Daily Archives: October 10, 2012

A Place to Belong

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Susana Rivera-Mills

When Susana Rivera-Mills was 12, her family fled their native El Salvador to travel to the United States for what they thought would be a temporary stay. They were escaping the brutal civil war that tore through El Salvador between 1979 and 1992 — a war that had brought violence to the streets and left Rivera-Mills uncertain whether she would see her mother again each day when she was dropped off at school.

The fighting continued long beyond the six months, and the family had had no choice but to start a new life in the U.S. None of the family members could speak English, and they had left El Salvador with only a suitcase each.

It was a shock for Rivera-Mills to be one of only a few Latino students in the small California town they moved to. The experience of dislocation as an immigrant in the U.S. would eventually prompt Rivera-Mills to create a professional life that would allow her to help others in the same situation.

Her experiences, Rivera-Mills says, created in her a desire to support those who lack a place to belong. As associate dean for Oregon State University’s College of Liberal Arts and interim director of the university’s new Center for Latin@ Studies and Engagement, she’s turned her difficult experiences into inspiration to give back to her community.

Driven to pursue education by her family’s struggles, Rivera-Mills shaped her career to support immigrant populations. With a doctoral degree in romance linguistics, she has been an advocate for the preservation of Spanish among Latino communities in the United States.

“My research looks closely at the variables that affect language maintenance and
loss in communities,” Rivera-Mills says. “I study community dynamics that help or hinder language use, and then share my findings with communities so that they can make informed decisions about their own language.”

With CL@SE, Rivera-Mills plans to expand Latino research by engaging multiple communities in studying Latino issues. The center’s mission is to promote research and outreach to advance knowledge and understanding of Latino contributions and issues surrounding the Latino population in the United States.

“We are interested in partnering with communities to co-create models in which the community needs are assessed and expressed, and then determine if and where Oregon State can serve to meet some of those needs,” Rivera-Mills says. “We hope to work with OSU Extension to get to know communities state-wide and develop programs around health issues and small business development.”

A chaotic life

But before Rivera-Mills could find the power to help her family or see herself as a role model within her community, she had to learn how to survive in a completely unfamiliar situation.

Both of Rivera-Mills’ parents had to work 12-hour days just to keep the family afloat. Suddenly stripped of the stay-at-home parent they’d enjoyed throughout their lives, she and her siblings had to take responsibility for themselves; waking up, getting ready for school, making it to the bus, completing their homework and making dinner on their own.

That responsibility, coupled with a desire to ease her parents’ struggles in any way she could, led Rivera Mills to take a full time summer job at a plant nursery, though she was only 12 years old.

“In my child mind, that was to me a way where, if I could work and buy my school clothes, or work and take care of certain things, then that was my contribution to try to calm what I perceived to be chaos around me,” she says.

The same spirit that inspired Rivera Mills to try to make things easier for her parents — working to provide her own money as well as keeping incidents of kids bullying her at school to herself — eventually helped her aspire to higher education.

“That honestly is what drove me through my Ph.D.,” she says. “It was having in the back of my mind the idea that everything I was doing in terms of my own educational training was about how do I help my family financially, how do I help them be in a place where they feel safe and where they feel stable and where we can finally not have to live moment by moment, worrying about what’s going to happen.”

From family to community

Rivera-Mills earned her doctoral degree in romance linguistics from the University of New Mexico in 1998. After completing her degree while working full-time to stay out of debt, Rivera-Mills had achieved her goal.

When she began her first professional job training future secondary language schoolteachers at Northern Arizona University, she felt she finally had secured the resources to help her parents. And she was right — with help from Rivera-Mills and her brother, who had recently graduated college, her parents were able to retire after relocating to Klamath Falls.

“It isn’t about the money so much as it’s about the honor, respect and gratitude being returned to the previous generation,” Rivera-Mills says.

But Rivera-Mills didn’t stop there. After achieving the goal of helping her family, she began to understand the implications of her role as a Latina woman with a doctoral degree.

