10 One and the Same: Examining the Shared Histories of Exploitation Between Racialized Women and Land

Dani(ella) (Her)nandez-Garcia

PO GWS 180.1: Queer Feminist Theories

Professor Esther Hernandez-Medina

December 15, 2023

Introduction: An Undeniable Interconnection

Cancer is an entity that has been ever-present in my life. It took both of my maternal grandparents when I was really young, almost took two of my tias, and affected countless others in my extended family. But even despite it impacting the livelihood of so many of my loved ones, I didn’t fear it until the person affected became my mom.

I was in the 8th grade when she told me about her breast cancer diagnosis. I remember she had just come back from the doctor and, up until that point, had not disclosed the reason for her visit. She sat me down in my grandma’s living room and told me the news. My ears immediately began to ring, and a lump simultaneously formed in my throat. Everything after that was somewhat of a blur; however, I do recall her treatment starting shortly after. All her hair had fallen out from the chemo before I even finished middle school, and by the fall, when I entered high school, she weighed less than me.

It has been almost 4 years since my mom entered remission, and she still rarely divulges details of her treatment to me. Maybe it hurts her too much to share, or maybe she thinks she is protecting me by not telling me. Nevertheless, there are parts of this story that I myself witnessed and cannot forget, one of which is the way that the chemo made her veins shrink, sometimes to the point that the nurses couldn’t find them. This was the point in my life when I developed my fear of needles. Despite this intense anxiety, I ultimately decided to get the BRCA gene test to determine the cause of my mom’s cancer, upon her and her doctor’s request. They wanted to know whether it was genetic and better understand the likelihood of my sister and I also being diagnosed with breast cancer in the future. After about three weeks of waiting, the results came in. Over the phone, we were told that my mom’s cancer was environmentally caused.

Up until last year, I did not fully comprehend the meaning of my blood results. It was not until I did my final EA020 project on contaminated landscapes and honed in on Southeast Los Angeles (SELA)—the area that I grew up in—that I realized that prolonged exposure to the carcinogenic material present in our hometown was most likely the culprit for my mom’s cancer. Reading extensive research journals on Exide Technologies—a lead battery recycling facility in SELA that recently shut down—and the negative effects that the air pollution from the nearby 710 freeway—one of the most popular heavy-duty diesel truck freeways in Los Angeles County—has on fellow residents allowed me to internalize the following notion: humans and their respective environments are undeniably interconnected. It is impossible to separate the land and all of its inanimate systems from the people who call it home.

In this essay, I will use the feminist methods of cuerpo territorio (“body territory”) and ecofeminism, which both display the connections that bodies have to physical spaces, to analyze the interactions that Indigenous women in the Americas and Chicanas in East Los Angeles have with the land they live on. Through the lenses of both methods, which examine the reciprocal relationships between women and land, I hope to illustrate how the portrayal of certain subjects as feminine justifies their exploitation and colonization. Simultaneously, I examine how racialized women view themselves as parallel entities to and intimately connected to their physical environments.

