles, or study. Lorde (1984) states very clearly, “It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language then into idea, then into more tangible action” (32). Art helps us to see and to feel, and therefore, to exist within and resist systems that would prefer we do neither. Importantly, she also challenges an intellectualism that doesn’t move anyone or any struggle forward.
Artists who engage with the academy or who, like me, use the resources at hand to grow their technical art skills within the academy, are no strangers to academia’s steadfast clinging to the written word. But Lorde heeds us to be wary of always intellectualizing, of falling into the trap of the white fathers: “The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free” (33). Some things cannot be written and then read in a paper alone. Some things must be lived and created. “For there are no new ideas,” as Lorde said in the late 1970s, “There are only new ways of making them felt” (33). This epistemology has been one of the greatest forces behind my motivation to create this documentary arts project, as well as the prospect of creating something that can be more easily shared with the communities I am documenting. For this project, I chose to keep photo and sound as separate projects rather than together in film or other simultaneous audio-visual form in order to let the richness of both resonate. Below, I will expand on the two media I employ in vignettes, noting some of my personal thought processes around both and my cross-disciplinary inspirations for this work.
Notes on Photography
- While it can be tempting to see photography as an “objective” way of capturing a moment or place, using light to stop time, it is anything but. As audiovisual artists and racial geographies scholar Nathaniel Télémaque notes, the 19th-century rise of the photograph, around the same time as the rise of geography as a discipline, was widely used as a tool to objectify the Other (Télémaque 2024, 17). Within the history of landscape photography, representations of land devoid of humans have deemphasized the relationships between people and place. For example, in the context of the Central Valley, photographer and historian Richard Steven Street writes that early agricultural photographs, which were predominantly taken by studios seeking to boost industry, notably left agricultural workers out of frame (Street 2005, 11). Thus, photography is always imbued with particular intentions, logics, and configurations of social relations. What is present in a photo also speaks as much as what is absent.
- In thinking about capturing a sense of the everyday in the Central Valley and Tulare County, I found inspiration in the work of photographer Ernest Lowe. There is much intense and oftentimes painful imagery about the Central Valley in the photographic archive, as noted by Richard Steven Street (2005, 8). Because of this, Lowe’s landscape and especially portraiture work stands out in the archive for being deeply personal and candid. Working throughout the 1960s, his work was inspired by earlier social documentarians such as Dorothea Lange. Images of his documenting field workers and Black life in Tulare County have been included earlier in this essay (see Figs. 3, 4, and 5b). With this project, I hope to similarly contribute to an archive of photos that are critical towards environmental and social conditions, while also prioritizing the humanity of the people and places on the other side of the camera.
- It is exciting to see a visual ethnographic approach that I can contribute to within the field of geography. For example, Nathaniel Télémaque’s (2024) work. Working out of White City, West London, Télémaque created the practice-related research project “Everyday Things” and has written about it. Alluding to the work of Tina Campt, Black visual scholar and author of Listening to Images, Télémaque prioritizes creating work that is confrontational and affirmative (8). My work follows his lead of looking to archives to understand what has and has not been represented about a place, something that I believe enriches a photographic practice. “Everyday Things” is also attuned to Black kinship and joy, emphasizing not a universalist sense of happiness, if not a deeper visualization of what Black life looks like despite the colonial and anti-Black logics at play (19). In the Central Valley and Latinx geographies context, I find Télémaque’s work to be an invitation to confront environmental and poor rural conditions while honoring the persistence of everyday Latinx life and culture.
Notes on Sound
- Sound is a medium that por vida allowed me to delve into further, compared to photography, which I have spent more time learning formally. However, I was bringing in experience of sound recording from my first short film INTERLOCUTORS, in which I used sound to portray the ambience of place, as well as the personal connections of land stewards to place through oral interviews. Despite its novelty to me, employing sound to create something where the visual did not dominate seemed like a worthy challenge.
- I was further drawn to sound when reading Dr. Tianna Bruno’s (2024) work on Black life in the face of state-sanctioned environmental racism, as she too connected with Tina Campt’s work: ‘through listening for lower frequencies we might capture the quieter, oft overlooked notes of refusal’ (81). While speaking to photography, Campt’s words and use of “frequencies” immediately made me think of sound and its potential to listen closely to what has been quieted and quite literally across sound registers. This allowed me to bridge connections across environmental racism, the concepts of survival and refusal, and sound.
- Apart from the practice of listening, sound recording also asks for an embodied responsiveness to place and what you are recording. For example, my approach to this project included both soundwalking, the practice of walking with a handheld recorder and which often captures the feeling of movement through space, as well as static recording. During moments such as when I spoke to my father about his gardening practice in the backyard, it felt natural to move about the space with him as he narrated. At other times, such as when listening to a tree brush in the wind at Allensworth, quietness was needed to capture the fullness of such a hushed sound. So my crew and I found stillness as we let the recorder roll.
- I find sound to be a form that has much possibility as a liberatory research method, building upon the tradition of Latinx-Chicanx methodologies, mentioned earlier in this paper. Within feminist Latinx-Chicanx studies, there is a tradition of nuevas teorias, which seek to introduce new, insurgent forms of knowledge production that honor alternative ways of knowing and Latinx community knowledge (Gaxiola Serrano 2023, 1645). Existing methodologies, such as testimonio and emerging ones such as walking pláticas, coined by scholar Tanya Gaxiola Serrano, have come to emphasize the value of memory, the body, and lived experiences. Following this tradition and in alignment with Lorde’s idea of poetry as essential, por vida seeks to emphasize knowledge about the Central Valley that is lived and felt. And similarly to these methodologies, it seeks to challenge objectivity, meet the political urgency of environmental justice challenges, and foster reciprocity in the places where the research is being conducted (Gaxiola Serrano 2023, 1649).