“I realized all of a sudden that my goal had widened,” she says. “It wasn’t just about my family anymore, because I realized that I was going to represent a real minority as a Latina woman with a Ph.D. The magnitude of what that meant and the fact that I would automatically become a role model whether I wanted to or not really broadened my mission.”

Uniting around Latino issues

Embracing that newfound responsibility, Rivera-Mills committed to giving back to her community and to students in her position. She supported the National Hispanic Scholarship that helped her get through graduate school, and mentored Latino students who were experiencing the same displacement and loss of identity she went through.

Now, Rivera-Mills gives talks around the state to encourage students to pursue higher education, and has worked through programs like Oregon State’s Adelante Leadership Program to endow Latino students with the belief that they can be leaders in their communities, in the state and beyond. When she shares her story with students, Rivera-Mills says, she sees how powerful it is for them to identify with someone who has achieved goals similar to their own.

“That has become a huge drive that continually feeds me and my passion for the work that I do,” she says.

She’s continuing that mission with CL@SE, which began its inaugural week Oct. 8. The theme of seeking common ground has become a motto for the center that Rivera-Mills believes reflects its goals to engage people from different backgrounds and perspectives to find commonality in Latino issues that also impact the United States as a society.

“We’re hoping in promoting this common ground we will be approaching diversity from a perspective of unity and not one strictly of difference,” she says.

Rivera-Mills says the center is already working to create new partnerships by connecting with community colleges around the state to bring the Adelante Leadership Program to students throughout Oregon.

Her goals for the center include growth and encouraging more Latinos to seek leadership positions, but Rivera-Mills says her first priority remains creating a place of belonging for young students going through the displacement she experienced herself.

“There are so many students of color who feel like they have to choose either their family, their community and their background or education, leadership and success,” Rivera-Mills says. “My message to them is you don’t have to choose. It’s not about choosing, it’s about creating a different space for yourself where you don’t have to sacrifice your language, you don’t have to sacrifice your heritage and you don’t have to pretend to be someone that you’re not.”

 

CL@SE inaugural week events:

Tuesday, Oct. 9

The Global Implications of Latino Population Growth and the Search for Common Ground
Juan Andrade, Jr., president of the U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute
6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m., CH2M Hill Alumni Center Ballroom

Wednesday, Oct. 10

Opening reception for Del Corazón: By Heart art exhibit by Chicana artist Analee Fuentes
4:30 p.m. – 6 p.m., Fairbanks Gallery
Exhibit will be on display Oct. 8-31.

Thursday, Oct. 11

CL@SE’s Research Symposium: Beyond Disciplinary Borders
6 p.m. – 8 p.m., Valley Library Willamette Seminar rooms

All CL@SE events are open to the public. For more information about the center, contact Rivera-Mills at susana.rivera-mills@oregonstate.edu or visit the center’s office in Room 233E Strand Agricultural Hall.

Breathing underwater

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Flatfish-measurement
Lorenzo Ciannelli crosses the deck of the R/V Elakha with a fist closed tightly over his prize. “This is what we’re after,” he says, spreading his palm to reveal a half dozen flat fish pulled from the trawl net, each slightly larger than his thumbnail.

Skimming across Yaquina Bay in the research boat, Ciannelli, an Oregon State University associate professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, is searching the seafloor for this slippery treasure. The tiny English sole are semitransparent and pour out of the trawl net in dozens, along with droves of scrabbling juvenile Dungeness crabs no wider than a half-dollar.

The fish Ciannelli collects are analyzed in multiple ways to help him build new understanding about the effects of hypoxia, the reduction of dissolved oxygen in aquatic environments that often occurs as a result of pollution, in bay and ocean settings. And to get that information, he has to do more than just catch them. In addition to processing the samples in his lab, Ciannelli reviews video of the English soles’ activity on the seafloor as they are snapped up by — or dart away from — the trawl.

“In general one thing that we know very little about is this coastal soft sediment environment,” Ciannelli says. “We are learning more about reef environments but for this soft sediment habitat we know very little, and I think that’s because it’s often overlooked — you look and you think there’s nothing there, but you turn it over, and they’re all there under the surface.”