Literature Review: Femininity = Inferiority; Inferiority = Exploitability 

Amitav Ghosh is a novelist who wrote The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis during the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this book, he argues that current geopolitics are intrinsically tied to the centuries-long histories of European imperialism and colonial powers in the Americas and Asia, which, according to scholar Andrea Smith in the piece “Queer Theory and Native Studies,” were justified through European colonizers’ dehumanizing caricaturizations of Indigenous peoples (Smith, 2010, 48). ^[1] Although Ghosh supports his claims by recollecting numerous historical events, it is evident that he is especially interested in examining the social and physical implications of terraforming—or manipulating the land so that it resembles European landscapes—in the Americas. He deeply considers the relationship between Indigenous peoples in the Americas and European manipulation of the earth in his explanation of terraforming: “To remake immense stretches of terrain to suit the lifestyles of another continent inevitably entailed the undermining and elimination of the ways of life of those who had inhabited those lands for many thousands of years. The project of terraforming was… of itself a mode of warfare” (Ghosh, 2021, 55). His description of terraforming illustrates just how detrimental the introduction of European ways of relating to land was to Indigenous livelihoods and original ecological and social orders. This part of his book also perfectly segues to a concept he somewhat hints at later on—traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), which was popularized by Indigenous Professor of Ecology Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Both Ghosh and Kimmerer describe TEK as a framework that positions Indigenous peoples as inextricably connected to their native environments and their non-human entities (i.e., native animals, forests, rivers, etc.) (Kimmerer, 2018, 35). Indigenous feminist scholar Luhui Whitebear, without explicitly attributing to TEK in her article “Disrupting Systems of Oppression by Re-centering Indigenous Feminisms” also alludes to this concept. She states that Indigenous communities have historically viewed land as an ancestor or elder—an entity that not only holds inherent value but should be respected (Whitebear, 2020, 3). Ghosh explains that although European colonizers did not refer to the term TEK during the commencement of their settler coloniality, colonization, and imperialism, he claims that they were extremely aware of the idea that humans and the land could be so intimately linked. Acknowledging the existence of this human-land relationship is what allowed European colonizers to understand that control of “resources” present on American land was contingent on the eradication of its original stewards (Ghosh, 2021, 56). ^[2] European colonizers often targeted the very lifestyles and food systems that Indigenous peoples worked in tandem with to gradually obtain ownership of American soil. A fitting example of this is the mass slaughter of buffalo by the United States Army during the late 1880s, which was committed to gaining control over the North American great plains and the Indigenous peoples who were native to them, who not only relied on buffalo as a food source but also as a product of commerce (Smits, 1994, 315).

Although frameworks like TEK do an excellent job at displaying the relationship between land and human beings more broadly, they oftentimes do not explicitly identify the parallelism between women, especially historically marginalized women like those who are Indigenous or racialized, and their environments. It is essential to analyze the connection between these two subjects to recognize their similar histories of exploitation due to their presumed yet conditional femininity. The methods and frameworks that will assist me later on in further supporting my claims are cuerpo territorio (“body territory”) and ecofeminism, which both exemplify this connection. However, for this section of the essay, I will give examples of how those links—or similarities between women and land—were made explicit via the effects of European coloniality and imperialism.

For centuries, the land in the West has been referred to as a woman, a mother, or described with feminine attributes. Although there are a lot of reasons that scholars hypothesize this to be the case, most agree that it is due to the influences of European male exploration in the Americas and the enforcement of Christian beliefs during European colonization of Indigenous peoples. Alan Watts, in his book Nature, Man and Woman: A New Approach to the Sexual Experience, describes the specific implications that these events had on both the meanings of nature and women in Western society: “In the Christian and Post-Christian West, we simply find ourselves in a culture where nature is called Mother Nature, where God is exclusively male, and where one of the common meanings of Woman… with the capital W is simply sex” (Watts, 2012, 132). In this quote, we see that both the land and women share a commonality—the gender that they are often referred to or characterized as. If the land is truly woman, and the only importance of women in the Christian West is sex (or, in other words, exploitation), then the only significance of land, like women, is also exploitation. This quote essentially allows us to see the following: in Western Christian society, land, and women, alike, are seen as “resources” that are there for the taking whenever it is beneficial to the dominant power.

The notion that women, specifically Indigenous and racialized women, could be viewed exclusively as objects to be taken advantage of is especially important to consider for two reasons: the first being that the ultimate goals of European settler coloniality, colonization, and imperialism were not just to kill off Indigenous peoples to gain control of their land and its “resources.” Rather, these atrocities were also committed to demolishing the personhoods of the Americas’ original stewards (Smith, 2010, 59), and sexual violence, oftentimes against Indigenous women, was one of the various ways that they did this. As Brian McCormack states in “Conjugal Violence, Sex, Sin, and Murder in the Mission Communities of Alta California,” the mission system did not only contribute to land displacement and environmental degradation in pursuit of implementing European lifestyles in the “New World,” but it also perpetuated sexual violence against women and a racial hierarchy that sustained Native subordination (McCormack, 2007, 392-413). ^[3] Indigenous women, in ways that paralleled their homelands, were seen as conquests by European colonizers, whether sexually or extractively (Smith, 2010, 59). The second reason is that the patriarchal and racist parameters of what constitutes a woman—established by European colonizers—have managed to transcend time and still affect notions of femininity today. I will provide evidence for this claim in the coming paragraphs.

