NewsTaco

By Jose Gonzalez, NewsTaco

National Park Week is coming up, aligned with celebrations on Earth Day. During this time, the public can attend National Parks for free. Do you have plans to attend your closest National Park?

The question is posed because it provides an opportunity to go past how public land managers and organizations are working to reach out to diverse communities, and point out the opportunities for Latino communities to not only visit National Parks, but develop deeper understandings, connections, and responsibilities for our National Parks.

As Latinos will attain greater sociopolitical power, a guiding question is, how do we handle the responsibility of being stewards to our heritage in the National Parks?

There are certainly many areas where the National Park System has struggled to be more relevant to changing demographics and reaching out to diverse communities. But at the same time, there are various success stories and there are National Park units that are deliberately working to “bring the park to the people.”

Nonetheless, though there may be park units that have a clear need for more Latino engagement, it should also be clear that there is a rich Latino history and heritage in many park units.

This is highlighted by the recent NPS theme study detailing Latino heritage in US history. That is a study worth reading, especially to put into context how Latino history has been an interwoven thread in the American historical tapestry since the very beginning. This is alongside the establishment of the American Latino Heritage Fund in 2011, which has been working “to ensure that our national parks and historic sites preserve, reflect and engage the diverse stories and communities of American Latinos throughout American History and for future generations.”

We certainly need that work and it is important to expect our stories and engagement to be reflected across the National Park System. At the same time it is important to embrace not just the opportunity but the responsibility. That means demanding accessibility to this public heritage and making it culturally relevant, but also working to ensure its sustainability.

That could mean being involved in the policy work of having a healthy park system. It can mean being advocates for the park system across different platforms. It  could mean deepening our understanding of what the National Parks are and how they work—and how they are different from other public lands. It could mean simply attending your closest National Park, if you have not, to discover the heritage that belongs to all of us. Regardless, it involves taking some form of action.

Part of this work will not only involve highlighting the park units that most clearly tell the Latino heritage, but also seeing how we can broaden our experience into other park units. We can clearly identify with the new Cesar Chavez National Monument, but how do we create a Latino story for Glacier National Park? How is our story evolving with Kings Canyon National Park or with Grant Tetons National Park?

So we do need to keep in mind the following:

• There is a need for more Latino community engagement in our National Parks.
• There is a need for more Latino representation in the National Park units.

But at the same time, as we own our power, demographically and politically, we can ask ourselves not only how do the National Parks represent us, but how we represent our responsibility for our National Parks. We need to increase our stories in, about, and for the National Parks. How will you engage with your parks this upcoming National Park Week?

[Photo courtesy National Parks Foundation]

By Jose Gonzalez, NewsTaco

This past week two stories stood out identifying two communities of color different in many ways but connected by a common challenge: contaminated water.

One story, from the New York Times, pointed out the issues with contaminated water faced in small predominately Latino communities in the Central Valley, California. “Don’t drink the water” is no joke here, but rather a sad reality and norm for low-income communities of color. It should be fair to ask HOW this happen as well as WHY. As the NY Times story points out:

“It is the grim result of more than half a century in which chemical fertilizers, animal wastes, pesticides and other substances have infiltrated aquifers, seeping into the groundwater and eventually into the tap.”

The irony is that many of these communities are farm-working communities that work the very fields and industries that poison their drinking water —and in that process these communities bear the cost of food production in more than one way. First, we rely on communities like these to serve as a labor force for the food we consume, the dairies and crops of California’s bountiful bread basket. But the political and economic forces that govern these areas keep many of these communities in poverty with low wages or uneven enforcement of the few regulations in place to protect them. Second, these communities struggle with limited access to the basic needs some of us take for granted, such as drinking water.

These communities are asked to pay twice for water. They pay first for the tap and second in the purchase of bottled drinking water. Furthermore this pushes habits we consider detrimental to sustainable living: In the larger conservation community we stress the detrimental environmental effects of bottled water and yet that is the safest and healthiest option for these communities absent state and regulatory action.

The other story exposed the loopholes benefiting oil and gas companies to dump contaminated water on the Wind River Reservation, Wyoming.  NPR broke the story, specifically pointing out  how what goes on there is illegal in most of the country— with the implication that a reservation is not seen as like most of the country.  The shocking part is that this is permitted, directly and indirectly, by the Environmental Protection Agency, the very agency that is supposed to regulate this type of practice to protect people and the environment. As this article from KERA News points out, quoting a Duke University environmental scientist:

“I was shocked when I heard this. I was very surprised this was allowed. It’s just something that we should know better by now. We should know that dumping our waste onto the surface of the ground is a bad solution…Are we doing something on tribal lands we wouldn’t allow somewhere else? I think that’s something we have to be asking ourselves.”

Those are good questions, but questions and issues that not all communities face— Yet common enough in communities of color.