01 Jul ¡Presentándome!

Hello all!

I am so excited to begin my internship and to write this blog about my work at Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park. As an Interpretation and Education Intern, I will be working on an assortment of projects – including, but not limited to, developing Spanish language materials for the park, working on a science curriculum for the local middle and high school, and researching and developing my own Ranger talk.

I am proud to bring my cultural heritage to a park that has historically centered its narrative around white men in the Gold Rush era. Currently, the park is focusing on telling “untold stories” of the Klondike Gold Rush: like those of women, Buffalo soldiers, and Tlingit indigenous people who were important but often overlooked in Gold Rush history. As a child of Mexican and Nicaraguan immigrants, I have spent my whole life hearing untold stories from across Latin America. So I am both enthusiastic and prepared to take on this work!

My park is located in Skagway, Alaska, where I live and work. In addition to being a site of rich cultural history, it is also a beautiful natural landscape. Summer varies from warm, sunny days one day, to windy, cold rain the next. It’s always changing!

Outside of this internship, I am a rising sophomore at Yale University. I am especially interested in Earth science and issues of land and migration justice. Particularly, I am interested in the areas where those issues intersect. Here in Skagway, I am learning about how the rocks under my feet formed into high mountains, which eroded down and left gold in the waterways. Then when a native Tlingit man named Keish found that gold, people stampeded to the Yukon goldfields in one of America’s greatest mass migrations. Settlements by Euro-Americans displaced the people who are indigenous to the region and irreparably altered relationships to water, land, living beings, food sources, and ancestral trade routes. Embedded in this history are the untold stories of the Klondike Gold Rush.

You can watch my video introduction below: