For the National Day of Racial Healing at Mount Holyoke College, we center powerful narratives within our own community of scholars and practitioners including Dr. Olivia Aguilar, the Leslie and Sarah Miller Director of the Miller Worley Center for the Environment and Associate Professor of Environmental Studies. We are excited to feature Olivia Aguilar's new book, A Latine Outdoors Experience: Remembering, Resisting, and Reimagining as we continue to centertruth telling and racial healing.. Dr. Aguilar will be in conversation with Dr. Hiram Ramirez and DEI Fellow, Roselyn Marrero '28.

About the book: The book provides a much-needed narrative at a time when the absence of such a narrative is both glaring and in demand.Contributing to literature that has laid the groundwork for re-examining the relationships between communities of color and the environment, this book further illustrates how the outdoor and nature experiences of people of color in the United States, specifically the Latine community, may be different than those predominantly represented in the environmental field. Olivia Aguilar collects and shares cuentos (stories) from members of the national organization, Latino Outdoors, while weaving her own narrative throughout, to provide a rich description of what being a Latine outdoors means in their own words. From spending time with familia to enjoying public spaces and creating outdoor oriented communities on social media, the memories and stories collected here show a thread of resistance and resilience throughout. Through remembering, Aguilar and the contributors in her book reclaim their narrative and reimagine the outdoor experience from the Latine perspective, ultimately charting a course towards a more inclusive environmental field.