Ecofeminism and Chicano Environmental Struggles: Bridges across Gender and Race

The widespread and profoundly serious nature of environmental devastation means that ecological issues have great potential to bring people together across lines of race, class, and gender. My main focus in this chapter is on the interconnections, overlappings, disjunctions, and gaps between ecofeminist perspectives and Chicano environmental struggles. My interest in the Chicano environmental movement comes from networking with antimilitarist organizations in Texas and New Mexico and living and teaching in Colorado and the San Francisco Bay Area. I consider myself an insider with respect to ecofeminism; I want to be an ally to Chicano environmentalists. Here I explore common ground between ecofeminism and Chicano environmentalism to suggest what we can learn from each other. Neither ecofeminism nor Chicano environmentalism are unitary perspectives, of course, though I emphasize the points of comparison between then here, rather than their internal variations.