ASLE 2025: Birds, Barrios, Borders, & Books—Chicanx Poetics and Publishing from the Belly of the Beast

Last month the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) held their biennial meeting in Maryland, gathering both in-person and online to swap the most recent ideas and practices in the environmental humanities. While we might assume that study of “the environment” is solely housed within the sciences, since the 1990s, fields traditionally concerned with the study of “culture”—history, literature, philosophy, cultural and media studies—have increasingly taken up questions of “nature.”

Just as the liberation movements of the 1960s spawned gender and ethnic studies, so too did environmentalist (and environmental justice) movements leave their mark on the study of literature, history, and culture. ASLE seeks to be a “center of gravity” for these approaches, a community of scholars, educators, artists, and activists whose work explores the intersections of nature, culture, and justice.  

As one of our intellectual homes and trade associations (the other being the Society for Environmental Journalists), ASLE has long been a space where we’ve worked through our own questions of what Deceleration is and does. And given that some of the answer to those questions often lies in bridging university and community, thinking and doing, ASLE has also been a space where we’ve reported back to our readers on some of the most critical ideas coming out of conversations among and between ecojustice scholars, artists, and activists. 

This year we did both, putting together our own panel for the virtual portion of ASLE 2025 and also convening a team of writers, as we did last year for the 12th World Wilderness Congress, or WILD12, to transmit dispatches from the conference for folks on the ground in South Texas and beyond. 

Titled “Birds, Barrios, Borders, Books: Chicanx Poetics and Publishing from the Belly of the Beast,” our panel originated with the idea of bringing together four FlowerSong Press authors who wear multiple hats, our writing deeply embedded in homeplaces and entangled in other activities (teaching, publishing, activism, land stewardship).

Together, we sought to reflect on what it means to write and publish for environmental justice in South Texas, belly of the beast for long histories of colonial extraction, racial capitalism, and the climate crisis both have wrought—not to mention oil and gas buildout, Trump’s border wall, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. We aimed to showcase the fuego y fuerza of South Texas ecojustice writing, but also to consider how indie publishing projects rooted in Chicanx/Latinx communities—like FlowerSong and Deceleration—have created space for DIY, decolonial forms of thinking, writing, and doing that seek to be accountable to the communities from and to which they speak.

My introductory comments set up the stakes of the panel, sifting through Deceleration’s “experiments in praxis” to recover what remains useful in this acute moment of danger, as the United States runs full-throttle toward unabashed white nationalism and open-throated fascism. 

FlowerSong poet and UTSA doctoral candidate Carolina Hinojosa’s “Fisgona/e/x Field Notes: Plants, Waterways, and Airways” (@ 18:35) then presented a series of speculative field notes documenting ecological processes and systems in South Texas, exploring the intricate relationship between human and more-than-human worlds through sketches of winter storm-frozen nopales, fragments of poetry, and digital photography. What and who grows, Hinojosa asked, through the fissures of human-made disruption?  

In light of the gravity of these disruptions to South Texas’s ecological and cultural continuity, Kamala Platt”s “After ‘Gravity’: ‘Where Should the Birds Fly After the Last Sky?’” (@ 30:08)—a title nodding to Palestine’s national poet Mahmoud Darwish—revisited poems from her FlowerSong collection Gravity Prevails. Written closer to the turn of the millennium, these poems nonetheless provided benchmarks to current realities, charting how our vantage points have shifted, and who and what has been shafted in the process. 

A few lines illustrate:

Finally, Edward Vidaurre stole time from his day job to share indie press insights and new poetry from his car, reading from his newest (10th!) collection El Viejo (@ 48:16). His phone died halfway through the poem “Pope Francis Bobblehead Figurine,” but he gave us permission to republish it below for those tuning in who need to hear how it ends. 

We wrapped up the panel with conversation about Elon Musk’s “space colonialism” at Boca Chica beach (@ 1:05:36), for those attending the panel from different regions and homelands, dwelling on continuities with Américo Paredes’s fictionalized depictions of the Rio Grande Valley and returning to Hinojosa’s compelling questions: Where do you begin and I end? What and who grows in the fissures of human-made disruption? Relatedly, we also touched on these ecological notions of radical interdependence in Gloria Anzaldúa concept of  “nos/otras” (a “we” that recognizes the other within self, and vice versa), which in many ways anticipated later ecocritical keywords like Timothy Morton’s notion of “the mesh” (@ 1:15:18). 

