On a sunny Saturday morning at Veltus Park in Glenwood Springs, Cathy Vidal and her son, Alex, are planting their third tree seedling of the morning.
“Let me see the plant, Alex,” Cathy says. She directs him to dig the hole a little wider, so it’ll fit the seedling.
But their sharp shooter shovel keeps hitting roots, rocks, and other hard objects. “We need to remove the rock in the middle,” Alex suggests. Eventually, the shovel isn’t enough, so the pair go and fetch a heavy metal pole that functions as a lever to pry away bigger rocks.
“I don’t know how you’re carrying that like it’s nothing,” Alex says as his mom works on a particularly large rock.
Cathy laughs, and replies, “Mom power.”
Vidal says Alex’s school requires a certain number of volunteer hours. They’ve done a lot of different projects, but this is their first time planting trees. Their relative lack of experience doesn’t slow them down, though, because the Vidals do quite a bit of gardening at their home in Glenwood Springs.
“Yeah, he just gave me—for Mother's Day—a strawberry plant,” Cathy recounts. “So it gave me a good amount of strawberries, and right now I have a tomato plant that's going crazy.”
This tree planting event is a collaboration between the city of Glenwood Springs, Roaring Fork Outdoor Volunteers, and public lands advocacy nonprofit Wilderness Workshop, for Latino Conservation Week, which takes place from September 13-21.
It’s a celebration of the Latino community in the outdoors: enjoying outdoor recreation and time spent in nature, as well as a time to acknowledge the work the community is doing to steward and protect the natural environment.
This year’s celebrations are taking place in a much different political climate, with increased immigration enforcement across the country, as well as attempts to roll back environmental protections.
Local groups aren’t stopping celebrations due to increased immigration enforcement in Colorado and across the country, but they are celebrating differently.
Alejandro Jaquez-Caro leads Wilderness Workshop’s Latino outreach program, Defiende Nuestra Tierra, which means ‘defend our land. This year, he wanted to emphasize smaller events to both keep the community safe, and to create an environment where people can connect with each other.
“I think events like this are great because sometimes we can get super distracted with those nationwide events and social media and the news,” he said. “But… we have a lot of community here and I think that's a really big strength of our valley.”
Olivia Juarez is the public lands program director for GreenLatinos, a national nonprofit that works on environmental issues facing the Latino community. Juarez uses they/them pronouns. They say decisions around public lands are linked to racism and anti-immigrant policies.
One example they cited is a recently issued secretarial order from Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, which among other things, authorizes money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund to be used for security technology in parks and recreation areas. Juarez and others worry this will be used for immigration enforcement.
“In a world where federal resources can be used to just surveil the public on our public land, and carry out immigration enforcement, our parks become more dangerous for Black and brown individuals and their families,” they said.
Other groups, like the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition, offered other critiques of the secretarial order, saying that it hinders conservation tools used by the Bureau of Land Management and restricts access for recreation.
Juarez said increased surveillance adds another barrier for the Latino community to be fully involved in the outdoors.
“Parks are completely inappropriate places for that kind of activity to take place, period,” they said, referring to immigration enforcement. “Outdoor recreation spaces are places where families intergenerationally should be able to feel safe, to be able to feel welcomed.”
GreenLatinos signed onto a letter earlier this summer, condemning immigration enforcement actions that take place during outdoor education activities for school-aged children, and asking the federal government to discontinue such practices.
“Targeting children during outdoor time will force children back indoors before they can even discover the connections to nature that are so beneficial to their development,” the letter reads.
Cathy Vidal said she’s seen that fear locally in her community in Glenwood Springs. She said people are hesitant to go to events labelled as “Latino” or “Hispanic.”
“People have a lot of fear of doing things, just (because of) misinformation,” she said. “Being deported and arrested” she said are the main worries.
Juarez said that fear makes it even more important to celebrate things like Latino Conservation Week.
“Just making people rethink, like how they can celebrate their heritage and connections with nature in a way that is more safe,” they said. “What makes you proud to be a person who has a cultural connection with Mother Nature.”
Alejandro Jaquez-Caro said he hopes that events like today’s tree planting can show people how rewarding stewardship is, and encourage them to connect even more with the outdoors.
“Hopefully this kind of inspires them to come out, return, take a look at all these plants and in maybe a year, see how much they've grown, have some pride with that,” he said. “But the other piece too is kind of that comfort piece of being outdoors. Maybe the next step for some of these folks is to go on a hike with us, go camping.”
For her part, Cathy Vidal says environmental issues important to her, especially in the face of worsening drought in Colorado. It’s something her family back in Chihuahua, Mexico knows very well, and she worries for the next generation.
“Water's not accessible all day in the part of where my family's from,” she explained. “So here, you're so spoiled in a way that you don't even have to think about it. So it'd be interesting to think that my kids', kids (might) have to shower with a bucket.”
It brings Vidal joy to see Alex enjoying the beautiful natural world that Colorado has to offer.
“He just likes to go float down the river,” she recounted. “Put little life jackets on and jump off and go down.”
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
