Meeting Dez: Our Newest Team Member
The work continues. As does the growth of our team. So, meet Dez. Dez is the incoming Program Director for the BIPOC Conservation Initiative, and we are so excited to have her on board. We are grateful that Dez indulged us with a little Q&A. Read on to get to know a bit about her. And learn more about our BIPOC Conservation Program here.
What’s on your nightstand right now?
A baby monitor, jade face roller, an eye mask a friend made for me, Kiehl’s hand cream, melatonin gummies, a fiddle leaf fig plant, and two books: Heartberries by Terese Marie Mailhot and Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel S.F. Heller
You can quickly see my priorities lol: childcare, skincare, sleepcare, relationship care.
What did you accomplish in the last year that you are most proud of?
I birthed a baby for the first time, bought a house for the first time, and landed my dream job at Wild Diversity! It was a big year.
What is your favorite podcast or TV show?
I’m trying to get more into podcasts, but I don’t have a good attention span for them. Lately I try to listen to: Desert Oracle, and The Plot Thickens by TCM: Lucille Ball.
These aren’t my favorites, but right now on my TV show rotation I’m watching Somebody Somewhere, The Gilded Age, Succession, and Bridgerton. Soapy period dramas and dark comedies are apparently my thing right now.
Cats or dogs? And why?
BOTH! But I only have dogs right now, two of them. Dogs are fun sidekicks, but kitties bring a calm, cozy energy to the home and are so cute when they sit on a windowsill on a rainy Portland afternoon! Meow!
Where did you grow up, and what’s your relationship to that place now?
I grew up near Los Angeles, California - but I tell people more often that I grew up in Southern California because it captures an entire region and culture. Growing up in L.A. means being on the freeways and roads constantly as a kid, and doing all the California things: going to the beach and driving along the coastline, going to the mountains (and looking at them), driving through the desert, driving to Disneyland or In-N-Out Burger, and above all: sitting in lots of traffic in 90 degree heat.
I’ve been in Portland for ten years now, and I STILL miss Southern California like something awful. I can’t help it! I’ve tried to shake my hometown time and time again, but I miss Los Angeles deeply. The hot sidewalks, smells of sizzling taco vendors, sunshine on my face, Dodger games, the beaches, hearing Spanish being spoken daily, and good music being blasted from someone’s car somewhere. I guess I miss the culture of L.A. because there’s nothing like it anywhere else, it is such a unique experience, especially as a Mexican-American. Growing up there is vastly different from what you’ve heard or seen on TV or social media. And living there is hard, no doubt - but the nostalgia and richness of the daily human experience there is always home in my heart.
Who is your favorite person and why?
My favorite people are probably my grandparents. Grandma Rose and Grandpa Bob. They are just fun and easy to be around. They always make me laugh, they like listening to music, watching old movies together, they taught me to cook good food, do the right thing, and how to have a sense of humor. I feel pretty fortunate I’ve had them in my life as long as I have.
What drew you to Wild Diversity?
I’ve been following Wild Diversity since around the time they launched a few years ago. I saw that this group was created for people of color outdoors and at the time had been doing work for women of color in travel and the outdoors. I found Wild Diversity in a google search and thought, wow, I gotta meet whomever started this group and become their friend. AND I DID!
What is your favorite memory of the outdoors in the Pacific Northwest?
Rafting down the Rogue River with a group of friends, and singing karaoke with acoustic instruments by the campfire is one of my happiest PNW outdoor memories. Also…backpacking for seven days with a group of women out in the Wallowas for the first time and summiting Eagle Cap ranks pretty high up there as well!
What is your go-to breakfast?
In dreams: a green smoothie, a bagel with cream cheese and lox, or scrambled eggs with rice and kimchi.
In reality: coffee on an empty stomach and maybe a banana or piece of toast if there’s any bread in the house.
#GOALS
What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?
Something along the lines of dark chocolate with raspberry, but lately I’ve been revisiting the old school Ben & Jerry flavors.
What does conservation mean to you?
Conservation [work], to me, is a practice of preserving, caring, and advocating for parts of our environment: land, water, air, animal, human. The environment is much more than just quiet landscapes – it includes people, animals, energies, soil to grow food in, so much more. Our program is here to question and challenge traditional narratives around conservation.
How were you introduced to the conservation movement?
I was on a river rafting trip on the Colorado River with a group of older baby boomers that had built their careers in conservation in Montana. One of the guys in the group was telling me about his job working with tribes in the region on land management. It was like a record scratch moment. I just thought…hmmm, that sounds like very dynamic work and I should probably figure out what it takes to do work like that. I had already been doing some strategy work around the #diversifyoutdoors movement, so the idea of radicalizing the ways we care for nature seemed intriguing.
A few years later, I was on another river rafting trip in Oregon, and someone told me about a conservation group that was hiring in Portland. And so began my career in conservation, but it didn’t happen quickly or easily. Everything I had done up to that point had been in media and creative storytelling. My focus had been on BIPOC driven narratives and story, and there wasn’t a lot of this in conservation at that time, so the last few years was spent sort of marrying the two worlds. I like to think of myself as a non-traditional conservationist, someone that sort of stumbled into conservation, found a relationship with it, and is re-writing narratives around it so that it feels more inclusive and invitational to all BIPOC. This approach hasn’t always been agreed with or liked, but it works for me. I believe we all deserve a place in conservation, and it too needs us.
