Bodies That Should Matter: Chicana/o Farmworkers, Slow Violence, and the Politics of (In)visibility in Cherríe Moraga's Heroes and Saints

Cherríe Moraga's 1992 play Heroes and Saints remains a critical dramatic work for both environmental studies and Chicana/o studies. The play mirrors and shapes the lived historical reality of Chicana/o farmworkers and pesticide poisoning in the San Joaquin Valley of Southern California, where a disproportionate number of children were born with birth defects or diagnosed with cancer between 1978 and 1988. This paper examines Moraga's representation of "slow violence" in the play, which uses arresting images to defy the invisibility of a subaltern Chicana/o community. "Slow violence" is a term coined by environmental scholar Rob Nixon; in contrast to spectacular violence, which is characterized by time- and body-boundedness, slow violence occurs gradually and often invisibly. The theoretical lens of slow violence opens up a space in which to discuss the political, temporal, and activist dimensions of Moraga's play as well as the significance of the relationship between environmentalism and subalternity. This paper strategically rethinks environmental violence on the body and land as well as the politics of (in)visibility.