Features
How to Move a Museum
Workers survey the 30-foot sculpture ghandiG by Peter Shelton ’73 at the museum’s former location before moving it by crane across College Avenue to its new home.
Drivers who regularly ventured past the Pomona College campus in the early mornings of October and November 2019 likely witnessed a strange ritual at the intersection of Bonita and College avenues.
Day after day, a procession of student interns crossed the street, slowly rolling stainless-steel restaurant-style carts loaded with slate-gray boxes tied down with brightly colored bungees. Motorists waited as the parade carefully bypassed the myriad yellow warning bumps near the curbs. Reaching the other side, the interns gently maneuvered the carts up to the sidewalk and then onto the ramp of the newly completed Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College.
The museum collection was arriving at its new home. Finally.
For many people, the words “Moving Day” trigger fear and apprehension from beginning to end: the monumental chaos of sorting and packing items, the crucial task of hiring a trustworthy moving team and the suspense mixed with dread of opening boxes at the new location, hoping for minimal damage. But for the staff at the Benton, “Moving Day” was a welcomed phrase for a transition that was long overdue and took nearly two years to complete.
Intern Emily Petro ’21 sorts and labels arrowheads from the Native American Collection.
When news of the 2017 groundbreaking for the spacious new $44 million state-of-the-art museum at the southwest corner of Bonita and College was announced, there was a cheer of relief that all objects in the museum collection would be under one roof at last. For more than 10 years, as many as 13,000 objects in the growing collection had been spread out in three satellite venues: Montgomery Art Gallery, Rembrandt Hall and Bridges Auditorium. The Native American Collection, first assembled around the turn of the 20th century, occupied various locations—among them the basement of the humanities building at Scripps College, then Sumner Hall, and in 2011 the lower level of Bridges.
Celebration quickly dissolved into the electric hum of brainpower as staff began to strategize. Here was a chance to do an up-to-date inventory of every collection item before safely packing and transporting objects as diverse as Andy Warhol Polaroids, Goya etchings, alabaster bas-relief sculptures, large abstract paintings, beaded Sioux leggings and contemporary art by Pomona alumni, including Helen Pashgian ’56 and Chris Burden ’69.
Such an inventory had never been done before.
Workmen prepare to move ghandiG by Peter Shelton
“I had been warned by colleagues that moving a collection is the single most difficult and yet rewarding task a registrar could ever undertake,” says Steve Comba, associate director/registrar at the Benton—who already had twice overseen moves of the Native American Collection.
Objects didn’t have to travel physically far—all satellite locations were blocks or buildings away—but that didn’t make the task less daunting. Handling objects at any step of the process is always a risk, says Comba. “There’s always the possibility of human error. We wanted to do this right. We had to take our time.”
Comba brought on board independent collections manager Karen Hudson, who assumed duties as move coordinator/registrar. “Before you move anything, you need to know what you have,” she says about the time-consuming and labor-intensive process of creating the inventory. “You start by opening up every box, in every storage room and in every building. I had my eye on every single object in the collection.”
Going through hanging racks, cabinetry and Solander storage boxes one by one for almost a year, Hudson compared each item to its own unique catalog number, cross-checked the database and updated all pertinent information. She noted items with missing numbers, objects that had been numbered incorrectly and other discrepancies.
“You don’t want to move problems,” sums up Hudson. “You solve them first before you pack them up.”
As with any move, surprises were uncovered. For years Comba thought that a rare Sioux ceremonial rattle had been lost; he was thrilled when the beautifully quillworked and beaded treasure was discovered during the inventory. Another surprise: The museum’s collection grew from 11,000 objects pre-inventory to nearly 13,000 in late 2018. (Note: Because of additional gifts to the collection since 2018, that number is now officially 16,000.)
The first museum piece arrived at its new home in spring of 2019.
In the early morning of March 22, spectators watched a 30-foot-tall bronze sculpture dangle from a hoist and crane that was inching its way down College Avenue. No trees or overhead wires blocked the transit. Under a blue sky, there was just a steady progression forward: ghandiG was on the move.
Purchased by the college in 2006, the ethereal sculpture by Pomona alumnus Peter Shelton ’73 was making its way to a new home amid the landscape of the Benton, which was still a work in progress at the time.
Moving ghandiG involved crews severing the sculpture’s support cabling system at the old location, transporting the artwork two blocks and then installing it—with new cabling—at the prominent corner. Shelton was consulted about the proper orientation for his sculpture, which now welcomes visitors to the museum in a striking way.
While ghandiG was officially the first piece of art to be moved to the Benton, it would be months before the rest of the collection joined the sculpture at the new location. Transporting those other items was far less dramatic—but there were still some heart-pounding moments.
The process involved the meticulous packing of hundreds of paintings, pottery works, photos and more. Comba, Hudson and a third member of the museum staff were joined by a team of interns Hudson described as invaluable. “We needed their help, their youthful stamina and enthusiasm,” she says. Comba goes further, calling them “rock stars.” He adds that the collection-moving interns weren’t all art history majors. “We had conservation majors from Scripps College and athletes from Pomona,” he says. “They each brought their own skills to the project.”
The museum could have hired an expensive professional art-moving company for the entire job, but since the Benton is a teaching museum with a robust internship program, the collection move presented an exceptional chance for hands-on, behind-the-scenes, roll-up-your-sleeves learning. Twelve interns—among them Pomona students Nina Mueller ’19, Ethan Dieck ’22, Jem Stern ’22, Quin Fraley ’22, Katherine Purev ’23 and Emily Petro ’21—stepped up for a challenge that lasted from April 2019 to March 2020.
The Native American collection was the first to be physically moved; it was the farthest from the new museum (although still only a few blocks away) and had many delicate objects. Comba also wanted to restart that collection’s educational outreach program for third graders, which had been suspended because of the move, as soon as possible. Interns assisted the staff with packing, wrapping and sealing boxes in the basement of Bridges; later the team hand-carried them up by elevator and then carefully loaded and unloaded them in and out of the museum van. Moving the Native American collection took about three months—and countless van rides—to complete.
Hudson made sure that interns knew the protocols of proper object handling, dispelling the myth that the only way to touch museum items is with white cotton gloves. “The cotton fibers of a white glove can snag loose ends of baskets. If you are handling anything fibrous, it could be a disaster,” she says. Nitrile gloves are typically used to handle photographs and prints (they leave no fingerprints), but experts don’t wear them when picking up smooth objects like vases (too slick). Overall, the growing professional consensus is that clean bare hands provide a better and more secure grip, especially when picking up organic items made of stone or bone, such as arrowheads.
