Eroding California: Water, Environment, and Health in the Historical Imagination

AHA Session 302
Sunday, January 8, 2017: 9:00 AM-10:30 AM
Centennial Ballroom A (Hyatt Regency Denver, Third Floor)
Chair:
Mario Sifuentez, University of California, Merced
Papers:
Fracturing Landscapes: Maps, Artifice, and the Illusion of Power and Control in the US-Mexico Borderlands
Mary Mendoza, University of Vermont
Life and Death at the Salton Sea: The Impossibilities of American Environmentalism in the Borderlands
Traci Brynne Voyles, Loyola Marymount University
Land, Food Security, and Water Rights in the Central Valley: Farmworkers, the Westlands, and the National Land for People Movement
Mario Sifuentez, University of California, Merced
Comment:
Karl Jacoby, Columbia University

Session Abstract

This panel will explore the convergence of race, gender, citizenship, and environmental history in California in particular and the US-Mexico borderlands more generally. Environmental issues have come to the forefront of the popular imagination in recent years. Water, climate change, endangered species, and salination are some of the most pressing environmental concerns in the West. The papers in this panel will challenge hegemonic notions of environment, health, landscape, and borders, from California's Central Valley, to the Salton Sea, and across the US-Mexico border. We will explore the ways in which humans have exerted a tenuous and at times imaginary control over the natural environment while simultaneously altering it. The papers will be paying particular attention to the ways different bodies have managed and been managed through the lens of environmentalism.
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