After the presider’s brief introductions (2-3 minutes), our 3 panelists will speak for 18 minutes apiece. This format leaves more than 15 minutes for question and answer. Our presenters are at different stages in their careers (a dissertating student, an Assistant Professor, and a Full Professor) and are based at a range of academic institutions. Their papers spotlight California’s linguistic and cultural diversity, its history of colonial displacement and migration, and its varied geographies. We regard this session's subject as comparative literature.

This session articulates a series of methodological questions. How, we ask, can travel writing about a specific place, bioregion, or state across time, in different languages, and under the aegis of divergent epistemologies serve as a record, however mediated, of ecological change? How do we interpret such records? How are the texts under discussion in this session different from more traditional sources of historicist ecocriticism, such as lyric poetry, drama, novels, and canonical examples of nature writing? How, in turn, can an ecocritical lens shift the focus of study for scholars of travel writing? What critical goals would a slightly less or non-anthropocentric conception of travel writing serve? What is the utility of thinking through travel writing and ecocriticism as fields that are fundamentally kin? What new archives and methods are made available to scholars in both fields?

In different ways, our 3 panelists address these questions. These are the précis of their presentations:

Carlos Alonso Nugent aims to destabilize dominant accounts of the California Gold Rush. His focus is the Chilenas/os, Mexicanas/os, and other foreign-born Latinas/os who made up the majority of the area’s Spanish-speaking population as early as 1850. This is a population of migrants who traveled from job to job through vast territories. To seize the full promise of recent scholarship on “the Latina/o nineteenth century,” Nugent reconstructs these migrants’ “imagined environments” - the frameworks through which human groups represent, relate to, and reside in more-than-human worlds. After tracking Latina/o migrants through a range of English- and Spanish-language newspapers, he concludes by showing how these media shaped John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murrieta (1854), which is often hailed as the first Native novel and the first California novel. For Nugent, this bandido book is instead an experiment in place(lessness) at the intersection of Indigeneity and Latinidad.

Jane Robbins Mize brings our session to the high desert of early twentieth-century southern California, where industrialists were beginning to drain the Owens River watershed—without residents’ explicit consent—via a massive aqueduct in order to supply water to the booming city of Los Angeles. Mize describes how essayist, novelist, and self-identified “ethnologist” Mary Austin used the conventions of travel writing to document the unseen water of the Owens Valley through her book, The Land of Little Rain (1903), in resistance to an environmental transformation that would become a large-scale ecological crisis for the region. Mize demonstrates how Austin situated the genre of the travelogue within the “hydrosocial cycle” of Mojave streams, storms, and even irrigation ditches in her depictions of the intimate relations between humans and water. Mize then charts how Austin circulated these depictions in The Atlantic to highlight the importance of reciprocal rather than extractive relationships with water, which anticipates the calls of future environmental activists.

Bryan Rasmussen narrates a place-based story of travel and migration in the Simi Hills in Southern California. To the Chumash, the Simi Hills are ‘Alapay, or “sky valley,” where a sacred astronomical observatory served as a cultural crossroads during solstice for the Chumash, Tataviam, and Kizh peoples. In the 1950s, the Simi Hills became a testing site for the aerospace industries that built the rockets that carried astronauts to the moon. More recently, the Simi Hills has been designated a habitat linkage for mountain lions and other species migrating between mountain ranges; construction will soon begin on a wildlife bridge, the largest of its kind anywhere, to cross the 101 freeway. Rasmussen draws on interviews with historians, activists, conservationists, poets, and Native scholars and storytellers, as well as nonhuman ethnography, to reveal that the harms embedded on, and emanating from, this site are neither discrete events in time, nor confined to the site itself, but overlapping, migrating structures that cross time and space at various scales and cross human/nonhuman boundaries.