Fraley, one of the interns, used her bare hands to check and pack 450 Chinese snuff bottles from the Qing Dynasty, one of her many special assignments. A history major, Fraley recalls getting into a rhythm as she handled the ornate bottles, which ranged in size from 2 to 4 inches. Using poly foam batting, Fraley gently wrapped and nestled the bottles into their drawer-like cubbies encased in pre-cut Ethafoam, a brand of foam often used for artifact storage. As she worked, Fraley examined the intricate details of these ancient mini works of art. “The artist used a fine paintbrush and painted the insides of the bottles,” she says. “It was so special to be able to handle and observe these up close.”
Some heavy or incredibly fragile items, such as Italian Renaissance panel paintings from the Kress Collection, were handled by professional fine art movers.
Comba lost track of how much poly foam was used to securely wrap objects. “It was everywhere,” he says of the material that is firm enough to cushion delicate objects but soft enough not to put unwanted pressure on certain structural elements, like the spout of a teakettle. “You want everything to have a soft landing at every step of the way,” he says.
Items were transported three ways. Heavy and incredibly fragile pieces—like the Kress Collection’s Italian Renaissance panel paintings, a 19th-century marble bust and a Sam Maloof walnut music stand—were given to a professional art-moving company that spent only two days on campus. Most objects, however, were moved using campus vans. Lightweight ones—such as photos, prints, scrolls and manuscripts—were walked over in rolling restaurant-style carts. “It was a huge responsibility, and it was nerve-racking,” Fraley says of those early-morning expeditions. “We just took our time, but I’ll tell you, that short walk never felt so long.”
Days after the last objects were moved to the Benton on March 3, 2020, the pandemic hit. Interns were sent home, which left staffers the final task of checking in and storing those remaining items in their new homes. “We didn’t have a time pressure to finish the job,” admits Comba. “You could call that a pandemic benefit.”
As far as Comba has seen, no item sustained any damage from the moving process, marking this move a huge success.
Now, months after the entire collection has officially settled into its new digs, the reverberations from the relocation still echo for those on the moving team, especially Fraley. “This really opened my eyes to the depth of the moving process and the specialness of this collection,” she says. “Because of this experience, I will never look at any museum the same way ever again.”
The long-awaited Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College opened to the public in May 2021 with reservation-based visits after the planned 2020 opening was delayed by the pandemic.
Named in recognition of a $15 million gift from Janet Inskeep Benton ’79, a longtime supporter of the arts and a member of the Pomona College Board of Trustees, the 33,000-square-foot museum provides not only space for the public enjoyment of art but also serves as a teaching museum and a new gathering spot on campus.
The public community celebration planned for November 13 will be preceded by an opening reception and artist talk with Sadie Barnette on November 6 as part of Sadie Barnette: Legacy & Legend. On November 11, the Benton will feature guest curator Karen Kice and graphic designer Amir Berbić as part of Sahara: Acts of Memory. Throughout the fall, the $44 million facility designed by Machado Silvetti Associates and Gensler will host events for the campus community in the museum’s courtyard and striking glass-walled interior spaces.
American Crossroads
As an inquisitive girl growing up in the city of Pomona, Genevieve Carpio ’05 learned about her world while riding around town with her family. The adults in her life were happy to converse with their captive passenger, especially one so unusually attentive for her age.
With her grandfather behind the wheel of his Chevy pickup, the girl soaked up tales of Carpio family history as poor migrant farmworkers who fled the Mexican Revolution and soon settled in Pomona’s historic barrio. And while cruising Claremont with her mother in the family car, she got a glimpse of her academic future.
The college town was close to the North Pomona home of the Carpios, one of the first Latino families to buy property in a formerly red-lined neighborhood, once reserved by contract for whites. Their abode was now Claremont-adjacent, just a short drive north on Indian Hill Boulevard, which seemed like an artery to another life.
“For fun, my mom enjoyed driving around Claremont and looking at the houses and we would say, ‘Which house do you want to live in? Oh, I want to live in that house. No, I want to live in that house.’ And then she would take us around the colleges, just to look at them.”
But Grace Carpio, a stay-at-home mom who hails from Puerto Rico, was not just sightseeing. She was planting a seed. “That’s where you’re going to go to college when you grow up,” she would say with certainty.
“No, I’m not,” young Carpio would snap back. “I’m going far away.”
Time proved her mother right. And time also taught Carpio an important lesson about the meaning of success and the value of uncovering untold histories in her own backyard.
“For me, having grown up in a very working-class community, success always meant getting as far away as possible,” says Carpio, who did research in Brazil and Argentina as an undergraduate. “In anthropology, it seemed to me there was this idea that you go to these places very far away to study something new and translate it according to these anthropological frameworks. But it was really being in Brazil where I noticed that, as a person who wasn’t Brazilian, there was a lot I had left to learn about interpreting these cultures.”
During her South American stay, coincidentally, Carpio was reading a book exploring the history of race and labor in the citrus industry of Southern California written by historian Matt Garcia, who holds a doctorate from what is now Claremont Graduate University.
From her vantage point in the Southern Hemisphere, Carpio experienced a paradigm shift that would send her career in a new direction.
“It opened this window into being able to do work in the communities that you come from,” says Carpio, now an associate professor in UCLA’s César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies. “It showed me it was possible to be able to write about home in a way I had never considered before.”
Genevieve Carpio ’05, husband Eric Gonzalez and son Elliot. Their daughter was born in September.
The past summer was an eventful one for Carpio and her family—husband Eric Gonzalez and their rambunctious 3-year-old boy Elliot. They moved into a new faculty apartment on the UCLA campus, making room for the arrival of their second child, Amelia, born on Labor Day.
If her schedule was harried, Carpio didn’t show it when she met for an interview in a shaded picnic area outside her office. At 38, she looks young enough to pass for one of her own graduate students. She’s relaxed and down-to-earth, yet also dignified. Despite sitting on a hard bench for an hour, Carpio barely shifts position, reflecting an inner discipline that was apparent to her parents from childhood.
Her rise through academia has been steady and strategically planned. She went straight up the academic ladder: B.A. in anthropology from Pomona (2005), M.A. in urban planning from UCLA (2007), doctorate in American studies and ethnicity from USC (2013), and finally a postdoctoral fellowship in ethnicity, race and migration at Yale (2015).
And on July 1, she earned tenure at UCLA, a status that brings professional privilege and private relief. She had dreaded the instability of the untenured, with the prospect of losing her job and being forced back on the “super mobile” college job market that could have landed her anywhere in the country.
