El Hombre Cósmico and the Green Valley: Estela Portillo Trambley’s Racial Environmentalism

Abstract Estela Portillo Trambley’s writings advance “racial environmentalism,” a theory of race as dynamically shaped by the environment. This notion of race subverted the Chicano movement’s masculinist nationalism; led her to craft a feminist, nature-centered universalism; and anticipated later critiques of environmental racism. The author traces Portillo Trambley’s engagement with Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, which shaped her notion of the self, as well as José Vasconcelos, whose ideas of mestizaje and la raza cósmica drew on neo-Lamarckism to envision race as environmentally shaped. While the movement strategically essentialized Vasconcelos’s cosmic race, Portillo Trambley adopted his dynamic understanding of race and endorsed the figure of the “new American.” Racial environmentalist ontologies appear in her readers’ theater narration, El Hombre Cósmico (1975) and her novella “Rain of Scorpions” (1975). The latter demonstrates that racial environmentalism enabled her to theorize environmental racism avant la lettre. Its two intertwined narrative arcs stage the compatibility of environmental justice and racial environmentalist notions of the self as permeable. Portillo Trambley’s writings helped set the parameters of Chicana feminist postnationalism and offer a crucial precursor to Gloria Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza.” Her work charts a divergent path in Chicana literature through its alternative vision of self, race, and environment.