In the West, gender and sex are widely thought to function as oppositional and binary constructs. When a subject lacks sufficient masculine attributes, it is rendered feminine and, therefore, inferior and exploitable. Suzanne J. Kessler, in “The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants,” explains this idea perfectly through her analysis of intersex babies in Western society. She states that the sex of intersex infants is not so much determined by the presence of both X and Y chromosomes or even being able to produce sperm, but rather by the “aesthetic condition of having an appropriately sized penis.” She further explains that intersex subjects assigned male at birth who have what doctors determine as an “undersized” penis are often pressured to undergo hormonal treatment to “fix” the issue. If the subject does not respond to this medical intervention, then their penis is treated as an enlarged clitoris, and they will eventually undergo surgery to officially become “female” (Kessler, 1990, 12–13). The idea that a lack of phallic tissue is considered a female identifier points to patriarchal conceptions that treat feminine subjects—or those thought to be—as second-class to masculine ones. In other words, the determination of females among the intersex community in the West is inherently based on the concept that they are not “male enough,” which automatically creates a gender hierarchy that positions medically assigned males at the top.

Like Kessler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, in her piece “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,” also heavily discusses the presence of phallic tissue among intersex individuals as the determining factor of maleness and how an “insufficient” penis length renders intersex people female (Fausto-Sterling, 1993, 22–26). This idea is critical to analyze because of the detrimental sociophysical implications it has for the intersex community. Instead of allowing intersex people to be ambiguous in their sex and gender, Western society enforces sex binaries that encourage these individuals to undergo countless cosmetic surgeries to conform to the status quo. This is not only harmful to the intersex psyche, but many patients report an absence of genital sensation following their operations (Fausto-Sterling, 1993, 3). This shows that the surgeries that patients undergo are not really for their own well-being, but rather for the comfort of Western society and the perpetuation of sex and gender as two (and only two) distinct categories. I would like to mention that the upholding of a gender binary and the control over intersex people’s and women’s expression are particularly significant for more than the reasons I listed above. Like intersex individuals and women, running bodies of water have also been portrayed as entities that must be “fixed” and managed by Western society. In the book Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past by William Deverell, we see that the damming and channelization of rivers were always committed to tame water flows that were deemed “unpredictable” to white settlers in California (Deverell, 2004, 126). In other words, there is an inherent mutuality that links intersex people, women, and naturally occurring land systems; all three subjects have been subjected to attempts at domestication and dominance at the hands of Western influences.

That said, the social and medical classification of sex and gender for white individuals is a lot more straightforward than for subjects who are racialized. This is because, in the West, the ideas of sex and gender are tainted by racist beliefs that work to dehumanize all people of color, but Indigenous and racialized women more specifically. In “The Coloniality of Gender,” Maria Lugones explains that during the construction of feminism in Western society during the 20th century, white feminists only considered themselves women. This perpetuated the idea that racialized women and people of color, more generally, were socially subhuman. Indigenous and racialized women were oftentimes characterized as anatomically female “animals” who lacked womanhood or femininity (Lugones, 2013, 13). By analyzing Lugones’ argument, we see that the womanhood of Indigenous and racialized women was historically conditional. When it benefited Eurocentric global capitalism, the criterion of who counted as a woman was mended, which gave way to the sexual violence of Indigenous and racialized women, which I mentioned earlier (Lugones, 2013, 13). It was the combination of their presumed inferiority as females and as racialized people that justified their exploitation during the commencement of European settler coloniality, colonization, and imperialism.

The Case(s): Contemporary Examples

It would be nice to say that the aforementioned beliefs stayed in the initial time period of European settler coloniality, colonization, and imperialism in the Americas; however, that is not at all the case. These notions survived well into the late 20th and 21st centuries. In the following section, I will mention two contemporary examples that display the notion of racialized and Indigenous women’s assumed subordination by dominant powers.