Carpio is certain that her tenure bid was boosted by the publication of her well-written and well-received book—Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019).
Thus, ironically, her work on mobility helped ensure that she could stay put.
“I feel like I’m at this really exciting crossroads,” she says, using a term for intersection that figures prominently in her life and work.
UCLA courses taught by Prof. Genevieve Carpio include Race and the Digital Divide and Barrio Suburbanism.
In the book, Carpio’s first, she examines the history of the Inland Empire through the lens of mobility—the freedom of movement, granted or denied to various racial groups. She focuses on specific policies used to control not just mass immigration, but also the “everyday mobilities” of marginalized, non-white populations.
Those policies included bicycle ordinances enforced disproportionately against Japanese workers; laws against joyriding that sent many Mexican youth to reform schools; the forced confinement of Native Americans at federal Indian boarding schools; and laundry laws aimed at driving single Chinese men out of downtown Riverside by banning them from washing their clothing outdoors.
Carpio’s book is part of the publisher’s American Crossroads series launched some 25 years ago, and it perfectly meets the original mission, says series co-founder George Sanchez, a USC professor of American studies, ethnicity and history, who served as Carpio’s doctoral dissertation advisor.
“We were going to go after books that made a difference in the field, that we thought were breaking new ground,” Sanchez explained during a presentation at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Resource Center shortly after the book’s publication. “Gena’s book fits this beautifully. … She shows things that were invisible to other scholars.”
Invisible, yes, but partly because other scholars weren’t looking. The Inland Empire is quasi-virgin territory for serious academic investigation, Carpio says. The academic neglect has the effect of silencing the voices of migrant workers and communities of color, overlooking the very people who helped build the citrus industry for which the Inland Empire is historically renowned. And by default, it allows this historical vacuum to be filled by the self-promoting origin myth of white settlers who colonized the area in the late 1800s—as if history began with them.
Riverside’s Washington Restaurant, established in 1910 and named for the first U.S. president, was operated by the Harada family, Japanese Americans who were later forcibly relocated during World War II. (Courtesy of the Museum of Riverside, Riverside, California and the Harada Family Archival Collection)
Carpio’s research began more than 10 years ago as part of her doctoral dissertation. At the time, it wasn’t history that drew her attention to modern conflicts over mobility. It was current affairs.
In the early 1990s, San Bernardino authorities had banned lowriders from a city festival celebrating the fabled Route 66, even though Chicano car culture had flourished on the thoroughfare which traversed the city’s historic Mt. Vernon barrio.
“It was so wrong,” Carpio says. “I really wanted to understand what it meant, and why it bothered me so much.”
She was also incensed by the proliferation of sobriety checkpoints in heavily Latino neighborhoods. In the guise of public safety, the checkpoints worked as immigration traps for undocumented drivers, caught on their way to work or to drop their kids at soccer practice. This “hyper-policing” turned the streets into “minefields,” she says, and infused fear into everyday trips.
Carpio’s outrage led her to join protests organized in 2008 by the Pomona Habla Coalition. She and fellow demonstrators would stand at street corners with signs warning motorists of checkpoints ahead.
Such restrictions on mobility, she realized, “send powerful messages about who belongs and who doesn’t belong.”
Carpio showed an early commitment “to fostering authentic, non-hierarchical relationships between college and community,” says Pomona Prof. Gilda Ochoa, the advisor on Carpio’s senior thesis, White Hoods and Welcome Baskets: The Forming of a Mexican Barrio in Pomona 1920-1940. “Before there was the Draper Center (for Community Partnerships), Genevieve and I were on campus task forces together working to enhance community partnerships,” says Ochoa, a professor of Chicana/o-Latina/o studies. “I was lucky to learn from her. A few years after she graduated, she even recruited me to join her on the Historical Society of Pomona Valley.”
Carpio spent a decade of dogged digging through the dusty, musty files of such historical societies and other public history sources. She rummaged through library basements, scoured forgotten public records, explored local museums and perused private family photo collections. Moreover, she sought out those quirky, unheralded folks who make local history their life’s mission.
She refers to that disparate pool of primary sources as “the rebel archives,” a term coined by historian Kelly Lytle-Hernández, the bedrock for constructing a “subversive history” of the Inland Empire. She proudly points out the hefty 70-page notes section at the back of the book, where she documents the oft-neglected archival sources she unearthed.
“I wanted to create a bit of a trail so that those who were coming after me would have this place to start, would have this map of the various resources in the region.”
Vincent Carpio Sr. was a field laborer before joining the U.S. military. He urged his granddaughter to pursue an education.
Carpio likes to say she was raised in the borderlands, the area where eastern Los Angeles County, specifically Pomona and Claremont, meets the counties of San Bernardino and Riverside. From there, the path to success led due west to the big city, at least for ambitious students like her. Nobody thought of looking east to the vast open spaces of the Inland Empire, which she considered an intellectual wasteland at the time.
Two uncles on Carpio’s mother’s side, Osvaldo and Nonato Garcia, also served their country.
Once again, it took distance for her to grasp the importance of her own backyard as a fertile territory for academic study. During her postdoc at Yale, Carpio spent two years writing and thinking about issues back home. So there she was, ensconced behind Ivy League walls almost 3,000 miles away, in a program that required “direct engagement with the cultures, structures, and peoples” that were the subject of her studies.
And it dawned on her that this history was her story.
“It’s the story of my family.”
Genevieve Tañia Carpio is a fourth-generation American, a great-granddaughter of Mexican immigrants Frank and Margaret Carpio from San Francisco del Rincón, Guanajuato, who came to this country in 1916 at the height of the Mexican Revolution. Four years after their arrival, they welcomed their first U.S.-born son, Vincent Victor Carpio—Genevieve’s grandfather.
Little Vincent’s mother, who had married at 16, could not read or write, according to the 1930 census, which also identified his father as a “picker” working in the “citrus fruit” industry. By then, the family—including 10-year-old Vincent’s four adult siblings—lived on West 12th Street in the heart of the old Pomona barrio. During the ensuing Depression, the Carpio family would head north in their horse-drawn covered wagon to work the fertile fields around Fresno.
Vincent grew up in his father’s footsteps, dropping out after sixth grade to follow the migrant trail. His aborted schooling would later motivate him to stress the value of education for his son, Vincent Victor Carpio Jr., and his granddaughter, known as Gena, the girl who would listen to his family stories in the car.
Interestingly, official records underscore the theory that race is malleable: Vincent Sr. was identified as Mexican in the 1930 census, but 13 years later the U.S. Army drafted him as white. During his 17 months of service, Pvt. Carpio saw action on D-Day and at the Battle of the Bulge. He was seriously injured by an artillery blast, spent five months in a military hospital and was sent home with a Purple Heart and Bronze Star for bravery.
