The paper offers a feminist ecocritical reading of Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga’s play Heroes and Saints (1992) and proposes Moraga’s ecocritical dramaturgy as a decolonial theater of testimony. Heroes and Saints stages a fictionalized account of the actual atrocities suffered by thousands of Mexican American farmworkers in the 1980s who, as a result of working on Californian vineyards fertilized by the American government’s toxic pesticides, are disproportionately affected by cancers and diseases of the female reproductive system.
I explore the biochemical violation of both the environment and maternal bodies as material sites of witness to expose and display the continuation of colonial subjugation of Mexican Americans in the United States by neocolonial means of environmental racism. Relying on Ana Fornictio’s generic definition of testimony—“the urgency to bear witness to an event or series of events perpetrated with aim of eliminating a community” (239)—I demonstrate that Moraga draws on the narrative genre of testimony as a discursive mode of resistance against the systematic political erasure of Chicano/a communities.
The testimonial value of the diseased female bodies and the desecrated landscape (gendered as feminine motherland, or Tierra Madre) in the play, therefore, transcends the portrayal of women of color as passive victims of neocolonial violence. Moraga radically reconfigures the inherent interconnection between damaged bodies of women and agricultural fields and transforms them into active agents in social protest and female empowerment. Moraga’s performative act of decolonizing Chicanas resides in evoking the indigenous philosophy of mestiza identity which calls for reestablishing the broken spiritual tie between the (mother)land and the female body. The paper, thus, investigates how transgressive images of the female body and motherhood intersect with spirituality, and ecological destruction and promote a decolonial performativity of the marginalized Chicana identity.

Babett Rubóczki is a Ph.D. student in the North American Studies program at the Doctoral School of Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Debrecen. Her research focuses on contemporary U.S. Latina literature with specific focus on the gendered representations of vulnerability in Chicana and U.S. Caribbean women writers’ and playwrights’ works. Her scholarly interests also include cultural and literary theories in diaspora studies, queer studies, and ecocriticism. She has published articles in both Hungarian and English in journals including the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies.

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