Meet the Chicagoan Determined to Break Down Barriers to Outdoor Inclusion for Latino People Like Him - NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council)

The 297-acre Big Marsh Bike Park on Chicago’s Southeast Side draws herons, egrets, and mallards to its wetlands, coyotes and deer to its meadows, and riders to its bike trails. But as one of the park’s natural environment workers, Luis Cabrales is quick to remind first-time visitors that the surrounding area is far less idyllic.

“There’s a landfill just to the south of us, there’s a decommissioned Acme coke plant to the east, and the Calumet industrial corridor to the west,” he says, pointing a finger in each direction. Big Marsh shares this industrial legacy: Once a dumping ground for steel mills, it was transferred to the park district from the city in 2011 and rehabilitated with an aim of revitalizing the Southeast Side—a predominantly Latino neighborhood long overburdened with toxic air pollution and other environmental health hazards.

This is Cabrales’s hometown. The 23-year-old conservationist grew up breathing air with foul odors and toxic dust stemming from the industries storing manganese, a neurotoxin, and piles of petcoke, a waste product of the oil-refining process, near local homes and schools. Green spaces, like the one where he works today, were scarce.

But it was in his own backyard that a love of conservation blossomed. When Cabrales was young, his family grew a vegetable garden where he would take care of the cucumbers and harvest the tomatoes. “This work has been in my blood for a really long time,” he says. “Growing up, we’d also go to Mexico to my dad...

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