As a first-generation Mexican American park ranger, Cam Solorio Juarez, definitely has a chip on his shoulder. The Park Service has long been criticized for not representing the diversity of the nation in its workforce. Juarez is defying that stereotype and doing what he can to increase representation not just in the workforce, but in the visitation as well.
In 2019 the Tucson Latinx community made up 45.4% of the population, yet the visitor population at Saguaro National Park, which is where Juarez works as the Community Engagement and Outreach Coordinator, was a large majority white.
Juarez, 48, was recruited to work at the park because of his connections to the Latinx and government community that he created in the years he served as a member of the school board. Those connections allowed him to work to create a new culture in the park and begin to incorporate more and more of the underrepresented communities of Tucson.
Juarez has lived in Tucson for most of his life, but before his recruitment he didn’t know the city was close to a National Park, let alone housed one. He didn’t hear about Saguaro National Park until the previous superintendent approached him to join the team after hearing a talk he did during a conference in 2015. If someone who was recruited to spread word of the park didn’t even know about it to begin with, then that’s the first issue to tackle.
“It was sort of Tucson's best kept secret because I came to find out that there were a whole lot more people out there like me who had never been to, nor had they heard of the park,” Juarez said. “Going to national parks is one of America's favorite pastimes, but it’s different with the Latinx community.”
- Latinx and the outdoors -
The relationship between the Latinx community and the outdoors can be a complicated one, and there’s a lot to unpack. There are many stereotypes that come with being Latinx and the outdoors, and I believe they play a role in why many from the community are less likely to recreate. First off, there are those who cross the desert to find a better place for their families, recreating in the desert for them isn’t something they’d look for. Other Latinx rangers have said that the community “recreates differently”, that they don’t usually hike and mostly gather in large groups with their families to do asados or have parties. Going to a national park where the group sizes are limited, and a majority of the visitors are avid hikers might be a turn off as well.
Another harsh reality is that, according to the USDA, a majority of field workers in the states are Latinx. It’s an interesting thought to recreate outdoors when you’ve worked so hard outside in order to put a roof over yours and/or your family’s head. Not only are the outdoors a reminder to some of the obstacles they’ve faced, but for Juarez they are a reminder of his disability and where it comes from.
“At an early age I learned that it was herbicides that caused my physical disability and heart condition,” Juarez said. “And now my own son's heart condition.” Juarez’s parents were both farm workers, and the herbicides used in those farms created consequences his parents weren’t expecting. One of the many things they taught him was to take the good with the challenging, “you can throw your hands up and just quit or you can dig your heels in and make a difference,” he said. “That's what I'm hoping to do here.”
- Making Change -
Luckily, when he started working in 2016, he didn’t have to start completely from starch. His predecessor at the park had been a graduate student working to figure out exactly what Juarez himself was wondering. Why are local Tucsonans, specifically Latinx, not going to Saguaro National Park?
She had done a series of listening sessions with members of the Latinx community, and aside from not knowing about the park the most influential factor of them not going was because they did not feel invited. “We in the Latinx community don't like to go as colados to fiestas, we rather be invited, ‘ahi, pues no me invito’,” Juarez said. “The notion is that if you feel invited then you're going to come.” Another factor was that the community did not see themselves represented in the park. There were not many familiar faces greeting them at the visitor center or making connections with their communities. The space felt foreign to them, and there seemed to be no reason to go to the desert and walk around.
Juarez had felt the same before he was introduced to the space.
It’s interesting how sometimes the things that are closest to home seem the most boring and are the easiest to overlook or ignore. The Sonoran Desert is the only home to hundreds if not thousands of species, and there are folks in the Tucson community who know very little about them. The biggest draw of the parks, at least for me, is that they are like giant open-air museums. It’s not just about being in the spaces and taking in nature, it’s also about learning the history of the park and facts about flora and fauna.
“Education needs to be done in a way that’s not condescending,” Juarez said. “People here for generations have been outdoors and for generations have traveled and migrated through these lands. How do you educate them on using these spaces when these are lands their families have been using for thousands of years?” Juarez came into the park because there was a need for someone who understood the complicated relationships that people from the area might have with the land. “We couldn't come out to those communities and say, ‘here's what we're going to do for you’,” he said. “We needed to find out what was going on in their community and focus on the assets rather than approaching it from a deficit model and telling them there is something they lack.” The park and the community needed to mutually understand each other, and Juarez has been playing the part of mediator for the past five years.
- Expanding the demographics -
Before Juarez joined the scene there were other players making ripples in bridging the gap between minority communities and the outdoors. One of the best places to begin that work is in schools, impacting the youth of communities. For years Don Swan has been working with the park to aid in those efforts. He began working with Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) and other organizations to engage students with the park at the University level. The Biodiversity Project, an internship under WISE, helps connect university students with k-12 schools to teach students about biodiversity, with an emphasis on Arizona. The goal is to increase the students’ knowledge and awareness of STEM fields and connect them to local areas through field trips, one of those being to Saguaro National Park. While Swan worked with higher education, the environmental education folks at the park were working to make contact with the kids from underrepresented communities. They worked with Friends of Saguaro National Park, the park’s nonprofit partner, to get grants for buses to take the kids from their schools to the park on field trips.
It was Juarez’s mission to fill the gaps where those outdoor connections were still missing. He began with Pima Community College, establishing relationships with different sectors of the school to reach its population. It was his thought that at the community college level the population is even more diverse and more local than at the university level. The other area he focused on was helping the folks from environmental education form stronger relationships with elementary and middle schools.
The connections Juarez made while working as a member of the school board were a big asset while he did outreach. “My job was to go in and talk to principals,” Juarez said. “Since they’re trying to catch kids up with reading or math, they don’t want to focus on things like field trips to a National Park. I would say, ‘Look, I understand that you guys have issues but imagine a kid who falls in love with the park and all of a sudden decides that he wants to be a scientist. In order to become a scientist, he has to learn how to read’.” The more Juarez and his team talked about different strategies the more they got people interested in coming. All of a sudden, the park became something people talked about. “When we start looking at all those connections the code begins to reveal itself and you see how these things happen,” he said. “It's exponential growth, you drop a pebble in the pond and the ripple effect starts having an impact on people.”
It’s the combined efforts of multiple people that have led to what we are finally seeing; a more and more diverse pool of visitors coming to parks. That ripple effect has snowballed and allowed people to see that, if someone like them is enjoying and recreating in these national parks then so can they.
Juarez is one of the people making these ripples, disturbing the status quo and showing others like him that it’s not only possible for them to comfortably recreate outdoors, but they can be in leadership positions that create change. “While yes, I think it's challenging to be a person of color and be a disabled person in the Park Service, it's also an opportunity,” he said. “And it's an opportunity that I can't gamble away.”