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Today, Latino communities face direct threats to our health, well-being, and safety as the Trump administration’s policies threaten our access to public lands while overpolicing public spaces and censoring Latino cultural and historic context.
These attacks come despite a long history of Latino leadership in protecting the land itself. The fight for conservation and climate action is inseparable from the fight for cultural recognition and racial justice.
For generations, Latino communities have been at the forefront of efforts to protect our public lands and to ensure all people have unrestricted access to outdoor spaces. GreenLatinos has supported efforts to steward accessible public lands by helping establish national monuments in California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and Texas. This leadership is rooted in a deep connection to the environment and the land.
Now we confront efforts to rescind the protections we have worked so hard for. Public lands are foundational to the health, culture, and physical well-being of Latino communities and all of our neighbors. But current policies attack our communities on two fronts: cultural erasure via censorship and physical threats via overpolicing and mass surveillance. This is a direct attack on our right to nature, history, and safety.
In March, President Donald Trump directed the Interior Department to remove information from public land that recounts histories of oppression in the United States. Since then, the administration has removed numerous exhibits that focus on the history of communities of color and women in the United States.
The examples have been numerous and painful reminders of whose stories this administration chooses to erase:
The Smithsonian’s Molina Family Latino Gallery at the National Museum of American History was quietly closed after the White House labeled several Latino artworks “objectionable.” Among them was illustrator Felipe Galindo Gómez’s 4th of July from the South Border (1999), which was exhibited in the Molina gallery exhibition “¡Presente! A Latino History of the United States.”
Stories honoring Black, Latino, and women veterans were deleted from Arlington National Cemetery.
The word “transgender” was scrubbed from Stonewall National Monument.
Signage on slavery, Japanese incarceration, and violence against Indigenous people was removed from Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.
Exhibits on women’s leadership, Tribal land dispossession, and eugenics were stripped from Muir Woods National Monument.
Climate change language was erased from Acadia National Park.
A photo showing the “Scourged Back” of Peter Gordon, a man freed from enslavement, was pulled off the walls of Fort Pulaski National Monument.
Each of these erasures distorts our shared history and denies future generations the full truth of this country.
Excluding Latino communities from the narrative in public spaces meant to immortalize United States history is poor preservation management and an act of cultural violence. Public lands are more than green spaces: they are open-air museums that contain our nation’s complex and often painful history. Censoring this history diminishes our nation’s truth, delegitimizes our historic roots in this nation, and makes public lands unsafe and inaccessible.
That same impulse to control the narrative is now extending into our physical presence on public land.
In September, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum redirected conservation dollars in the Land and Water Conservation Fund for “security installations within or adjacent to public parks and recreation areas.” This can result in a proliferation of polluting generator-powered surveillance systems, cameras recording the biometric data and habits of park users and passersby without consent, and the presence of immigration policy enforcers. These installations deteriorate quality outdoor recreation experiences and disrupt wildlife and residents, creating unwelcoming and unsafe conditions. Public recreational lands should be places of healing and recreation, not zones of fear that deter access.
We already know the consequences of weaponizing surveillance systems. ICE has used facial recognition and location tracking technologies that disproportionately target Black and Brown residents. Public lands should not be tools for racial profiling in immigration enforcement. Communities of color are three times more likely than others to live without access to nature. Turning our shared natural heritage into a landscape of surveillance and suspicion only exacerbates this existing inequity.
Together, we must commit to defending our long legacy of Latino leadership in conservation efforts by demanding equitable access to nature. Protecting our public lands is just as much about climate action as it is about cultural heritage and racial justice.
This administration must reverse course. They must support programs that expand outdoor recreation access in underserved areas, truthfully interpret our history, and prohibit the use of public lands for immigration enforcement or racial profiling. Our right to nature is non-negotiable.
Olivia Juarez is the Public Land Program Director at GreenLatinos and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
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A “One Small Step” Campaign for 250th: From ABC News, “The LIBRE Initiative, a nonprofit funded in part by the Koch family's conservative political network, is launching a seven-figure nationwide campaign to reach Latino voters ahead of the country's 250th anniversary.”
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