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Apr 28, 2017 | By Nina Djukic | UC Berkeley
It’s mid-September and I am running on a road in rural Costa Rica, the humidity so heavy in the air that I am barely moving. The road is unpaved and stuffed with stones from volcano flows that left this here years and years ago. Behind me rides a troop of little boys on bicycles and scruffy brown puppies chase each other chasing motorcycles, five of them in a row. One boy calls in accented English, “I love you!! Nice to meet you!!”.

It has been raining all afternoon and I have a plastic bag in my pocket to save my phone from when it starts again. The hillsides are littered with black-and-white cows and skinny, potbellied horses. One night at dusk walking home from swimming the road was filled with a running bull, escaping from its master who yelled insults from the back of his motorcycle. There are caimanes in the lake at night but I swim anyway, out into the center of that blue bowl ringed with hills, past the pilings in the black mud that are actually trees that drowned here when they dammed the river. Most afternoons there are thunderstorms and sometimes the lightning starts before I can get out. I risk it anyway.
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It is early October and I am traveling in Nicaragua, walking on a footpath through the jungle because roads are impractical so we take boats. The lanchas are packed with children, burlap sacks, and palettes of food. The air is filled with the smell of gasoline and the rush of fish-smelling water. When someone wants to get off we just stop the boat on the bank, and the trails they take look like they go nowhere, winding right into the bright green jungle. There’s a girl my age kissing her boyfriend over her baggage on the riverbank, and a grandmother comes on board to take a baby from the boat. The parents clasp each other’s arms and smile. I watch one man get off on a dock where nine men are sitting, and he stands in the middle of the circle and shakes each one’s hand, one by one.

In this little town along the river I walk the concrete trails paved over and over by the same feet, past the ramshackle houses on stilts with huge pigs sleeping under them and the chickens running underfoot the donkeys. A flock of lively acid green parakeets swoops joyfully overhead in a flurry of feathers and noise.
In Costa Rica, they say that every town has three things: a church, a pulperia, and a soccer field. Here, an old Spanish fortress hangs broken over the brightly colored roofs of the living, tin patched with plastic. There are kids playing in the muddy river and peach hibiscus flowers blooming over the old stones.

When I crossed the border from Costa Rica into Nicaragua I crossed on foot, hopping off the chicken bus to walk with all the others. There’s a customs building for each nation. You have to get stamped in one to move on to the other, but most who cross here go illegally. At the stamping booth, a woman asked me to help her fill her form out while another looked over my shoulder to see which boxes I checked. For some of these people, who live on the rural outsides of these country’s arbitrary borders, the messy scrawl of their name in the signature section of their passport is the only time they have written their own name in years. On the other side of the border, no different but in name, we sit on the hot asphalt and wait for the van that will take us to San Carlos, a small town 30 minutes away. Nine out of ten of us waiting crossed illegally, and I watched them climb into the van in a mass of dark hair and suitcases, trudging between shrubs into the endless dusty sun.

When I come back again to cross this border, just after sunrise on another morning, twenty are already walking to where there’s a border – in places barbed wire fence, in places the Rio San Juan, in places imaginary. They are walking to a place called Costa Rica, where 6km from the border the coffee is three times as expensive, and the pay is better, and the government saved 25% of the land for national parks. On the way back to San Jose I’m crammed against the window with another woman, headed south. We sit here on this bus together, this woman and I, but I crossed the line with a blue foldered document and she slipped beneath the fence like a shadow. Underneath all those concepts and economies and laws, she hoisted her bag onto her back and walked.

I am thinking: how much of traveling is just being good at waiting?

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Nina Djukic is a third year Conservation & Resource studies major at UC Berkeley. She spends most of her time reading, eating chocolate, volunteering at clinics, and making tremendously bad puns. She hopes to be a doctor and worthwhile citizen of the world.