Back in Pomona, the veteran struggled to find work. He repeatedly tried to get a job with the city’s public works crew and was finally hired one day, only to find the job was “no longer available” when he reported in person. His name must have sounded Italian on the phone, his family reckons, but his appearance was unmistakably indigenously Mexican. Undeterred, the Carpio patriarch pushed his way onto the payroll, promising to work a week for free to prove himself. He wound up working for the City of Pomona for more than 20 years.
Carpio’s grandfather died on his 92nd birthday in 2012, living long enough to see his granddaughter fulfill the hopes for an education that had eluded him. She had been named Genevieve after one of his daughters who died as an infant during the war, while he was away at boot camp. For her senior thesis at Pomona in 2005, Carpio interviewed her grandfather, then in his 80s, for one of many oral histories that eventually helped shape her book.
“We really valued oral history because it reveals stories that aren’t in official documents,” she says. “They aren’t the dominant stories about powerful people, the mayors or the business owners, but about the folks who built the city. Nobody knows who digs up the streets, who paves the streets. But that’s what my grandpa did, you know, he dug up the streets in Pomona.”
Her father, Vincent Jr., a long-time Chicano community activist, also cultivated a love of culture and history in his daughter as a young teen, urging her to volunteer at the Ygnacio Palomares Adobe, a Pomona museum.
Although Carpio graduated from high school 20 years ago this past summer, her mother still gushes with pride that Gena was accepted to all 12 colleges where she had applied. Carpio almost passed on applying to Pomona because she thought it would be too hard to get in, and “I was just so scared of rejection.” She still becomes emotional thinking of the day her admission letter from Pomona arrived in the mail.
“I opened it up and my knees buckled. I fell to the floor, and I just started sobbing. I was so happy.”
Four years later on her graduation day, Carpio joined her classmates in the traditional passage through the college gates with the weighty inscription: They only are loyal to this college who departing bear their added riches in trust for mankind.
“The idea is that education is not just for your own enrichment, but for you to do something good with what you’ve learned,” she says.
‘“I hope this book encourages people to write their stories, especially those that so often have been left off the map.”
“I feel like I’m at this really exciting crossroads.”
–Genevieve Carpio ’05
Westward PO
Cameron Blevins ’08 photographed by Flor Blake
On an 80-degree September day in 2016, Cameron Blevins ’08 was wearing a sweater as he waited in one of his favorite places in the world.
The windowless Ahmanson Reading Room of the Munger Research Center at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, is a carpeted kingdom of quiet. It is kept chilly to safeguard the more than 450,000 rare books and 8 million manuscript items the library holds.
Blevins, now a professor of U.S. history and digital humanities at the University of Colorado Denver, handed an archivist a little slip of paper containing his request for documents. He was deep into research for what would become Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West, exploring how the postal service, working with private entrepreneurs, played a central role in extending the federal government’s reach to the Pacific.
A Wall Street Journal reviewer will go on to call the book “a wonderful example of digital history built on information technology and archival research.” First, though, came the search.
Five, 10, 15 minutes went by before a trolley rolled toward Blevins bearing archival boxes filled with letters from the 1850s through the 1890s.
“You feel like a kid in a candy store,” he says. “The archives are where you find little windows into the past. You look through the catalog to try to find things you can metaphorically unwrap. It’s magical.”
Blevins originally came west from New London, Connecticut, to attend Pomona. In his first semester, his life changed when he wowed Professor of History Sam Yamashita with his paper about major league baseball players’ barnstorming tour of 1930s Japan. “He found it fascinating,” Blevins recalls. “I remember him saying, ‘If you wanted to, you could do this as a career.’ I hadn’t thought until then that this was something I could do for a living. It got my wheels turning.”
Thanks to a Pomona research grant, his sophomore summer he mastered GIS (geographic information system) software and used it to map the landholdings of Venture Smith, an enslaved man who bought his freedom in colonial Connecticut. “This was absolutely transformative for me in my career,” says Blevins, who earned his Ph.D. in history from Stanford. “Pomona supported my research and gave me the independence to spend a summer digging in archives and learning this technology. I’m not sure I would’ve had the same career trajectory if I hadn’t had this experience. It opened my eyes to the potential of technology to study the past and propelled me down this road toward the digital humanities.”
The realm of computational analysis and data visualization offered Blevins a new way to bring history to life. It didn’t replace—and still depended on—the time-intensive work of archival research at places like the Huntington, sifting through box after box of dead-end materials penned in indecipherable script to find the few that will matter. He describes that process as a “combination of excitement, hoping and lots of waiting.”
“All historians have an experience where you’re in the archives and come across some document, and a thrill runs through you. Maybe it’s something personalized, individualized—a human being I’ve been thinking about. I’m able to see him in front of me.”
Blevins would experience such a thrill during his research. But first came the wider context.
“History,” says Blevins, “is not some magic bullet to let you predict the future or avoid mistakes, but it is absolutely crucial for understanding the state of the world and society.”
Historians of the Western frontier once told tales of glorious conquest. In his multivolume book The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt, who became president of the American Historical Association a few years after serving as president of the United States, proclaimed it was “our manifest destiny to swallow up the land of all adjoining nations who were too weak to withstand us.”
The pattern of conquest is “pretty dark,” Blevins says. “The history of the United States is based on two inescapable facts—African slavery and the forced dispossession and attempted extermination of Native people. That’s inescapable and a vitally important part of our history,” he adds. “You can’t understand how we got where we are today without coming face to face with those facts. All of us are sitting on plundered land. That is something our nation needs to face.”
Paper Trails tells how an institution as seemingly benign as the post office helped enable the military and settlers to bring destruction to Native Americans. “The American state’s violent campaigns were conducted with envelopes as well as rifles,” writes Blevins.
The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 opened the floodgates for westward expansion, and the forcible displacement of Native Americans accelerated in the 1830s. The postal system continued the westward march.
USA existing native lands compared to post offices in 1848.
US Post Office (exact location)
US Post Office (approximate location)
Native Lands
Reservations
Between 1848 and 1895, the federal government opened 24,000 post offices in the western United States. By 1889, the U.S. had 59,000 of those offices nationwide and 400,000 miles of mail routes—a system larger than any other nation’s. (Blevins notes that by comparison, there are fewer than 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S.)
