Communicating a “New” Environmental Vernacular: A Sense of Relations-in-Place

Abstract

This study focuses on communication as a lens and tool for reinvigorating and empowering marginalized cultural environmental relations. We use a community-based cultural approach to identify a core Hispanic premise of a sense of relations-in-place. This premise constitutes nature as a socially integrated space that provides the grounding for human relations, and differs from dominant Western discourses that constitute nature as an entity separate from humans. The study's interpretation of a more integrated orientation to environment has the potential to inform wider alternative ecocultural discourses and applications that are more inclusive, and perhaps more sustainable.

Keywords:

• Environmental Communication
• Ecocultural Premise
• Resolana
• Relations-in-Place
• Sense of Self-in-Place
• Nature–Culture Binary
• Environmental Meanings
• Hispanic
• Latino/a
• Chicano/a
• New Mexico
• US Southwest

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Michelle Otero (The Wilderness Society), Javier Benavidez (Conservation Voters of New Mexico), Henry Rael (Arts de Aztlan), Jacobo Martinez (UNM Resource Center for Raza Planning), and our extended research team, Iliana De Larkin, Lissa Knudsen, Sara McKinnon, Antonio Sandoval, Genesis Hernandez, George Rincon, and Ana Luisa Aldrete

Notes

1. Aranda read his poem at the kick-off event for Connecting Community Voices, a nonprofit organization that emerged out of this study's collaboration. The event in Albuquerque's South Valley included local food, art, music, and spoken word addressing area ecocultural themes.

2. While there are various signifiers in the United States, including but not limited to Mexican/Mexicano, Mexican American, Spanish American, Chicano/a, and Latino/a, in this paper we use Hispanic based on study participant preference and overall usage. The term Hispano/Hispanic is widely used in New Mexico and other parts of Spanish colonized territories in the US (Acuña, 2008) and the signifier recognizes the unique historical contextualization of these populations. We are mindful of differences in ethnic self-identifying labels and that the very words to describe Hispanic cultures can carry numerous meanings and ideological implications. Latino/a, considered a more politically conscious label, has been adopted as the preferred panethnic label and refers more exclusively to persons of Latin American origin (Rinderle, 2005). Scholars like Oboler (1995) challenge the amalgamation of Spanish speakers under the umbrella term Hispanic and problematize political implications of the terminology and its origin as a state-imposed identity label.

3. In this paper, we avoid the practice of italicizing Spanish words in an effort to represent and reflect the integrated, unmarked use of Spanish terms and phrases by participants in their largely English-language communication. For reader comprehension, we include translation for Spanish words and phrases that may not be commonly known by non-Spanish speakers.

4. Researchers have since used these measures to identify value profiles in a number of other cultural groups in an attempt to understand cultural differences and similarities in human experience. Researchers like Hofstede (1980, 2001) and Rokeach (1979) have also labeled other universal value orientations. These theories require several fundamental beliefs including the belief in the existence of basic human values that are measureable, concrete, and universal. Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck's (1961) large values study has been the target of a great deal of criticism over the years, as well as reflective critique from the lead researchers themselves. Many individuals were involved and often had their own agendas, questions, and projects they were pursuing. Many lived in the communities they were studying and their presence had an obvious impact eventually leading the Zuni pueblo to stop allowing research in their community. Ultimately, at least 69 publications have resulted from the values project, not including 17 graduate student dissertations and theses (Powers, 2000, p. 25).

5. This study was limited by age range of volunteer participants, none of whom were under the age of 36. Future research should explore whether similar or different ecocultural premises inform young Hispanic New Mexicans. If the first author's current undergraduate students are any indication, some intergenerational continuity in the ecocultural premise of relations-in-place exists. Young urban Hispanic students speak warmly of outdoor family and community gatherings, such as mantanzas, annual events around pig roasts. Students who grew up on farms or ranches emphasize connections between food and community, of raising, slaughtering, growing, and eating food together on the land. These same students, mostly in their early 20s, already speak of mourning the loss of outdoor spaces in which they used to gather with neighbors or family.

6. Readers who saw or read John Nichols' (1974) Milagro Beanfield War will have initial familiarity with acequia water struggles. For more background on acequias as forms of ecocultural relations-in-place, see Lamadrid and Arellano (2008), Rivera (1998), and Rodriguez (2006).

7. Many early Spanish settlers were conversos, also called crypto-Jews or anusim. These were Jews trying to get as far away from the Inquisition as possible via the geographic movement of colonization to practice their faith, though still in secret by necessity. This history created a particular sense of relations-in-place in New Mexico, one of the farthest outposts of Spanish colonization and a place where many conversos settled. Relatedly, our participant who identified as Jewish pointed out her ancestors were among the original area Spanish settlers.

8. On the international scale, for instance, one possibly comparative culture could be found in Fitch's (1998) study of Columbia, in which she argues the fundamental unit of human existence is vínculo (bonds), forefronted in an ideology of connectedness embodied in the phrase “una persona es un conjunto de vínculos” (a person is a set of bonds to others), bonds among humans, between a family and its home, and between a human and her/his homeland.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tema Milstein

Tema Milstein, an Assistant Professor in University of New Mexico's Department of Communication and Journalism, focuses on the intersections of ecological sustainability, culture, and communication

Claudia Anguiano

Claudia Anguiano, a Lecturer for the Institute of Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth College, focuses on the communication and cultural aspects of activism in rights-based social movements

Jennifer Sandoval

Jennifer Sandoval, an Assistant Professor in University of Central Florida's Nicholson School of Communication, focuses on the communication of identity, agency, and culture present in the female body and in policy that regulates it

Yea-Wen Chen

Yea-Wen Chen, an Assistant Professor in Ohio University's School of Communication Studies, focuses on the intersections of culture, communication, relationship building, and social justice

Elizabeth Dickinson

Elizabeth Dickinson, an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at Salem College, focuses on culture and environmental communication