Denise Moreno-Ramirez grew up in the border town of Nogales, Arizona, living in the U.S. with her family during the week and traveling to Mexico on weekends with her grandmother. Near her small border community was Camp Little, a U.S. Army camp abandoned in 1933 that had been, by standards of the 1930s, cleaned up. But contaminants like chlorinated solvents from the untreated waste left behind had seeped into the groundwater and ultimately came out of people’s faucets in Moreno-Ramirez’s neighborhood. Her community experienced steep rates of lupus and cancer, but no one knew why for years. Moreno-Ramirez recalls people coming to her high school science club to detail their suspicions that toxins were affecting her community, and beg anyone they could to recruit people or organizations to get to the bottom of it. “Why aren’t people doing something for us?” she asked at the time. “That was really eye opening for me.” Please take a look at the new openings in our newsroom. Eventually, the alarming health issues in the town of fewer than 30,000 people caught the attention of organizations such as the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and the Border Ecology Project. Moreno-Ramirez knew she carried a unique perspective being from such a tight-knit but often forgotten community, and that there might be others similar to hers that suffer in silence because no one will take the time to hear their issues or concerns. “I realized as a young individual that there were no scientists that looked or talked like me or had the same experiences like me,” she said. “And I realized as an individual sitting in Nogales, that that was really important for my community.” The closer you are to the victims of the contamination, she said, the better you’ll understand the root problem and know how to deal with it most effectively. This inspired her Voices Unheard dissertation project for her now-completed Ph.D. in... |