He calls this sprawling, fast-moving system a “gossamer network”—as intricate and ephemeral as a spider’s web—that expanded and shrank with each gust of population movement. Some 48,000 post offices closed, changed names or moved during this unstable period. “What surprised me was the speed with which the network could extend these tendrils into really distant places and then also contract,” says Blevins. “Post offices would sprout up in a mining camp and disappear two years later.”
USA existing native land reservations compared to post offices in 1893. US Post Office (exact location) US Post Office (approximate location) Native Lands Reservations
The rapid westward growth of post offices was “a subtle, unexpected system” that accelerated settlers’ migration and violent military oppression, Blevins argues. He believes that the post office’s role in hastening westward migration and armed conflict was so ubiquitous that historians failed to see it.
“Again and again, the protection of [mail] transportation corridors provided a pretext for military action,” Blevins writes. One western officer griped, “Except to guard the El Paso Mail I am unable to discover the necessity for a single soldier at this post.”
True to the data visualization work that Blevins began as a student, Paper Trails emerged from the use of digital history and interactive maps and charts. A visit to gossamernetwork.com, the book’s companion website made in collaboration with designer Yan Wu, reveals clusters and sprinklings of hundreds of pink, purple and blue dots that represent remote post offices in places like Skull Valley, Arizona (established 1869, still operating); Spotted Horse, Montana (established 1890, discontinued 1892); and Mud Meadows, Nevada (established 1867, discontinued 1867). With a computer click one can watch them suddenly appear near gold strikes or materialize in lines as straight as railroad tracks.
Run by contractors who filled local needs as they arose, the postal system expanded so rapidly that its Washington overseers could barely track its growth. “The extension of the mail service was unquestionably far in advance of the actual needs of the country. …It is questionable whether the good accomplished in the remote regions of the West compensated for the positive evil which resulted,” Postmaster General Thomas James wrote in 1881, referring to postal service corruption, not wars.
“As humans, we want tidy morality stories with something as a force for good or evil. Of course, it’s never like that,” says Blevins. “What I see as important is less understanding this period in history, but to think about how large networks, systems and structures shape modern life for good or bad.”
He sees striking parallels to today’s tech companies. “We could go into the way something like Facebook amplifies misinformation. But it’s not like people in its headquarters are scheming how to break American democracy,” says Blevins. “It’s that they put things in motion—things they sometimes don’t understand—or they don’t think about the consequences of structures they set up. It’s less about trying to assign individual blame to a company but trying to think about those underlying algorithms that drive misinformation or radicalization.”
There is another side to Blevins’ work beyond analyzing data and systems. They provided powerful insight, but he still had to find the human stories to bring this history of the immense postal system to life. That proved a tougher quest than Blevins expected. “I went into archives expecting 19th-century Americans to be writing about this amazing network and ‘Isn’t it incredible I’m able to communicate with people 3,000 miles away for the cost of a two-cent stamp?’” Instead, he “heard crickets. When things are vast and wrapped into daily life, people don’t talk about them as much as you’d expect.”
But on that day in the Ahmanson Reading Room, after Blevins had pored through box after box of unusable materials, the trolley stopped at his table, delivering one that would yield an entire chapter in Paper Trails.
It contained dozens of letters written from the 1850s to the 1890s by Benjamin Curtis and his sisters Sarah, Delia and Jamie. Orphaned in 1852, they had been sent to live with relatives in Massachusetts, Tennessee, Ohio and Illinois. But thanks to the U.S. Post Office, they stayed in touch, especially when they all moved west to equally remote Wyoming, California, Idaho and Arizona.
One of Blevins’ favorite letters is from Benjamin to Delia on September 8, 1886. She is in San Diego. He is homesteading in Arizona’s Salt River Valley, east of Phoenix. The nearest town is 30 miles away, but the post office opened a branch two miles from him in Armer and another three miles away in Catalpa. His wife has given birth to a 9-pound baby daughter. “It is a trying time for any mother, and although it is 100 degrees in this room she does not complain,” Benjamin writes and then tells Delia they named the baby after her.
“We think it is just the nicest baby ever born,” he boasts. “Only it don’t take after its father, for it has plenty of hair on top of its head.”
Lo and behold, in the file Blevins found a photograph of Benjamin, who was far balder than the baby. It was a “humanizing moment” for Blevins as he sifted through the letters offering “beautiful, intimate glimpses” into the siblings’ relationships over decades.
Although cool-headed computer calculations drive the scholarship behind Paper Trails, the heart of the book beats with human stories. Blevins’ gossamer network of outposts on a map ultimately reveals the vast distances that have always existed in America as well as the ties that bind us together.
Suddenly Everywhere
photography by Jeff Hing and Sandeep Mukherjee
Wearing a safety vest, Professor Sandeep Murkherjee looks at his work through the entrance of the YouTube Theater at SoFi Stadium during the construction process.
“My work begins with the perspective that movement is primary and prior to space and time (spacetime). Motion does not happen in space and time but instead produces it. ”
—Prof. Sandeep Mukherjee
A working artist as well as a professor, Mukherjee creates paintings and sculptures that are displayed in galleries, museums or private spaces. But a new career in public art—a field where commissions are much sought-after—has taken flight. He already has been selected for large-scale permanent works at the Facebook offices in Los Angeles, a federal courthouse in Toledo, Ohio, and now the 6,000-seat YouTube Theater tucked beneath the roof of SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, home of the NFL’s L.A. Rams and Chargers.
With a master’s degree in industrial engineering from UC Berkeley and a master of fine arts from UCLA, Mukherjee brings a scientific understanding of such concepts as movement, malleability and color to his work. He created the 204 pieces of hand-molded aluminum on the walls of the theater’s lobby by wrapping the pliable metal around sections of tree trunks, cross-sections of trees, broken limbs and even rocks. Then he painted the molded shapes in gradients of intensely colored acrylic—oranges that look hot to the touch, blood reds and varied hues of goldenrod, lizard green, indigo and amethyst that merge into each other. Seen together, the pieces sometimes almost look like microorganisms on a slide. Viewed separately, they resemble archeological finds—bones, stone tools, even pieces of bodies.
“Luminosity, opacity, color, materiality, texture—all are shifting properties of the work that have an innate architectonic rhythm. I strive to make the experience of moving through the space vivid, transformative and impactful. ”
—Prof. Sandeep Mukherjee
“Depending on the time of day or night and the viewer’s location, the work becomes a membrane in flux, an interface that changes with the viewer’s perspective and movement; a porous skin that connects the inside and the outside. ”
—Prof. Sandeep Mukherjee
“Traditionally we think of space housing the work, but in my case the work communes with space—turning corners, echoing shadows, absorbing light and making room simply for what is there. ”
—Prof. Sandeep Mukherjee
The Road to Basketball Glory
Lately, the road to basketball glory passes through Pomona College.
