Conserving Natural and Cultural Diversity: The Prose and Poetry of Pat Mora

Pat Mora writes in Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle that the United States "has both the opportunity and responsibility to demonstrate to this world of emerging representative governments that nurturing variety is central, not marginal to democracy" (19). The use of the word "nurturing" seems in no way fortuitous, because she recognizes natural and cultural diversity as integral threads of the lifeweb labeled Humanity, which is one thread of a much larger lifeweb labeled Earth. As a result, she calls for emphasizing cultural conservation with the same enthusiasm with which some movements labor for "historical preservation" and "natural conservation" (18). This recognition of the interrelationship of natural and cultural diversity and emphasis on the nurturing practice of cultural conservation are to be found throughout the poetry of Chants (1985), Borders (1986), and Communion (1991), as well as in Nepantla (1993), of which she says: "The essays are about my encounters with my world" (Nepantla 9). Pat Mora is a Chicana who began writing around 1980 and has won awards for both her poetry and her children's books. Born in 1942, she grew up, raised three children, and worked in El Paso before moving in 1989 to Cincinnati, Ohio. She has taught at the high school, community college, and university levels and served in various administrative capacities at the University of Texas at El Paso from 1981 to 1989. Of those years, Mora remarks that "I was fortunate to work on issues of outreach to women and to the local Mexican American population.... For those of us committed to extending the opportunities of the university to our community, it was a frustrating but exciting time to participate in that gradual transformation" (Nepantla 4). "Nepantla" is a Nahuatl word meaning "place in the middle," and Mora makes it clear that she not only recognizes herself as having come from such a physical place, the Tex-Mex borderlands, but also from such a psychic and cultural place as a Mexican-American. Mora seeks in her writing, as well as her life, to conserve the generative tension of the dynamic plurality that is borderland existence. "I am in the middle of my life, and well know," she declares, "not only the pain but also the advantage of observing both sides, albeit with my biases, of moving through two, and, in fact, multiple spaces" (Nepantla 6). One of the dangers of a segment of the natural conservation movement is the recovery or preservation of a small section of a larger bioregion. Tourists can then visit that parcel and experience nostalgia for the rest that was allowed to be destroyed. One can see the same danger evident in urban historical preservation, particularly in historically ethnic areas being crowded out by skyscrapers and highways. As Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero observe in the Introduction to Infinite Divisions, "since many freeways in large urban areas were built in the barrios, the freeways often run along Chicano residential areas. In addition, they may have also destroyed much of the older sections of the barrios, thus destroying traditions" (32). And in such urban renewals/removals, one often sees that the buildings preserved as representative of a particular cultural heritage are ones that are of interest to tourists and tourism promoters rather than inheritors of the culture. But Mora is well aware of the danger of token wilderness preserves and Potemkin-village mercados and warns against any idea of recovering the Mexican-American heritage as curio or artifact: "a true ethnic of conservation includes a commitment to a group's decisions, its development and self-direction" (Nepantla 30). Just as the ecology movement warns that biological diversity is crucial to biotic survival, Mora warns that cultural diversity is crucial to human survival, since it actually helps to maintain diversity in general: Pride in cultural identity, in the set of learned and shared language, symbols, and meanings, needs to be fostered not because of nostalgia or romanticism, but because it is essential to our survival. …