Women's transformative texts from the southwestern ecotone (Ana Castillo, Helena Maria Viramontes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan)

The diversity of plant and animal life found in the ecotone or convergence of two bioregions strengthens the environment of a region. Similarly, I believe that the diversity found in the Southwestern United States strengthens the cultural life of the region and thus, the ability of the people to survive is strengthened. Drawing on that idea, my dissertation contextualizes the writing of contemporary Southwestern women writers Ana Castillo, Helena María Viramontes, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Linda Hogan within the framework of late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century American literature and looks at their work through an ecocritical lens. More specifically, I propose that today's minority and mixed blood women writers draw on a long tradition of recording the negative impact of European-American colonization and Manifest Destiny in the Southwestern United States. Even as early as the 1880s, women such as Helen Hunt Jackson and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton condemned the theft of land and displacement of indigenous peoples. That tradition of literary protest evolved into environmental concerns by authors such as Josephine Clifford McCracken who argued in her short stories for the protection of the California redwoods and Mary Austin whose outspoken western novel, The Ford, dramatized the devastating results of diverting water from farmers for capitalist purposes. Today's minority Southwestern writers of color examine oppression of both the land and the minority communities that live on that land. Their fiction interrogates destruction of forests and ecosystems by mining and lumber interests and the effects of industrial pollution on the inhabitants of the region. Thus, this work seeks to revise the master narratives of Manifest Destiny: the contradictory desire for a pristine American landscape and the right to rape and plunder the land for capitalist gain. I argue that their novels demonstrate the subversive strength of fiction as a narrative strategy that can arise from a culturally diverse region. My work seeks to bring together the political and environmental history of the region, interrogate the effects of that history on current issues of community and land and locate that argument within the literary community.