In July, Coach Mike Budenholzer ’92 and his Milwaukee Bucks hoisted the NBA championship trophy after defeating the Phoenix Suns in the NBA Finals.
In August, Coach Gregg Popovich and Team USA fended off France for Olympic gold in Tokyo.
“Coach Bud,” as he’s known throughout the NBA, played for Pomona-Pitzer from 1988-92 after he was briefly recruited by Popovich before the young Sagehens coach left to become an assistant with the San Antonio Spurs in 1988.
That glancing acquaintance deepened when Pop—as the longtime San Antonio head coach is known throughout the basketball world—hired Budenholzer as a Spurs video coordinator and then promoted him to assistant coach. They would work together for 19 years, piling up four of Popovich’s five NBA titles with the Spurs.
Charmed paths? Not completely.
Despite winning NBA Coach of the Year in 2014-15, Budenholzer faced postseason disappointments in his first head job as coach of the Atlanta Hawks, ending with a mutual parting of ways after five years. There was more departure talk as the Bucks fell short of expectations, even falling into 0-2 holes in two of their best-of-seven playoff series on the way to the championship. But Budenholzer’s Bucks left no doubt in the end, when Giannis Antetokounmpo’s astounding 50-point performance in Game 6 of the Finals gave Milwaukee its first NBA title in 50 years.
Head Coach Mike Budenholzer ’92 holds the Larry O’Brien Trophy after his Milwaukee Bucks win game six of the 2021 NBA Finals.
Popovich, likewise, seemed headed for possible failure as Olympic coach. Without NBA stars LeBron James, Steph Curry and others on the roster, Team USA had early misfires—notably an exhibition loss to Nigeria and a loss to France in the opening game of the Olympic competition.
For Pop, five NBA rings meant little when faced with the five-ring Olympic symbol and the duty to uphold American pride. Add to that his memories of being cut from the 1972 Olympic team as a player out of the Air Force Academy—“I was devastated when I didn’t make it, as anybody would be,” he says—and his role as an assistant coach on the 2004 Olympic team that settled for a crushing bronze medal.
The USA Men’s National Team present Head Coach Gregg Popovich with the gold medal after winning the Gold Medal Game of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
“You know what sayonara means? That’s how I’m feeling right now,” a relieved Popovich said in Tokyo after winning gold. “You know, every championship is special and the group you’re with is special, but I can be honest and say this is the most responsibility I’ve ever felt. Because you’re playing for so many people that are watching for a country and other countries involved. The responsibility was awesome. And I felt that every day for several years now. So, I’m feeling pretty light now.”
The next time Popovich and Budenholzer gather for a meal—as they often do when they get an opportunity together or with longtime Pomona-Pitzer Coach Charlie Katsiaficas—expect a toast to Pomona.
“I loved playing basketball at Pomona. It was a huge part of my experience,” Budenholzer recalled last spring during an episode of Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. “The reason I chose Pomona was I could get the best education while still playing basketball. … I had a couple other places [he could have played] and really none of them were probably even in the same realm academically as Pomona.”
Popovich, despite an NBA career pointed toward the Basketball Hall of Fame, has never lost his love for his days as a Division III coach at a small liberal arts college.
“I just enjoyed the atmosphere where all the players were real student-athletes and they knew that wasn’t going to be their profession or anything, but they sacrificed that time to be on an intercollegiate team,” he recalled as he prepared the U.S. team for Tokyo. “I loved the whole Claremont Colleges set-up down there with the five schools. It was really great for my family. My kids kind of grew up there during that seven or eight years.”
“It was great satisfaction, well beyond basketball.”
Retirement could be nearing for Popovich, 72. Maybe Katsiaficas could use a volunteer assistant.
“Nah,” Popovich said. “I don’t think Charlie’d hire me.”
Gregg Popovich’s penchant for speaking his mind politically didn’t stop when he became the U.S. Olympic coach.
“A patriot is somebody that respects their country and understands that the best thing about our country is that we have the ability to fix things that have not come to fruition for a lot of people so far. All the promises at the beginning when the country was established were fantastic. Those goals have not been reached yet for a lot of people. So being a critic of those inequalities does not make you a non-patriot. It’s what makes America great, that you can say those things and attack those things to make it better. That’s what a lot of countries don’t have. You lose your freedom when you do that. You don’t lose that freedom here.”
—Gregg Popovich
Getting There
Moving people from point A to point B is a must. But horses and buggies are long gone, an ever-increasing number of vehicles are packing (or are they parked?) the freeways and teleporting is still a way off.
Jarrett Walker ’84 photographed in a Los Angeles Metro station in 2013
Jarrett Walker ’84 is an oft-quoted and oft-consulted international expert on public transportation who has published everywhere from the Journal of Transport Geography to Shakespeare Quarterly and been cited by Bloomberg, The Seattle Times, Atlanta Magazine and more. He has redesigned major public transport networks in North America and overseas and is a frequent speaker on transit and urbanism issues. And he says it’s not enough for mass transit to compete with cars. Mass transit must succeed.
He is certain it will. While the COVID-19 pandemic suggested that public transit is unsafe, Walker contends that it was much safer than we were being told—and time and seats occupied will prove it, despite people’s fears.
“I don’t see safety or perceptions of safety as something insurmountable,” he says. “As long as we don’t cut service, I think that inevitably many people will look at their options and find that public transit is the safest thing to do among their options in enough numbers that will get ridership.”
Riders are coming, but so is the possibility of a permanent transformation of rush hour, Walker says. But to get there requires some serious upgrades to efficiency. Walker points to the Metrolink in Southern California as an example of a very inefficient operation because it is so narrowly focused on rush hour.
“Metrolink has to position a whole bunch of trains to make one trip. There’ll be one trip from San Bernardino to L.A. And they will have to have a whole train and a crew just to run that one trip because by the time you get to L.A. and go back, the peak is over and it’s too late to do it again.”
Because racial and social equity are major concerns, the need to focus on all-day service is even more urgent since low-income people are traveling at all hours, not just the peak. But Walker has a few questions about what the equity priorities should be.
When it comes to fares, proponents say both free fares and more service are necessary. “They’re both important. But what actually happens inside of an agency’s budget when they say free fares is you get free fares instead of more service,” Walker says. “What you often get is free terrible service. If that means the service is useless to low-income people who need it, it’s hard to call that equity.”
But the soundbite of “free fares,” has a better ring to it, according to Walker, because it’s easier to explain in politics.
