El Salvador Reborn with Mellissa Linton-Villafranco (U Arizona Press, 2026)

Yeah, it's the history that you go through is interesting.

And at first when I was starting the book, I was a bit confused about why you decided to focus on both reproductive rights and environmental rights, because they can seem like separate issues.

But why do you decide to combine them together?

That's such a great question, Caleb.

It's something I struggle with a lot.

And actually my dissertation work was trying to bring these two social movements together.

And I think what brings them together is my training in reproductive justice.

So reproductive justice is actually a US Black feminist theory and praxis.

So it's a way of thinking and also a way of organizing, a way of constituting our social movements together.

And so what's unique about reproductive justice is it doesn't focus only on the right to choose to have an abortion, which is a very sort of individualized choice that's made in isolation for many people.

But instead, reproductive justice focuses on the holistic conceptions of life that make that provide a dignified life.

life for us.

So it's not just based on choice, but instead based on access to clean water, access to sexual health education, to education itself.

So reproductive justice, it encourages us to think of coalitional politics.

And I didn't want to just think of abortion as a silo, as this independent issue that isn't connected to other key social movements happening right now.

And, you know, aside from my own academic training and seeing reproductive justice as organically in the United States bringing together these movements, especially, you know, Native feminists who live and work on reservations and might work with the Indian Health Services, have published a lot of work, like Breonna Theobald, about how water rights and reproductive rights are intimately connected as they're both...

Water is life, right? That's one of like the enduring taglines from the no Dakota access pipeline movement here in North America.

And so, you know, there's the reproductive justice academic track that made me think these two issues are connected, abortion and environmentalism.

But the other part of this answer is that when I began doing fieldwork in El Salvador in 2011, through 2018, most of the marches that I was participating in that were led by feminist organizations had a very coalitional politics.

And so I actually was able to meet environmentalist defenders, or as they call themselves, water defenders, in a 2018 protest.

And so it was really clear to me that Salvadorans were thinking of these two issues as inextricably linked.

mostly because some of the organizers who are doing feminist organizing are also doing environmental organizing.

And so I wanted to bring these two social movements together to give a snapshot of contemporary El Salvador and what social issues are occupying the hearts and minds of Salvadoran people.

Yeah, and you make it clear, and it's also interesting too, throughout the book, you make it clear how these issues connect with each other.

And then also, especially in relation to the church, how the church is sort of on both sides of either issues, obviously being pro-life in one instance, and then also having concern for the environment in another instance, and how that tension that's there.