To expand scientific understanding of that environment, Ciannelli is combining visual observation with chemical analysis to quantify the health and energy stores of the fish. The lower oxygen levels of hypoxic conditions, often caused by pollution, can sap marine life, leaving them with depleted lipid (fat) stores and resulting in lower growth rates. With this research, Ciannelli hopes to learn more about how hypoxia is affecting fish and to help determine whether conditions in the bay or open ocean are more favorable for growth.

“We want to find out which of these environments, the bay or the ocean, functions better, and it may very well be that it’s the bay one year and the ocean the next,” Ciannelli says.

While adding clarity to scientists’ understanding of the effects of hypoxia in bay and ocean habitats is part of Ciannelli’s immediate goal, he says his work isn’t just about answering one question, but expanding the field of knowledge as much as possible.

“This is just a little piece of a mountain of knowledge that many people before us have built and many people after us certainly will add to,” Ciannelli says. “It’s really trying to add another level of information.”

Building a bigger research network

To explore his questions about marine habitats, Ciannelli has constructed a network that stretches from his office on Oregon State University’s main campus in Corvallis, to its Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport and out across the water to his research on the R/V Elakha.

At Hatfield Marine Science Center, Mo Bancroft, a graduate student studying marine resource management, is furthering Ciannelli’s investigation with an arrangement of 18 round tanks. The tanks are connected to a pipe system that pumps a specific amount of liquid nitrogen into each, and in every tank are 10 juvenile crabs and 10 English soles.

Bancroft is examining the effects of different water temperatures and oxygen levels on the growth of the fish and crabs. Tanks vary in temperature from 7, to 10, to 13 degrees Celsius. Controlled amounts of liquid nitrogen work together with bioballs — white plastic spheres covered in spikes — to scrub oxygen from the water, creating hypoxic conditions in some tanks, while others have higher oxygen content.

“I’m looking at both conditions you may see in the bay, with higher temperatures, and in the ocean, at 7 degrees Celsius,” Bancroft says. “It will give us a pretty good glimpse of what’s happening. If the fish cannot withstand lower levels of oxygen for a month, that tells us something.”

What it will tell them, Ciannelli says, is how these different environments affect growth in specimens under regulated conditions. Bancroft has marked all the fish with uniquely colored and located tags, and the crabs are in individually tagged containers within the water, allowing him to make direct comparisons for changes in each one.

Undergraduate involvement

While Bancroft observes live specimens, University of Miami student Kathryn Doering is analyzing the freeze-dried sole Ciannelli brings back from his trips on the water. Doering, a junior studying marine science and biology, earned a place on Ciannelli’s team for the summer through the NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.

“I applied here because Oregon is really far away from Florida, and I was interested in seeing how they were ecologically different,” Doering says.

Doering has spent time on the ocean sorting fish alongside Ciannelli, as well as in the lab on campus using chemical processes to analyze the English sole samples and quantify the results. Information such as the amount of lipids in the fish — indicating whether they have fatty stores to draw on — are suggestive of how healthy the fish are in their environment.

“It actually has a larger chemistry component than I was expecting,” Doering says. “I think it’s just giving me a better idea of what science is and how research is conducted on a daily basis.”

Fruits of research: discovery and friendship

Whatever the results of his study, Ciannelli is sure to continue probing the seafloor for knowledge. As the project continues to develop, he hopes to use collected data to begin making predictions about the animals’ growth rates. That information, he says, could impact how the sole and crab are fished — or protected.

“Crab and sole are commercial species, so where we find the best growth habitats could have practical application, and if we want to preserve them, it can tell us which habitats we should protect,” he says.

Ciannelli’s passion for marine biology keeps him coming back to these questions, but he says one of the most enjoyable aspects of conducting research is working with great people.

“We think of research as science, but it’s really about doing research and interacting with people whose company you enjoy; the friendship and the bond that you form,” he says. “So at the end of the day, for me it’s about doing research with people you like to hang out with.”