An Overview of LatinTX: Place, Race, and Latinx Critical Environmental Justice in Texas

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is funding a 5-year (2025-2029), $4,571,000 grant for our project on Latinx critical environmental justice.

LatinTX is a critical environmental justice initiative that will activate, incubate, and amplify humanities-centered, interdisciplinary, and community-engaged scholarship and creative activity at Texas A&M University and beyond. By 2030, we want to be a national center of excellence for interdisciplinary environmental justice research and creative activities that center new perspectives, voices, and imaginaries needed to advance transformative conversations toward more just and equitable responses to everyday environmental injustices.

For LatinTX, “critical environmental justice” has broad scope. Following David Pellow’s work defining the breadth of this interdisciplinary field, we understand critical environmental justice to move beyond a singular focus on environmental impacts in localized communities to include the broader ways in which communities are viewed and treated as expendable. Concern with such “logics of expendability” means we see pollution, climate change, energy transitions, land degradation, water and food insecurity, migration, and resource exclusion, for example, as connected with long histories and experiences of social exclusion, marginalization, and oppression (often across intersecting axes of race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, etc.). We seek to build a community of scholars from across the humanities to engage with and enable new perspectives, voices, and imaginaries needed to advance transformative conversations toward more just and equitable responses to everyday environmental injustices in Texas and the borderlands.

LatinTX will intentionally craft robust collaborative partnerships and relationships with community organizationsthrough the formation of a Community Advisory Board (CAB), Community-University Network (C-UN), and programming across the state of Texas. Community engagement will be amplified by a cluster hire that will establish six humanistic tenure-track and tenured faculty positions in the College of Arts & Sciences (ArtSci). Faculty are also expected to contribute to the interdisciplinary environmental undergraduate program, which is advancing environmental humanities curriculum.

Additional funds will support the TAMU Race & Ethnic Studies Institute (RESI), the ArtSci Environmental & Sustainability Initiative (ESI), and Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) programming and grant initiatives, fellowships for faculty and graduate students, internships for community engagement work for undergraduate and graduate students, and staff to ensure that environmental justice research is woven through the fabric of the University’s research, education, and public engagement.

LatinTX aims to 1) build a diverse cohort of environmental justice activist scholar-teachers, 2) create strong, durable research infrastructure for cross-disciplinary and cross-unit and department collaboration to ensure their success, and 3) expand their networks and impact by expanding that infrastructure to include community organizations and collaborations.

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