The Cornille Lecture: Hilda Lloréns

In the United States the “Great Outdoors” have traditionally been constructed and
represented as White recreational spaces, while Blacks, Latinxs, and other minoritized people of color are portrayed as being disconnected and alienated from nature, and as lacking knowledge of environmental issues. For communities of color, access to safe outdoors spaces is an environmental justice issue. This talk will trace a Latinx engagement with the natural world and the outdoors. I am using “trace,” as a verb, and a noun, to offer a reparative narration of what is a complex and complicated, multiple, and incomplete view of the ways in which Latinx populations practice, experience, perceive, think about, and engage with the natural world. I use “trace/ing” as a methodological and theoretical guide for navigating through the incomplete terrain of Latinx nature practices in the United States. To be clear, there is no singular Latinx story about their engagement with nature, instead it is a varied, intricate story as varied as the people who comprise this identity category. Here I offer an ethnographic tracing of a Latinx engagement with the natural world during this turbulent socio-political era that because of climate breakdown must necessarily reckon with “the end of nature.”