Our desert makes special people
The other day, Dr. Hitch and I had a very interesting conversation about the desert and the effect it has on the people living there. We spoke of the obvious things, like our superhuman heat tolerance, and then more nebulous things were mentioned, like the lack of resources and the result of dealing with such adversity.
We decided that the fires of 120 degree July days forge a special kind of person. Resourcefulness is very important in a place where you are handed so little relative to the rest of California.
In 2014, the Imperial County had 21.1 percent unemployment rate, the second highest in the nation. In January of 2017, the number has dropped slightly to the still formidable 19.6 percent. These numbers force people to get creative to merely survive.
Our lack of resources compared to other places (our closest neighbors being San Diego County and Riverside County) are very apparent from an early age.
I remember my schools ran out of white paper all the time and couldn’t afford to get more so we’d often be writing on green or pink paper. Schools from San Diego would come to play sports here and have much nicer uniforms, much nicer equipment. All of this creates a drive in many Imperial Valley students.
Well, one opinion could be that it drives them away. It’s no secret that the Imperial Valley suffers from a “Brain Drain.” Many people leave to pursue their education, and then they stay outside of the Valley for their adult lives. There are many factors involved; not wanting to endure the heat, not enough high-paying jobs, and not wanting to deal with the lack of resources that they had to deal with growing up here.
But the lessons learned growing up in an environment like this can be very helpful as well. Just at the museum alone we have several examples of people shaped by the desert doing, or at least at the beginning of, doing great things.
For the first three years that the museum was open it was staffed mainly by internships. People came from outside of the county and used our new museum as a stepping stone for their career.
Out of nine interns that came to the museum between 2010 and 2014, seven left to take full times jobs in either the museum or archaeology field.
Currently, the museum has been focusing a little more on training and developing homegrown talent here.
Example 1 We can start with me! Edgar Bernal Sevilla graduated from San Diego Sate University-Calexico Campus in 2016 with a degree in history.
While in school he took a research class, History 450, and completed 16 weeks of research in the Morlin Childers Archive — working one day a week to try and make sense of a new collection the museum had received. During the summer 2016, Edgar completed a three month internship, working everyday in the same collection.
Since then, he has been hired part time as a research assistant, but has really become a key piece for public relations. He has presented lectures at for the Anza-Borrego Desert Natural History Association, and the Imperial County Historical Society. In March he presented at the Anza Society Conference.
In September, he will be presenting a professional paper at the American Association of State and Local History Annual Conference in Austin, Texas. He has also been awarded a young museum professional fellowship to attend the American Alliance of Museums Annual Meeting & Museum Expo in St. Louis, in May.
Example 2 Richard Barnes is a 2011 graduate of Southwest High School. In 2015, he received an undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Richard came back to the Imperial Valley after graduating and worked as an intern at the Desert Museum, completing a post-inventory archaeological artifact report.
Last year, with the assistance of Neal V. Hitch he was hired as education coordinator at the Museum of the Aleutians in Unalaska, Ala. His experience with creating experiential education programs here in the Imperial Valley made him the perfect candidate for a museum in another extreme location.
This fall, he has been accepted to the University of Hawaii to pursue a Masters Degree in Anthropology.
Example 3 Neal Lucas Hitch is a 2013 graduate of Southwest High School and the SAVAPA Art Program. The son of our museum director, Neal V. Hitch, Lucas volunteered at the museum developing the coiled clay art program and piloted plein air watercolor painting and hiking programs.
As a Sterns Memorial Trust Fellow, he served as a summer visiting artist at the museum in 2015, creating, among other things, the Observatory.
This large hay bale art structure was his first experimentation with inhabitable art. Since, he has submitted entrees for several art-installation based competitions. In the summer of 2016, Lucas was awarded a competition and built an art installation called the Alt-Cathedral at a summer art and architecture camp called Hellowood, in Budapest, Hungary.
He is graduating with a degree in architecture in May and has received an architectural internship in Tokyo, Japan.
I’ll close with a little anecdote. I went to study abroad in Granada, Spain, last summer. Many of my San Diego living colleagues were stifled by the heat.
They didn’t go out during midday when I was roaming the cobbled streets. One day, one of them saw me drinking coffee at noon. They were horrified. “How can you be drinking hot coffee, it’s like 95 degrees!” they said. “Where I come from, anything goes under a hundred,” I replied, sipping my delicious cafe con leche.
When you’re from somewhere where anything goes under a hundred, you can pretty much make it anywhere.