It’s windy on Monday afternoon, and the blinding sun is beating down on the playground at Discovery Park in Meridian. Undeterred, Evan, 7, and Kenji, 6, are hard at work digging up canals and trenches in the sandbox.
They’re here with Peques Nature Club, a Spanish language outdoor group that provides culturally relevant space for Peques, or “little ones,” to learn about the environment.
Started in 2022, the local bilingual group is working to give a new generation an expanded relationship to nature.
Mónica Belmont and America Yorita-Carrion are two of the five co-founders of the club, and parent to Evan and Kenji, respectively.
Monday’s meet-up focused on the importance of water. Over cups of agua de jamaica and snacks, the parents made posters while the kids were hard at work engineering their increasingly complex canal system.
In Spanish, Belmont explained to the group all the ways she is grateful for the role water plays in her life, from watering the fields her parents worked in to helping her cook pozole for her kids.
“Me imagino la vida sin agua y digo todas estas cosas no pudiera disfrutarlas,” she said.
Since it launched last summer, the club has hosted bilingual activities for about 60 families and their kiddos in the Treasure Valley. They meet weekly in different locations, like Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge or little nooks off the Greenbelt. The goal is to expose families to as many new outdoor spaces as possible.
The idea for the club started with a question.
“How do we diversify the outdoors?” said Yorita-Carrion. “How do we get more people to access public spaces, parks and recreational activities that maybe historically haven't been utilized, enjoyed and loved-on by some communities, like the Latinx community?”
A study published by the Hispanic Access Foundation in 2020 found that communities of color in the United States are three times more likely to live in “nature deprived” areas than their white peers.
This week, Peques met in honor of Latino Conservation Week, which was created in 2014 to promote access to the outdoors and highlight the Latino community’s commitment to protecting the environment. Started nationally in 2014, Idaho is celebrating LCW for the second year in a row through events organized across the Treasure Valley.
Yorita-Carrion grew up running around on the beaches of Southwestern Mexico. But when she was in elementary school, her family moved to the US and her relationship with nature changed.
“There was a big shift there because the outdoors now became work in the fields,” she said, adding that for many migrant families, the outside is often synonymous with hard labor. When her husband first introduced her to ice fishing a decade ago, her Latino friends had concerns.
“They're like, wait, are you going to be safe?” Yorita-Carrion said with a laugh, “Brown people don't go ice fishing! And so a part of this story is demystifying what an outdoorsy person looks like within my own community and also in the outer community.”
Through regular meetups, outings and crafts, Peques hopes to teach a new generation how to become good stewards of the planet.
“We want to take them and say, “hey, this is ours.” This is for everyone to enjoy and protect,” Yorita-Carrion added.
The next adventure for Evan, Kenji and the rest of the Peques crew? A visit with abeekeeper on Friday and a scavenger hunt up Bogus basin in August.
