Excerpt: This environmental awareness arises from a community-based Chicana/o epistemology rather than from the “higher education of the Gringo value system.” In fact, this contrast in relationships to the natural world marks Chicana/o difference from white society. “The failings of the Gringo society,” says Vasquez, occur “because in all of its technology it does not make a place for HUMANS in relation to NATURE.” Speaking back to the drive of settler colonialism for “access to territory,” what Patrick Wolfe calls its “specific, irreducible content,” Vasquez emphasizes how US white settler structuring of the human relationship to land threatens the Chicana/o values of harmony with nature. The “Gringo” “concept of ownership and possession of the land,” she insists, attempts to replace and erase the “indigenous concepts of Aztlán [that] still live here” in the Southwest, where the “concepts of humanity and nature are very much part of everyday living.”
