"the uncleanness of my dark skin"

Toxic Burdens, Brown Embodiment, and Latinx-Indigenous Relationality in Rebecca Salazar’s sulphurtongue

Abstract

This paper examines how the relationship between race and ecology is materialized in Rebecca Salazar’s poetry collection sulphurtongue, which takes the point of view of a second generation queer Latinx speaker who grew up in Sudbury, Ontario. I argue that sulphurtongue constructs a poetics of synaesthesia in which mundane moments of embodied noticing reveal environmental, transnational, and transhistorical connections that link brown Latinx embodiment to pollution. I then argue that sulphurtongue searches for futurities outside of settler colonial extractivism by asking how diasporic Latinx emplacement might be made more accountable to Indigenous understandings of place. Drawing on the work of Leanne B. Simpson, I ask what sulphurtongue teaches us about reclaiming brown Latinx embodiment from settler colonial extractivism and racial capitalism, and how this reclamation might participate in the ethics of “co-resistance” that Simpson sees as fundamental to the mutual liberation of Indigenous, Black, and brown communities on Turtle Island.