Apr 26, 2017 | By the GCRC Planning Committee: Christina Acosta, Violet Barton, Danielle Bermudez, Maria Mora, Daniel Rios, Rodolfo Rodriguez, Jamin Shih, Michelle Yeung | UC Merced

On March 2 2017, the Graduate Cultural Resource Center (GCRC) officially opened its doors with its first event: “We Wear Our Crowns: An Evening of Female Empowerment” hosted by fifth year Interdisciplinary Humanities graduate student Kim McMillon, which included poetry, music, art, and spoken word with Black Panthers Charlotte Hill O’Neal “Mama C” and Tarika Lewis.

“This was a liberating, historical moment for students of color at UC Merced, where we stood in solidarity with one another to heal and build community” said third year sociology graduate student, Maria Mora.

The GCRC comes from the organizing efforts of graduate students of color across multiple identities, who advocated and mobilized for a safe space and asserted the right to belong. UC Merced was the only UC without a cultural center of any kind, despite being widely publicized by administration as the most diverse UC campus. In the spring of 2016, the graduate student advisor to GSA on Climate, Diversity and Equity, and Interdisciplinary Humanities graduate student, Daniel Rios, presented a co-written resolution to the Graduate Student Association to establish a graduate cultural resource center at UC Merced, which passed on March 14, 2016. In this process, students of color envisioned a space where they could come together and acknowledge their daily lived experiences regarding institutional racism, neoliberal capitalism, cisgender heteropatriarchy, and oppressive micro-aggressions they face in academia. The GCRC embraces an intersectional, social justice, and emancipatory education praxis that affirms students of color intersectional identities, and validates the marginalizations they encounter daily. The GCRC creates a place and a space where marginalized communities can find healing through cultural events, political organizing, and solidarity with one another.

“We enter this space with a shared commitment and understanding to mutual dignity and respect, non-violence, social justice-centered intentionality, and transformative justice” reads the GCRC’s mission statement.

“In the future, we hope that GCRC will affirm students of color in recognition of the emotional, political and intellectual labor that we give to the university, and the importance of building equity in higher education” states Danielle Bermudez, a fourth year Interdisciplinary Humanities graduate student.

In April 2017, GCRC will offer a series of events that highlight historical and ongoing oppressions as well as collective agency and resistances of people of color and their intersectional identities, including womxn, income-insecure, LGBTQ+, non-binary, gender non-conforming, gender fluid, disabled, international, immigrant, refugee, and non-traditional graduate students. These events seek to foster a climate where students of color feel safe expressing themselves and their lived experiences without fear of being targeted, and to affirm our identities and resiliency. GCRC events will reflect our Community Guidelines, which exalt the rights to be respected, to be treated with dignity and respect, to be affirmed, and the community’s duty to challenge oppression and to recognize that [our] silence will not protect us. April events will include a panel with local community activists in Merced, the visioning of a mural, a presentation on Cultural Centers and HSI Status by UC Student Regent Marcela Ramirez, a workshop on White Supremacy and Anti-Blackness, a Know Your IX training, and healing circles, in collaboration with the undergraduate Intercultural Hub’s grand opening on the week of March 20th, 2017.

“It is our hope that the GCRC will grow and serve to dismantle the oppressions that students of color face in academia, as well as to bridge graduate and undergraduate students in our joint pursuit of transforming the institution by advocating for social justice, and to also increase the number of faculty of color in order to thrive in the university” states Christina Acosta, a first year sociology graduate student.

For more information about GCRC, visit our facebook page.

Apr 26, 2017 | By Lorenzo Tuason | UC Riverside

The results of the 2016 presidential election have caused nothing but eruptions of outrage among dissatisfied voters, condoning of heinous crimes against minorities, and an uncovering of the vile issues plaguing the States underneath a state of stagnation. The election of Donald Trump has caused such an uproar throughout the nation that we may experience radical changes soon. This may be the necessary spark that will help cultivate a much stronger union in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, this is all future talk. Let us delve into the present.

