The issue of representation in the parks goes far beyond there not being a familiar face to greet you at a visitor center. There are different factors at play, and a big one is that not all forms of recreation in the outdoors are valued fairly. This is something Julie Gonzalez, now the Community Engagement Coordinator for Grand Teton National Park, passionately fights to dismantle.
Since she was a little girl, Gonzalez has been cultivating a relationship with the outdoors. Her father would take the family on trips to go camping and they would often celebrate birthdays and Easter outdoors in city or state parks.
She recalls her father bringing out the grill and making carne asada and tacos, and hotdogs for the kids. The kids running around, playing games and the adults sitting together, sharing one another's company. Her relationship with the outdoors wasn’t about going backpacking or doing long hikes, it was about building a stronger relationship with her family. That is a very valid form of recreation, but she felt as if it wasn’t valued by others as much as conventional recreation.
“I think it's important to redefine what it's like to experience the outdoors.” Gonzalez said. “Part of the lack of representation comes from having an over representation of this idea of how you can recreate in or experience a national park.”
She said the parks need to provide more “experiences where people feel like they can be themselves” in spaces like these.
“If you want to stay in a hotel and just drive around the park to look for wildlife, that's a totally valid way of experiencing this park,” Gonzalez said. “You don't have to climb the Grand to feel like you belong or are getting a full national park experience. We must give value to the way each person experiences the outdoors.”
Gonzalez, 27, is now in a position to affect change as the Community Engagement Coordinator for Grand Teton, but this hasn’t always been the case for her. She began this position in May 2021, but had been working on and off in the Park Service for five years before that. Her work includes eight separate seasons as a park ranger; three summers at Glacier National Park, one winter at Sequoia and Kings, two summers at Mount Rainier, and two winter seasons at Grand Teton.
Obtaining a full-time position at the park is hard work, but hard work is something Gonzalez is familiar with. She was born in California, grew up in Michigan, and later moved to El Paso, Texas for high school, and attended UT Austin for college. Moving around she learned to adapt quickly to environments and people, which also aided in her ease of moving around the states to work for different parks.
The national parks were always familiar to Gonzalez, but it wasn’t until she was completing her Bachelor of Science in environmental science and geology that she became involved with them directly.
“I was trying to figure out what I would do with that degree, I knew I didn't want to go into oil and gas like a lot of my peers, or environmental consulting,” Gonzalez said. “I had previously done an internship with the student conservation association, and during this time they reached out looking for participants for an internship program called NPS Academy. That’s how I was introduced to the Park Service.”
The internship began with a week of orientation, each cohort did theirs at a different park and Gonzalez’s was held in the Great Smoky Mountains. It was her first time in a national park, and she spent her whole time there learning about conservation, what it means to be a minority outdoors and what career opportunities she could take advantage of.
The internship itself was at Glacier National Park and during her time there she fell in love with the idea of working outdoors and with people from all across the world. Not only that, but it was also her first time experiencing more intense forms of recreation, like long hikes or backpacking, and she enjoyed it. From there she did her best to work every season for the park service, and now she holds her full time position at Grand Teton.
“I was recently asked to think about the difference between inclusion and belonging, and inclusion is bringing someone into something that already exists versus creating something new and alongside them so that they feel like they belong and there's ownership there,” Gonzalez said. “That's where I see my role as a community engagement coordinator come in. I have to ask myself how I can make this place more about belonging and working with partnerships and communities and those grassroots efforts that are already taking place. I have to trust those connections and relate to that population in a way that is authentic to really make change.”
There are many facets to her role as community engagement coordinator, one is education programming, that being field trips, classroom visits and distance learning. Another is as liaison between the park and the community.
As a liaison she aids the park in creating youth development programming with various partners that typically focus on underrepresented or underserved communities. They not only talk about the park, but also teach participants social emotional learning. This includes leadership, team building, communication, resilience and building a community amongst themselves.
Those experiences she’s having are exactly what she wants to be doing she emphasized. Gonzalez, like so many others, is working hard to challenge the norm of what it looks like to recreate outdoors and who it looks like, and it’s something she wants to continue doing for the rest of her life.
“I think it's important for us people of color to ask ourselves what are the connections that we already have with nature and the outdoors that aren't being showcased and why that is,” she said. “And then work to do something about it.”