The first case to support my claim is the Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA), which was a grassroots environmental justice organization primarily composed of Chicana women in the 1980s whose main goal was to protect the health of their East Los Angeles community. Through their constant efforts to center the health of their children, engage in local organizing, and cater to the needs of monolingual Spanish-speaking residents, this group was able to expand to 400 members during the peak of their activism (Pardo, 1990, 1). Although MELA had many successes throughout the years, their most monumental was preventing the establishment of a state prison in Boyle Heights and protesting against a plan to create a California-commissioned waste incinerator in Vernon, CA, during the mid-1980s (Pardo, 1990, 2).

The second case is the life’s work and tragic death of Berta Cáceres, one of the most well-known Indigenous land protectors in Honduras. During her lifetime, Cáceres fought restlessly and courageously to stop the exploitation of her homelands (The Guardian, 2016, 2). By co-founding the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), she was able to pose a huge threat to corporations like the Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima (DESA), the Sinohydro Corporation, the Dutch Development Bank, and the Finnish Fund for Industrial Cooperation that sought to exploit Honduras’ natural “resources.” Her most famous victory through COPINH was her organization against the creation of the Agua Zarca Dam, a Sinohydro Corporation and DESA joint project. It should be noted that both companies are powerful ones: Sinohydro Corporation happens to be the largest dam developer in the world and is currently located in Beijing, China, and DESA is a very influential energy company in Latin America. Although Cáceres had no intention of slowing down her activism, she was, unfortunately, murdered in her home in La Esperanza by a gunman in early 2016. Her mother, who gave her account to reporters from The Guardian, claimed that her daughter’s death was not at all an accident. In fact, she stated that she was certain that her murder was carried out by the Honduran government (The Guardian, 2016, 2).

Frameworks and Analysis: Cut from the Same Cloth

As shown in the two examples above, the logic that racialized feminine subjects are inherently inferior is pervasive in areas that have experienced European settler coloniality, colonization, and imperialism. The concept that is not so explicit in these cases, yet still very present, is the parallelism between the aforementioned women and the land they live on due to similar histories of exploitation.

The link between racialized women and land was not made explicit in academia until the theorization of the feminist concepts of cuerpo territorio and ecofeminism. Cuerpo territorio is a decolonial feminist method and theoretical framework, mostly utilized by Latin American scholars, that highlights the ways that trauma from sociopolitical injustices becomes physically embodied within racialized women. It is also often used to emphasize the ontological connection between bodies and territories. (Zaragocin and Caretta, 2021, 1503). The story of MELA in East Los Angeles is a perfect example of how this concept operates in the real world. The state of California intentionally chose to commission plans for a waste incinerator in a predominantly working-class Chicano community because of their presumed socioeconomic subordination. The way that MELA chose to be sociopolitically active in this case is critical to analyze because it displays residents’ acknowledgment of the idea popularized by cuerpo territorio: humans and lands are closely interconnected. Participants engaged in environmental activism specifically because they understood that the health of their loved ones was contingent on the state of the land on which they lived. They knew that if the waste incinerator plan was approved, their community would undeniably suffer from the physical implications of air pollution or, in other words, physically embody this environmental injustice. During their mobilization, MELA participants came to recognize the ways that both they and their home city were made to be disposable by corporations that undoubtedly had more financial power. In ways that mirrored each other, East LA residents and the physical East LA landscape shared a commonality of expendability and exploitation sustained by powerhouses. As scholar Glockner puts it, the injustices committed against marginalized communities are more than just control over the land and its “resources.” It is also about controlling the people who call it home (Glockner, 2023, 19).

