I’m more than a little dismayed by your interview with Sergio Avila and his great crusade to bring Mexicans into the outdoors (“Conservation justice,” February 2020). As a wildlife biologist and outdoor enthusiast, I’m offended and angered by the level of ignorance and pandering in this interview. If you wanted to get a sense of how Latinos, Latinx, Mexican-American (or whatever the woke nomenclature is these days) experience the outdoors, then perhaps you should have gone to a trailhead in Saguaro National Park, or the Arizona Game and Fish regional office. There you would have seen plenty of Americans of Mexican descent enjoying the outdoors and working in wildlife conservation. Avila’s contention that white people are somehow excluding others from the outdoors is ludicrous. You either come to this lifestyle organically or you don’t; no one is keeping anyone from going outside.
—Nate Gwinn, via email
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Offensive pandering.
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