When Freddy Fernandez-Ramirez, 30, signed up to become a park ranger, he never imagined the job would include weekly Instagram segments of the Sonoran Desert and signing autographs.
Fernandez-Ramirez has been working for the park for 8 years now, but his journey to the desert was a winding one. He was born in East LA and spent his toddler years alongside his sister and cousins, all of whom were first generation Americans. After some time, the families got fed up with the earthquakes and occasional protests and one by one made their way to Tucson, Arizona.
Every summer after their move, Fernandez-Ramirez’s parents would send him and his sister to live in Rayón, Sonora with their grandparents. The small village is about an hour northeast of Hermosillo and surrounded by the wild desert mountains. As far as he’s concerned his family has been living there for over 200 years.
“The best and most beautiful memories I cherish took place in the Sonoran Desert, growing up there in Rayón Sonora with my grandparents,” he said. “I learned a lot from them, and their love for the desert rubbed off on me.” Fernandez-Ramirez spent those summers harvesting pitaya from organ pipe cactuses, learning about the flora and fauna and admiring his grandfather as he took off on horseback, returning days later.
He was the youngest of the pack in Rayón and really looked up to his cousins for guidance and knowledge of the desert. When they went harvesting for pitayas, each person would have their own bucket to fill. In the areas of the Arizona Southwest, the native Tohono O'odham, meaning desert people, use the woody ribs of saguaros to harvest the fruit from various cactuses. In Rayón, Fernandez-Ramirez and his family stacked broom sticks together and added barbed wire to the end to harvest the fruit from the organ pipe. With their buckets and tools in hand they went out to the unrelenting desert and stayed until the buckets overflowed. Aside from enduring the desert heat, he and his cousins had to navigate through a forest of spines and keep their eyes out for dangerous snakes and animals. Fernandez-Ramirez looks back on this time fondly, and although he recalls a couple of times where he was lost in the desert with no water, he said, “you know, I'm still here.”
As a teenager he spent less and less summers in Rayón, and eventually none at all. Through those years his connection to the desert seemed to disappear. He hung out with friends in Tucson and stopped interacting with or visiting the desert.
Then one day, while studying criminal justice at the Pima Community College, he heard a little voice inside his head that told him to go back. To visit the desert and see what it had to say. He saw on google maps there was a large portion of green blocked land to the east that said Saguaro National Park. “It had a lot of hiking options and I was intrigued, so I had to go check it out,” he said. “I fell in love with the place, it reminded me so much of Rayón.” He felt the desert was calling him back and at the visitor center he asked if there were any opportunities to volunteer with the park. Of course, there were, and the leadership at the park was more than happy to take him in.
Fernandez-Ramirez was young and bilingual, and the park’s volunteers were mostly made up of retirees. Even then they were trying to diversify the people of the park and his help was one they welcomed with open arms.
“In the process of being a volunteer I lost my grandparents,” he said. “When I lost them, I felt even more connected to the land. I wish I had reconnected with the desert before they passed. I had so many questions that I wanted to ask, and I missed out on that. But being out in the desert definitely reminds me of where I'm from and my family. I'm really proud of that.”
Fernandez-Ramirez volunteered in the east district of the park for a year and a half and during that time Friends of Saguaro National Park, the park’s partner and a nonprofit organization, started a new program, the Next Generation Ranger Corp program. It was a paid internship with the park that paved the way for him to get a federal position after completion. He was one of the first to get through the program and has now been an interpretive park ranger at Saguaro National Park for four years, coming up on five this January 2022. “I love what the Park Service stands for,” he said. “I think it's awesome and I want to do my part in this.”
Recently Fernandez-Ramirez has been a part of a new Instagram segment the park calls “Freddy Fridays” in which he, Freddy Fernandez-Ramirez, explains something about the Sonoran Desert to the park’s 171,000 followers. “Anytime I'm out there hiking I just look at my surroundings and see what's around me and what the desert wants to show me that day, and that’s what I talk about,” he said. Usually, he talks about whatever is happening in the desert at that particular time. During our chat the desert flowers were in full bloom and he had focused on that for the past two weeks. More recently the topics have included scorpions, toads and even one episode taking a backstage look at the production of a “Freddy Friday".
There’s no script, no pressure, and Fernandez-Ramirez is a natural in front of the camera. His comfort zone is in the desert and that’s where he has built his life to be. “I've gotten really good feedback from coworkers and a lot of visitors out here,” he said. “I actually had my first autograph ever two weeks ago, it was so funny I thought, ‘I don't even have one, what do I put?’ so I just put my initials, F. G. F R. with a smiley face.”
His infectious personality makes the videos a breeze to watch and it is that same trait that makes him so good at his job, interacting with visitors and helping them have the best experience possible. He tries to use his Spanish as often as he can and is always excited when he hears a family speaking Spanish and sees a more diverse crowd going to visit the park.
When he first started working at the park Fernandez-Ramirez felt a bit out of place, and he knew he wasn’t the only one. As a visitor to the parks, it can be intimidating if you don’t see anybody like you. It’s important to have a diverse workforce in the parks because if everybody is white, male and wearing a uniform, some communities will feel ostracized in a space that’s meant for all.
The Park Service has definitely gotten better at this in the past five to ten years, but there is still a lot of work to be done. “The National Park Service has been around for over 100 years, and for most of those 100 years we interpreters have been telling the stories from a white perspective and that needs to change,” Fernandez-Ramirez said. “We need the support of our minorities if we want the National Park Service to last another 100 years and then beyond that, we need their voices to be heard.”
That change happens when people of diverse backgrounds are able to hold these positions of leadership and can extend their love for the parks or the outdoors to their communities.
“Now that my family knows more about the parks and that I’m a ranger I have my nephews, nieces and cousins that have seen me on social media or even PBS and they're like, ‘oh I wanna be like uncle Freddy. Tio Freddy, he's so cool!’,” Fernandez-Ramirez said. “Just by me being a park Ranger it has opened the doors to my whole family, I love what it’s done.” Those small impacts to his immediate family create ripple effects that will hopefully encourage his nieces’ friends to go to the park, or a mom or anybody who has some sort of connection with him.
“Nature does not discriminate, it's welcoming and it belongs to all,” he said. “Just being out in nature you feed the soul and body.”
“If you come to Saguaro National Park ask for Ranger Freddy, I can help you out.”