- To even further connect with Latinx intellectual thought and the borderlands, I thought much about Anzaldúa as I listened back to my recordings, which captured my own dialect of Spanglish, as well as code-switching from those I was recording between English and Spanish. In her landmark essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, Gloria Anzaldúa begs the question: "for a people who cannot directly identify with either standard (formal, Castilian) Spanish nor standard English, what resource is left to them but to create their own language?" (Anzaldúa 1987). She posits the liminality of a Spanish-English dialect as a form of world-building. Sound recording is then able to capture a sense of Latinx spatialization and diaspora that is unique to language.
In the end, while I have much to explore within the realms of photography and sound, what is apparent is their strong potential to animate research about a Latinx sense of place and place-making, privileging lived experiences and embodied practice over “objectivity”.
Conclusion: An Ode to Life
It’s true that there is no shortage of environmental injustices in my home region of the South Central Valley, and no one should doubt the deep-seated power of colonial legacies, conservatism, and private interests to shape asymmetrical outcomes. But what this paper has sought to argue is that these are not the only things that constitute place. And further, that photography and sound have the exciting potential as embodied methodologies to understand Latinx life, livingness, joy, care, and sense of place. For, as Dr. Tianna Bruno (2024) notes, even if overlooked conventionally, “There is a refusal exerted, even within the confines of oppression and limited resources, to have a life without dignity and futurity” (82). This project, por vida // for life, honors this.
Within this essay, I have articulated my theoretical approach, which is grounded in Latinx geographies, to center Latinx place-making and world-building. It is also deeply inspired by a Black geographies approach to reading life in new registers outside of death and activism. I have also outlined brief histories of Tulare County’s Black & Indigenous landscapes, which I read about in order to make sense of what and whose land I was walking upon, as well as what I was photographing and recording. These layered histories track the dispossession of land from the Yokuts, the original stewards of Tulare County, as well as Black migration to the area, revealing how colonial and anti-Black logics laid the foundations for present-day environmental injustices faced by Latinx communities. Finally, I offer short notes on the possibilities, as well as tensions, within the forms of photo and sound. My photographic interests lie in confronting environmental and social conditions while humanizing landscapes. Meanwhile, my sound interests are in picking up on what has been silenced and overlooked, as well as making connections with existing Latinx-Chicanx methodologies of embodiment.
Through this research, reflection, and my accompanying fieldwork, I have sought to create an ode to the life lived despite environmental racism, state neglect, and powerful corporate-industrial interests. I created this work not as a means to fill research gaps or collect data but instead, inspired by others seeking to create a decolonial audio-visual practice (Télémaque 2024; smith 2024), to create a practice of loving place, and of making visible what has been rendered invisible. Following the lead of Black feminist theorists such as bell hooks, I embrace the idea of being a theorist of your own lived experiences and of creating new methods around these shapes (hooks 1991). With the possibilities of doing a much more technical analysis of the 2024-2025 photo and sound pieces, as well as future fieldwork and reading, this is a practice I intend to continue and to keep sharing.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the folks from the Valley who allowed me to document their stories and places, including my father Ignacio Canchola, Tere from Pixley, and Miguel from Delano. Thank you to Tianna Bruno for being a kind, rigorous scholar and mentor. Thank you Joel for your care in teaching students documentary arts and for driving all the way down to the Valley. Thank you to Alondra and Jim, my undergraduate fieldwork crewmates and amazing friends. Thank you Clara for the generous review and feedback on drafts of this paper.
- I borrow the idea of the “ecocides of racial capitalism” from scholar Katherine McKittrick, who suggested using this phrase instead of “climate change” in a Twitter post in 2016 (@demonicground, December 1, 2016).
- In just about 600 words, I found that this article demonstrates the way in which an environmental injustice plays out (from a non critical but still revealing perspective). Corporate producers (in this case, growers who administer pesticides) work to preserve their bottom line and thus the status quo of capital accumulation, while local authorities state acts in alignment. This is all justified through the argument of private property, as well asserted with state power (in this case with deference to law enforcement).
- My use of the phrase “honoring the brown body and agency” is inspired by the work of Tanya Gaxiola Serrano, a Latina scholar who uses geographic methodologies for educational research, in which she embraces an idea of centering “the brown body and facultad”. See Gaxiola Serrano 2023.
- Within environmental justice literature, scholars have endeavored to explore these deeper roots of colonization and capitalism as fundamental to environmental justice. See Pulido 2017. However, the state has also increasingly adopted the language of environmental justice, seen within federal EJ grants & new EPA positions created under the Biden administration. Because of this, there is a political tendency to liberalize environmental justice and discount the role of the state in shaping the very injustices they seek to remedy. This is one reason I found it important to explore the strands of Black & Indigenous histories and dispossession.
- It is important to address that within this paper, I have not explored the strand of Asian American histories of dispossession and place-making in the Central Valley, from Japanese Americans who were incarcerated on Tulare County’s fairgrounds during the internment period of the 1940s to Filipino farmers who helped make 1960s Central Valley grape boycotts possible.
References
Akins, Damon B. and William J. Bauer. “Native Spaces: Ukiah.” 2021. In We Are the Land: A History of Native California. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520976887.
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