Professor Michelle Joffroy of Smith College presented a Log Lunch talk on April 5 entitled “The True Cost of Justice: Imagining Ecological and Social Debt in Latina Fiction.” Arguing that cultural expressions allow us to examine questions of environmental justice with greater creativity and to take more risks in critiquing as well as commending activism, Joffroy analyzed the play “Heroes and Saints” by Latina writer Cherrie Moraga. Moraga’s work presents the fictionalized experience of a farm-worker community in California struggling with the health effects of heavy pesticide use. Professor Joffroy highlighted key themes such as contemporary connections with local indigenous histories, religious dimensions in Latin American social movements, and the experience of isolation and shame in migrant communities. Moraga’s work, she argues, asks us to consider the complex interaction between visibility and shame that can too often be ignored in environmental justice activism. Even as strategies such as mapping and storytelling provide an important means towards recognition, Joffroy reminds us of Moraga’s literary “call to think critically” about the costs that activist strategies can impose on vulnerable communities.