What’s the travel time solution for low-income workers? Less rigid work schedules, Walker says. Transportation advocates have been pressing for such change for years, but it took COVID-19 to bring it about. If less-rigid work schedules persist, that could unlock an enormous amount of resources to run better all-the-time service, he says, because rush-hour-only service is so expensive.
No doubt resources and revamps are required. But Walker thinks the political debate on infrastructure might be misdirected. For one, nobody knows what the future of rush hour looks like. As a result, he contends that infrastructure projects that depend on rush-hour demand projections should be paused, and possibly rethought. Infrastructure that can be justified by all-day demand should proceed.
A math major at Pomona, Walker says his liberal arts education helped him see the big picture. With a Stanford Ph.D. in drama, literature and humanities, a case could be made he has a good grasp of the human experience. So that combination of broad thinking and deep understanding of numbers and people might be part of what leads him to believe that while we need some big infrastructure projects, a higher priority may be “100,000 crosswalks.” Walker says that however great a bus network he designs, what remains is a huge problem for pedestrians: In much of our suburban landscape, it’s too dangerous to walk.
“I can draw the best possible network of bus services, but I can’t change the fact that I’m dropping you on one side of a road that goes 50 miles an hour and there’s nowhere safe for you to cross. You look at the actual barriers to transportation, and a lot of it is the danger or impossibility of walking.”
Elected officials don’t really know how to take credit for 100,000 crosswalks, Walker says. Instead they want their name on a big piece of infrastructure. But that’s not always what we need, he says. Sometimes yes, but oftentimes no. Walker warns that we are always in danger of building the wrong infrastructure, and a little skepticism is warranted. While politicians may garner support for building things, political pressure would be more aptly applied to fixing things, he says.
“That’s really obvious when you actually analyze mobility,” Walker says. “A bunch of it is actually the many tiny things that are wrong, not just the giant things that are wrong.”
The Front Lines
It wasn’t the end, not by a long shot, but it felt like the beginning of the end.
“I was just at home. It was a weeknight, like 8 p.m.,” says Kate Dzurilla ’11, a nurse practitioner at NYU Langone hospital in New York who worked nights on a COVID-19 floor during the surge that brought freezer trucks to the city to serve as overflow morgues. “It just popped up on my phone. ‘You have an appointment to schedule. You’re eligible for the vaccine.’”
Clicking through quickly, Dzurilla scheduled the first available slot on Dec. 15. “And I just kind of started crying,” she says. “I wasn’t sure exactly what the emotion was, whether it was excitement or relief that it was over or, like, a little bit hopeful.”
On the other side of the country in Kirkland, Washington, Dr. David Siew ’98 works as an internal medicine hospitalist at EvergreenHealth Medical Center, where the first known U.S. outbreak of COVID-19 was identified in February 2020 as patients from the nearby Life Care Center skilled nursing facility streamed into the hospital with severe lower respiratory illness. The hospital would later lose an intensive care nurse to COVID-19. “A nurse that had been with us for a really long time and was a bedrock of all of our intensive care unit,” Siew says. “That was really hard, and obviously it highlighted our own vulnerability.”
On Christmas Eve, Siew and other hospital staff received their own first vaccines.
“It was amazing to see the emotion of people,” he says. “It was almost like a party atmosphere at our vaccine clinic because of the amount of relief and elation after living a year in a higher-risk environment, just knowing that the threat was always there, that you could fall critically ill or die from this illness. Obviously, the vaccine is not 100% protective, but to finally have some relief was euphoric, and hopefully we’ll be able to get that for everyone.”
Nurse practitioner Kate Dzurilla ’11 takes a selfie as she receives her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
The first known U.S. case of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was identified on Jan. 20, 2020, in Washington’s Snohomish County in a 35-year-old man who had recently returned from Wuhan, China. “Patient Zero” would recover.
At the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Matt Wise ’01 monitored the reports. With a Ph.D. in epidemiology from UCLA, he has worked for the CDC for more than a dozen years and has risen to chief of the Outbreak Response and Prevention Branch in the division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases, typically focusing on illnesses caused by such pathogens as salmonella, E. coli and listeria.
“The reality is that almost every year, there’s some major public health disaster either at home or abroad,” he says.
Most are contained. This time was different.
The outbreak at the Life Care Center was identified after Dr. Francis Riedo, a former CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer and the director for infection control and prevention at the hospital where Siew works, noted an expansion in testing eligibility beyond only those who had travel history or contact with someone who was infected. The hospital selected two seriously ill patients, sent out the tests, and uncovered what would become one of the first significant COVID-19 outbreaks in the United States.
But those illnesses among vulnerable elderly patients weren’t what stopped Wise cold: At about the same time, a 17-year-old high school student from nearby Everett, Washington, tested positive with no history of travel. “The moment that came out, you knew that there was extensive unrecognized community transmission going on,” Wise says. “I think seeing that confirmed everyone’s worst fears that this was being transmitted widely within the U.S. And I think that was the moment where it was just like, ‘OK, we’re not getting out of this. This is here, and it’s happening.’”
Back in New York, the virus hit early and hard.
“I got it right at the beginning, like March 16th. I tested positive,” Dzurilla says. “Thankfully it was mild, but there was so much anxiety, more than anything. Especially at that point, we didn’t really know what all the symptoms would be like. I lost my taste and smell on about Day 5 of being sick and no one had even known that was a symptom at that time. When I got it, we’d barely had any COVID patients. When I came back two weeks later after being sick, the hospital had exploded, and it was all COVID.”
In Los Angeles, Dr. Edgar Chavez ’98 had been monitoring the distant drumbeat of the deadly virus that emerged from Wuhan for months, but Los Angeles County did not record its first death until March 11, a woman who had traveled abroad.
Chavez earned a medical degree at Stanford before turning down a lucrative job offer and returning to the South L.A. neighborhood where he grew up after his family fled war-torn El Salvador. The Universal Community Health Center he opened on E. Washington Boulevard blocks from his childhood home was the first of three clinics he founded to meet the needs of the underserved, largely Spanish-speaking population.
It was a Monday in March, as Chavez recalls, when “I had a patient that came to see me, and he was having a bad cough, just not feeling really well. He had an appointment to come back a week after so that I could evaluate him again. And by Sunday I get a call from a community hospital that he had passed away from respiratory failure. This was a young 60-year-old guy. He had a little bit of diabetes, but not really to the level that I would say, oh, my God, you know, you are at such huge risk of dying from any type of disease. And so that’s when it hit me. You know what? This is going to be really bad.”