For me, one of the most interesting ideas to surface from our panel was Hinojosa’s reference to Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s concept of “third nature” from her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, which refers to “what presses on despite capitalism,” as Hinojosa put it.

She quoted Tsing further:

“Imagine ‘first nature’ to mean ecological relations, including humans, and ‘second nature’ to refer to capitalist transformations of the environment. This usage … derives from [groundbreaking environmental historian] William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis. I then offer ‘third nature’: that is, what manages to live despite capitalism.”

It’s a concept that resonates with my own feeling, embodied in much of my poetry, that so much of climate action—especially in the face of grief for all we cannot save in time—lies in the size and scale and direction of tending to “barrio ecologies”: the tiny, overlooked relationships we have to the tiny creatures that survive and persist all around us, despite the many environmental violences inflicted on our neighborhoods. 

Equally it evokes John Paul Lederach’s notion of “critical yeast,” which also found its way into my closing comments:

While the moment may have arrived here in the U.S. for a spectacular mass movement, ultimately, what makes its growth possible is the spread of critical yeast. By this I mean the quality of small pockets of unusual relationships that make a difference where they live. Yeast is the smallest ingredient in bread baking, but the only one that helps everything else grow.

To view our conversation, check out the recording above.

In the coming days, Deceleration will also publish other coverage from ASLE 2025, including:

• “ASLE’s Collective Atmospheres and the Significance of Feeling the World” — Kamala Platt

• “Kaia Sand’s ‘Poetic, Journalistic Brain’ Archives Alternatives to the Language and Policy of ‘Unwanted Persons’” — Michelle Yates and Marisol Cortez

• On queer/trans climate futures — Kit O’Connell

• On Latin American environmental humanities — Carolina Hinojosa

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Gracias a Edward Vidaurre and El Martillo Press for allowing us to reprint “Pope Frances Bobblehead Figurine” below in its entirety:

'Pope Frances Bobblehead Figurine,' By Edward Vidaurre

I have poems sitting outside my door, under the bed, near the water bowl the dog’s use to drink,

outback near the grave of our chicken, on the mulch around the rose bushes, inside the piping that allows for water to come through our shower head, in the mirror, all waiting to sit on my fingertips.

I sit with my fingers laying on the shift, L, D, and S key on my computer keyboard. I look at the

Pope Francis bobblehead figurine and tap the head so it bounces around. I look at the art my

daughter gave me for Father’s Day some years back and smile.

I stare at the books on my desk: Caste, An American Sunrise, Essential Bukowski, and In Search of Duende. I sharpen a pencil and sit back on my leather chair. My phone has a podcast playing and I can hear the news coming from the TV in the living room.

I think of the books in the other room, how I returned the dog with mange to recover before we

brought it home to foster it, and the shoes I left in a hotel room in Corpus Christi. I inhale the Gum Mint vape that is tasting more metallic than minty. My phone sits in my backpack, never returned after the upgrade.

I come across a cougar or bear in my dreams where I always get away? I’m too old and fat to win at a race and so I feel safe in this room, where papercuts and gout is the only risk.

It’s 9pm and I just finished a cold cup of coffee. There have been times where I let the cup sit and I gulp a fly into my mouth and spit it out.

No one talks about knives much. People talk about guns. I’ve had dreams of bullets flying all around me, as if they’re coming in with the wind. I knew of a guy who got stabbed and thrown in a lake when I was a kid. They found him bloated several days after his disappearance. He had long dirty brown hair and green eyes. My neighbor was friends with him and cried for him after the news.

My wife hates walking into this room. It’s messy and gives her anxiety. The only thing in this room that she can look at with fondness is her father’s recliner. I try not to put stuff on it. Right now, there’s a pillow and a lego container that needs to be put together. I think the books in this room are pissed off at how I have placed them.

I used to collect pins. There are some in my desk drawer and some baseball cards I bought at an estate sale. A stapler I never use and several dried out markers. There’s a snack-sized ziploc bag with green slime. I tap the Pope Francis bobblehead figurine again so it bounces around while I write about prayer.