USU Employees Continue to Make Waves: One Student is Educating Others About Mono Lake Conservation
By Teagan Davidge
Last month, University Student Union (USU) Student Administrative Support Assistant for Equity, Programs and Leadership Victoria Villeda presented a class project created in partnership with the National Association for Chicano and Chicana Studies (NACCS) to the Green LA Water Coalition.
The presentation included a video titled “Saving Mono Lake: A Visual and Historical Palimpsest of Chicano/a/s Environmental Justice and Water Conservation Movement in LA” which discussed tens of thousands of years of history surrounding the lake. The project also examined untold stories of the people and places linked with Los Angeles in terms of water supply and water usage.
Dr. Gabriel Gutiérrez, Professor of Chicano/a Studies at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), is the project lead and has facilitated Mono Lake education for many years.
“I’ve been teaching Mono lake related curriculum going back at least ten years and have been taking groups up there, sometimes twice a year, to do the weeklong Outdoor Education Center program. That has evolved into students asking more questions and having to provide more context,” Gutiérrez said. “Rather than looking at only now, we decided to go back in time and do a historical project. The idea of the approach that we’ve taken is to really look at recovering and reclaiming those narratives that have been erased.”
Villeda is a student of Gutiérrez and has been enrolled in two of his classes at CSUN.
“The research was very hard because, like the professor mentioned, there is this huge palimpsest effect that you see. Even when looking for [it], you don’t see much information on the indigenous. It took me a good minute, days, to find the information I wanted to incorporate into the video,” Villeda explained.
The palimpsest effect Villeda mentioned refers to something that is reused or altered but still bears visible traces of its earlier form. Villeda and her team discussed the palimpsest effect in relation to Mono Lake and its surrounding areas.
“We have so much land that was once utilized by indigenous people. With time, new settlers pushed or wiped-out previous inhabitants. Even with so much change, you can never truly erase the traces from primary sources who were willing to tell their story and share the land’s true history,” Villeda said.
Villeda and other students of Gutiérrez dove deep into historical archives to discover more about the ways indigenous people relied on Mono Lake.
“Victoria participated in this project and was really a major force in [the creation of] the video you’ll be watching,” Gutiérrez told the Green LA water coalition.
Mono Lake Committee’s Outdoor Education Center Manager Santiago Escruceria illustrated to the coalition how the lake has not reached its proper depth despite past arrangements with the California Water Board.
“The lake is still eight feet from an agreement signed in 1994 that established a height for Mono Lake at 6,392 feet above sea level. We have gone 30 years with Los Angeles receiving their allocated water. They have been getting 100 percent of what the agreement says they are supposed to get every year, and Mono Lake is still eight feet from reaching the level it’s supposed to reach, so think about that,” said Escruceria. “That’s why we’re trying to work with them now. Every drop of water we send to LA is another drop of water that doesn’t help sustain Mono Lake.”
Villeda spoke about the importance of visiting Mono Lake and speaking to educators there to truly understand the gravity of the situation and importance of the natural resources the lake provides.
“I think the Mono Lake experience is necessary to understand how water flows, where it’s going, and where it’s coming from. Especially when you live in the city, you don’t see what’s going on, you don’t see the water that we’re losing,” said Villeda. “You’re not going there just to see cleaner air or to see trees, you’re going there to see how we’ve affected this water. Especially with Santiago, you learn not just about geography, but you go into so many more aspects, on the indigenous, on the water. I think he really puts it into perspective that we could do better, we could do more and we need to do more to create change that should have happened yesterday. But we persevere and we keep trying.”
Board Member of the Green LA Water Coalition Martha Davis thanked Gabriel and his students for their work on the presentation and acknowledged how it gave her a better understanding of why Mono Lake matters.
“I really appreciate this project that is being led by Gabriel and the students. I do think that a lot of the time, history papers over a lot of change and pain that has been created because of some of the choices we’ve made. And I always feel like the more that we understand those relationships, the better we can figure out how we solve the problems together and undo some of the damage,” said Davis. “I really appreciate this project and the work that is being done to showcase the many ways we don’t completely understand this history. [I enjoyed finding] out what we can do differently now so that we can protect communities and places at both ends and all the way along the aqueduct. Thank you to the students for a wonderful project.”