Similar to cuerpo territorio, ecofeminism works to explain the connection between women’s livelihood, inanimate subjects, and the environmental state and argues that the liberation of women cannot be achieved until we have liberated nature. In the book Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature by Greta Gaard, the author further explains that under patriarchal society, women, land, and animals sustain male dominance because of their presumed submission and consumption by men (Gaard, 1993, 1-61). The life’s work and brutal death of Berta Cáceres are key examples of ecofeminism. During her lifetime, Cáceres was extremely devoted to land protection because, like MELA participants, she understood her livelihood to be related to her homelands. Her Indigeneity and womanhood allowed her to recognize that she was ancestrally connected to Honduras and, therefore, morally obligated to protect it. While alive, Cáceres was an immense threat to exploitative global powers because of her successful efforts to organize against numerous imperialistic and environmental injustices, like Sinohydro Corporation and DESA’s Agua Zarca Dam. Like her mother, I believe her death was 100% intentional because of one detail of her case in particular. According to First Sergeant Rodrigo Cruz, a former United States-trained Honduran soldier who worked in the special forces unit in the Honduran military, Cáceres’s death was premeditated. He told The Guardian that before he fled the country to escape his military obligations, he received a hitlist handout from his unit that had Cáceres’s picture and name on it. This list was given to him months before her murder took place (The Guardian, 2016, 1). In 2018, a DESA manager and a few Honduran soldiers were charged with her murder, but still, many environmental activists around the world believe that the true conspirators—corporate elites who are widely credited with ordering her death—have not paid the judicial price. (Global Initiative, 2016, 1). I believe the Honduran government murdered Cáceres because of the fear she instilled in global corporations, like Sinohydro Corporation and DESA, whose entire socioeconomic power is dependent on the extraction of “resources” in the global south. Although her disruption of their Agua Zarca Dam was met with the most public backlash, Cáceres had been organizing for the rights and sovereignty of her people and ancestral homelands for years. It was just a matter of time before the government’s fear of her would boil over. In many ways, Cáceres’s case shows that the sexist, racist, and colonial legacies of imperialism do not exist in a vacuum. In fact, like the arguments made by ecofeminism, the fight for environmental and feminist liberation is one and the same.

The cases of MELA and Berta Cáceres are important to analyze together because, in addition to the claims I made earlier, these examples illustrate the fact that women are usually the ones at the forefront of environmental or land protection activism. According to feminist geography scholars, women and mothers tend to be the most environmentally inclined demographic because they recognize their shared histories with land regarding domination at the hands of patriarchal and colonial powers and also because they continue to be the most vulnerable group to displacement from environmental degradation (Charleswell, 2015, 2).

Conclusion: Closing Statements and Acknowledgements

I began this essay with an intimate story of my life, not to garner sympathy but rather to show the numerous ways that racialized and Indigenous women are undeniably interconnected to the land they live on. Throughout this essay, I argued that similar histories between racialized women and the land regarding exploitation due to European settler coloniality, colonization, and imperialism in the Americas make these subjects parallel entities. I used the feminist frameworks and methods of cuerpo territorio and ecofeminism to analyze two cases that support my claim: the cases of the Mothers of East Los Angeles and the life and death of Berta Cáceres.

Writing this piece allowed me to further acknowledge the shoulders on which I stand, especially regarding MELA. Southeast Los Angeles, the area of Los Angeles County where I am from, suffers from numerous environmental injustices, and I can only imagine how much worse its environmental state would have been if the plan to establish a waste incinerator in Vernon had been approved. Not only are my health and livelihood something to thank MELA for, but I also want to recognize that their dedication to advocating for the sociopolitical mobility of marginalized Los Angeles residents is what inspired me to write this paper.

I would like to thank Brandon Karagozian, the CSWIM Writing Partner who reviewed my paper, for his dedication to offering insightful sources for my work and also Profe Hernandez for encouraging me to pursue this topic. Lastly, I would like to further acknowledge Berta Cáceres’s case before ending this essay. Her story is particularly important to learn about and honor because it shows that even as a globally well-known Indigenous woman, Cáceres’s social clout was not enough to protect her from state-sanctioned gender-based violence. I would like to believe that had the legacies of European settler coloniality, colonization, and imperialism ceased to exist in the Americas, Cáceres might still be alive today. May she rest in power.

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