In light of the recent appointment of president-elect Trump, we must take into account the conditions that we now face under his executive administration and act accordingly. Human rights advocates have been spreading their support in the battle against social injustices occurring around the nation. Since Trump’s appointment, the prevalence of these events is quickly increasing as more harm and challenges are being inflicted towards minorities. The number of people who resist the rising oppression is also increasing in correlation to the frequency of these same events. Overall, the need for societal repairs is rapidly becoming more apparent as the country makes its social problems more distinct. As a strong proponent of environmental justice, I, too, believe in the need for environmental restoration and conservation, as challenges will be inevitably imposed by Donald Trump, the antithesis of Mother Nature.

The Trump administration will further degrade the conditions of our environment because of its stance on climate change. It is quite baffling that our president-elect continually believes that climate change is a mere hoax. While his words won’t harm the environment, it is the purpose behind these same words that will. To showcase his disbelief of climate change, Trump appointed Myron Ebell as the head of the EPA transition team. Myron Ebell is a man who was branded as a “climate criminal” during the 2015 Paris climate summit because of his denial of climate change and refusal to accept scientific evidence pointing to adverse environmental impacts. Ebell’s administration of the EPA will eventually decelerate the agency’s environmental sustainability progress as he circulates his dull environmental concerns within the agency’s culture.

Additionally, Trump has also indicated his intention to dismantle Obama’s environmental policies. Executive Order 13693 seeks to cut the federal greenhouse gas emissions by 40% over the next decade beginning in 2015. Once fully established in the White House, it’s plausible that Trump will discontinue the executive order and counter our attempts to have cleaner sources of air and energy. The country might even experience a bigger setback when Trump “pull[s] the United States out of the agreements reached in the Paris Accord,” according to Jennifer Guenther, an Environmental Law professor at UCR. The Paris Accord was the same event that branded Ebell as a climate criminal. The agreement that was primarily decided in this assembly was to aim for the global mitigation of adverse impacts of climate change, which includes lowering greenhouse gas emissions. By pulling out of the Paris Accords in accordance with the dismantlement of Obama’s federal policies, the United States will look like a cold and heartless environmental antagonist.

As the Trump administration slowly becomes established in the government, the environment also slowly becomes more victimized by the negation of policies and regulations that are conservative in its conditions. Due to Trump’s erratic behavior during the coverage of the presidential election, it remains uncertain as to what he plans on doing next. Guenther stated that “[Trump] does seem to be headed toward the expansion of business and the possible expense of the environment. This puts a higher burden on states to ensure that the environment is protected within their boundaries and utilize the existing federal laws in support of those goals.”

Donald Trump may have a heavy influence at the federal level, but the individual states also have a certain autonomy that enables them to nullify preemption as it did with the Clean Air Act, which allows the states to control their own air quality standards.

In similar fashion, Victoria Ciudad-Real, a UCR student, expressed her concerns stating that “California, being the liberal pro-environment state that we are, will be able to resist any changes or at least try our best to continue regulation.”

Her thoughts conveniently align with Jessica Hardcastle’s statement in her article, Will California Climate Regulations Trump a Weak EPA?, about California being a “leader on climate policy for more than a decade” considering its comprehensive and ambitious climate change regulations.

Even though it is hard to predict what Trump will do in the future, we can maintain our resilience by upholding the integrity of our local governments, such as what California has been modeling for years.
We, as local warriors for justice, can show solidarity and strength as we continue to resist the villains that have ingrained themselves in the center of our republic. We may face disturbances in the force with the impending doom that the Trump administration will bring, but there is also hope that this disruptive behavior will ignite a progressive movement that will better safeguard the water from which we drink, the air from which we breathe, and the soil from which we flourish.

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Lorenzo Tuason is a 4th year Marketing major at University of California, Riverside. Outside of academia, he advocates for improving our treatment towards our oceans and works closely with the environmental non-profit organization, Heal the Bay. He spends his free time watching comedy shows or rock climbing. In the future, he hopes to learn how to swim in order to fully embrace his passion for the ocean.