Working for a just and livable future for all people is foundational to the Atlas of Essential Work. These efforts include sharing stories and other expressive forms from marginalized and exploited essential workers, while envisioning more equitable futures. These futures include the conditions of labor and what labor organizers Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway called “the other sixteen hours.” This reference communicates the whole spectrum of human lives both during and outside of work. Another aspect of thinking about and communicating the importance of labor involves amplifying collective social movement struggles for transforming power in multiple forms. We are excited to bring student scholars into this informing and visioning project in the form of zines created by class members in Environmental, Climate, and Energy Justice in Latinx Communities, Fall 2022, in UO’s Clark Honors College.

Student Zines

In conversation with their class colleagues and the course’s designer and facilitator, Professor Catalina de Onís, these emergent scholars were encouraged to address the following questions: In what ways are anti-colonial and decolonial struggles entangled with environmental, climate, and energy justice, and how is this intersection communicated and by whom? What strategies and tactics do different Latinx and Latina/o individuals and groups employ to highlight and urge alternatives to environmental degradation, climate disruption, settler colonialism, environmental racism and privilege, racial capitalism, and anti-migrant and anti-Black racism, among other grave problems? How can research on intersecting injustices refuse “damage-centered” narratives and craft complex, contextualized projects that amplify efforts to survive and flourish? What resulted from responses to these and other questions was an individualized, term-long research project called “Construyendo Otros Mundos”/“Making Other Worlds.” Students generated digital zines, or do-it-yourself mini-magazines, that function as alternative media spaces for creative scholarship and publishing.

Class member zines feature a variety of experiences, topics, arguments, and stories. This online archive contains a selection of the submitted projects. The seven included creations 1) critique dominant disaster responses in Puerto Rico and ties to environmental racism and colonialism; 2) document and participate in youth organizing that intertwines Latinx and Indigenous peoples for intergenerational fire justice; 3) reflect on family experiences with farm work and social movements in the Northwest; 4) highlight the harmful boundaries created by the US-Mexico border wall and interspecies connectivities; 5) describe harms experienced by Colombian farmworkers as examples of climate injustice; 6) honor the life of Lenca land and water defender Berta Cáceres to exemplify the need for decolonizing environmentalism, while amplifying Indigenous climate justice; and 7) create pathways for an equitable future for Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields by centering environmental justice. Together, these creations demonstrate that, through project-based learning, college students can envision and strive for ways of being, knowing, and communicating that challenge intersectional injustices and policies and practices that threaten life on Earth, while making alternative worlds.