74°F
weather icon Clear

Latinos find their roots at Lake Mead

Conservation and nature are near and dear to Diana Tapia and Cecilia Arteaga. So the pair, who are interning this summer as Lake Mead National Recreation Area communication specialists, set out to create an event to combine their love of nature and their goal of celebrating Latino heritage.

The Find Your Roots event they organized Saturday morning helped start Latino Conservation Week. Tapia and Arteaga, who landed their gigs through the Latino Heritage Internship Program, joined four volunteers to clean purple sage seedlings and transplant plants in the park’s nursery.

Tapia and Arteaga said their grandparents always recycled and conserved, storing salsa and beans in old sour cream containers and forgoing the dryer to hang laundry out on a clothesline.

“It’s still keeping our Mother Earth in mind,” Arteaga said.

Find Your Roots began around 8 a.m. with a short hike in the cactus garden, led by Tapia. Tattoos of a compass on her right forearm and mountains on her left biceps stood as emblems of her navigating skills.

She showed off some of the plants native to the desert, including the brittlebush. In the summer, its leaves are washed out and gray. But in the spring, the leaves are a vibrant sunset orange.

The brittlebrush’s colors lingered with Tapia, but Arteaga remembered creosote’s scent.

“It smells like desert rain,” she said.

Down the road inside the park lay a cream-colored greenhouse: the Song Dog Native Plant Nursery, named for the coyotes that scatter mesquite seeds around the desert.

Saturday’s group gathered outside to hear Kelly Wallace explain the importance of saving native plants. Because a portion of Interstate 11 is being built on part of the park’s land, Wallace and her team salvaged plants that could have been destroyed during construction and kept them to replant later.

“We pay attention to the genetics of a particular area,” said Wallace, biologist and nursery manager. She said the nursery manages a collection of at least 200 species of seeds, keeping them in a walk-in refrigerator.

“It’s like the Fort Knox of seeds,” Tapia said.

In the nursery, four-wing saltbushes that germinated and grew their roots in a cone-shaped container were transplanted into a bigger pot for more room to grow. Turning the container upside down, volunteers grabbed onto the root and placed the plant in new soil.

“Ah, it collapsed on me,” said Juan Robledo, a volunteer with Chispa, a League of Conservation Voters subset that caters to Latinos and families and aims to influence policymakers.

Robledo found the root and righted the plant.

Just as they hope to help the plants grow, organizers from Saturday’s event hope awareness of nature will grow during Latino Conservation Week.

“We’re trying to pretty much come together to get people to experience their natural lands and develop that dialogue with the Latino heritage,” Tapia said. “It’s part of our culture.”

Contact Briana Erickson at berickson@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5244. Follow @brianarerick on Twitter.

THE LATEST
BCHS students win robotics competition

A trip to the workshop for the High Scalers, the robotics team at Boulder City High School in 2024 was much like a visit in 2023. Stuff used to make and practice with the robots built by the team everywhere, six or seven kids gathered there after school and a faculty advisor ensconced in the back of the room at a desk.

Mays in as interim city manager

May 8. That is City Manager Taylour Tedder’s last day working for Boulder City. In other words, Tuesday was Tedder’s final city council meeting.

Council establishes separate pool fund

Things appear to be heating up in terms of motion toward at least initial steps in Boulder City building a new pool. Those steps are not anything that residents will see for a while, but they set the stage.

BCPD closes graffiti case

Thanks to business surveillance cameras, the city’s vigilant license plate reader and “good old-fashioned detective work,” one of the most visible crimes the city has seen this year was solved and arrests made.

Ethics article on hold

In last week’s article on former Boulder City Fire Chief Will Gray’s termination, it mentioned that a follow-up on the Nevada Ethics Commission complaint filed by Gray against Councilman Steve Walton would appear in this week’s edition.

Student Council shines with 2 awards

The Boulder City High School Student Council received a pair of prestigious awards within the past two weeks to add to the list already on their proverbial mantle.

Former fire chief Gray discusses termination

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind for the city, and specifically the fire department, as questions of whether or not Will Gray was still employed as that department’s chief spread through town.

Breeding proposal breeds opposition

Judging by the number of people speaking out against it during public comment at the last city council meeting and the tone of numerous social media posts, the proposal to allow for licensed pet breeders to operate in Boulder City is itself breeding a growing opposition. And the opposition appears to be spilling over into other pet-centric issues, including the fact that, unlike anywhere else in Clark County, Boulder City does not require dogs to be on a leash in public.

Wanted: A good home for theater seats

For those who have either grown up in Boulder City or are longtime residents, the Boulder City Theatre holds a special place in the hearts of many.

Hangars and OHVs and pool people, oh my

In a meeting with only two council members present in the room (and the other three on the phone) and in which the major attention was divided between a contentious possible law concerning pets and the fact that the city manager had announced he was leaving for a new job on the East Coast, the council did take a series of other notable actions.