Yo Cuento: transmedia testimonios and Latinx participation in the outdoor diversity movement

This essay examines the cultural stakes of Latinx involvement in the outdoor diversity movement through a close reading of the organization Latino Outdoors’ blog, Yo Cuento. Contributors to Yo Cuento conceptualize Latinx outdoor engagement and environmentalism as rooted in transnational notions of family, place, and community rather than US national identity and individuality. Yo Cuento challenges the structures of racial capitalism that attempt to reduce Latinxs to their productivity and labor identities. In celebrating Latinx leisure, blog contributors reclaim a pleasurable relationship to the environment severed by colonialism, immigration, and economic exploitation. The transmedia testimonios of Yo Cuento collectively produce a Latinx outdoor recreation identity that reclaims a pleasurable, unproductive, shared (rather than possessive) relationship with the more-than-human world.