Workers exit a large tent set up in front of the emergency room at EvergreenHealth Medical Center, where Dr. David Siew ’98 experienced the first known outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. —AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
At the initial U.S. epicenter of the disease, doctors at EvergreenHealth started a website recording their own experiences and responses to the new disease to share with medical colleagues around the U.S., Siew says.
But after the earliest days, when COVID associated with people who had the means to travel—or had interacted with people who traveled—began to fade, it became clear that the battle is against more than the disease itself, says the CDC’s Wise.
“The virus has found the soft underbelly of everything in our society, all of our public health system, our health care system, the inequities, racism—the virus sort of sees all of that,” says Wise. He has now served three COVID deployments from his home—the first last spring focused on identifying areas where transmission was increasing rapidly, the second in the fall working on community interventions such as how to protect people at polling places, and the most recent this winter focused on providing constantly updated vaccination data on the CDC COVID Data Tracker. “When you ask that question about whether I have been touched, well, I am one of the people who have the ability to work remotely and insulate ourseves from contact.”
Working from home “is not a luxury that lots of people have. It’s not a luxury that health care providers have, and it’s not a luxury that lots of people that have to go to a physical job every day have,” Wise says.
The disparities unfolded starkly in the South L.A. communities Chavez’s clinics serve. “A lot of our population historically has gotten poor health care, so they have lots of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease,” he says. “When they get COVID, it’s not a flu, it’s not a cold. It’s actually something that drives them to the hospital. We’re seeing a lot of deaths. In the past year, I’ve probably lost upwards of 15 to 20 patients to COVID—my own patients that I’ve seen over the past 10 years that I’ve been at the clinic.
“The reason that’s happening is because a lot of our community lives in multigenerational households, and so you’ll have the young that have to go out to work. They’re the people that work in restaurants and shops, where they’re the first line to deal with the public. And they’re repeatedly being exposed to COVID. The young may not have issues; they will get over the COVID. But the problem is that they’re taking this COVID back home, and they have grandpas and parents who have these high-risk conditions and end up getting COVID, and then they end up dying. A lot of our patients are undocumented too. They don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘I am going to rely on the subsidies that the government gives for me to stay home, from unemployment.’ They don’t have access to that money. It’s a hard situation to see with our patients.”
Frustrated with waiting up to 10 days at one point for results from COVID tests sent out to labs—rendering them clinically useless, he says—Chavez made a decision to go big on testing that provides quick results. “You can tell people, ‘Hey, stay home,’ but if they don’t have a positive result, people are like, ‘Maybe I’m negative.’ They don’t really listen to you.”
With the help of $650,000 from the federal CARES Act, Chavez purchased a mobile van for testing, hired additional staff and ordered 200,000 of Abbott’s ID Now tests that provide a result in less than 15 minutes. The Universal clinics now provide three types of COVID tests—antibody, antigen and the rapid PCR test. In a typical month before the pandemic, the clinics might have had 2,000 patient visits. Now, he says, it’s 4,500 a month, in part because of access to testing.
Along with testing, Chavez transitioned many clinic visits to telephone or virtual with a simplified system called Doxy.me that allows people to simply click on a text for a video call rather than going through a portal or requiring a computer and Wi-Fi. That allowed both patients and his health care providers to limit contact.
With the arrival of the vaccine, Chavez pivoted again, quickly ordering vaccines and spending close to $10,000 on a used ultra-low-temperature freezer to store them.
Beyond L.A. County, Dr. Michael Sequeira ’73 faces some of the same demographic challenges and more in his role as San Bernardino County’s new public health officer—a job he started on Nov. 23, shortly before the devastating post-holiday surge.
The county is home to transportation and shipping hubs, farm workers, a large Indigenous population that includes the San Manuel and Morongo tribes and many Pacific Islanders, whose large and close-knit families have been hit hard by the virus.
As hospitals began to fill, Sequeira, a former emergency room doctor, stepped back in to assist in the emergency room for a bit, even though at 69 his age put him in a vulnerable group.
“Most of the hospitals in the region were bursting at the seams,” he says. “We were helping bring in State and National Guard to help our different hospitals. We were basically having to put ICU beds in gift shops and hospital cafeterias and lobbies.”
Since then, he has shifted his work to the immense logistical task of distributing vaccines in a county that covers more than 20,000 square miles and reaches to the Arizona and Nevada borders, making it the largest in the Lower 48 states.
Instead of creating vaccination mega-sites, as L.A. County did, San Bernardino adopted a hub-and-spoke system to reach a more dispersed population. Another challenge is overcoming vaccine hesitancy in the community. “I just had a feeling that was going to be a problem with this vaccine,” Sequeira says, recalling how about half of his nurses in years past had resisted flu vaccines. “From the start, I was trying to stay ahead because if we only had 50% of the people who are eligible taking the vaccine, we’d never reach herd immunity.”
To counter uncertainty stemming from concerns about the speed of the vaccine’s approval, the mRNA technology, politicization of the pandemic or other issues, San Bernardino embarked on a campaign of education and reassurance using social media, community town halls and spokespeople including Black doctors, Spanish-speaking doctors and tribal doctors.
There are also worries about variants, with the U.K. variant appearing in a small pocket of Big Bear Lake. “We had to jump all over that, and we’ve contained it,” Sequira says.
Matt Wise ’01 in his office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.—Photo by Dustin Chambers
By late February, as the U.S. marked the solemn toll of more than 500,000 dead, hints of hope emerged as cases declined rapidly—a suggestion, some said, that the U.S. had begun to achieve partial herd immunity. Many of those closest to the crisis are more cautious, saying it could be only a lull, cautioning against overreaction.
“I think everyone is eager for a return to some kind of normalcy,” says the CDC’s Wise. “I just think we have to be really careful that our eagerness to try and have some of that normalcy come back—to be able to see our grandparents and our friends and all that—doesn’t lead us to underestimate the virus. There are variants out there.
“I would say I’m optimistic for sure, but I think that we have to temper that optimism with some realism that having a vaccine is an incredibly important tool, maybe the most important tool, but it’s not the only one. And it’s necessary but probably not sufficient to get us over the line. We still have to do all the other stuff too.
“I think it’s really hard to predict what society is going to look like when this all ends. And frankly, I think even the notion of this ending, it’s hard to know what that even means. You know, we will probably have some amount of COVID-19 with us always now.”
The Class of 2020 Versus the Pandemic
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the College to evacuate its campus a year ago, the Class of 2020 was stunned—perhaps more so than their younger peers. This was their last semester on campus, a busy one but also a fun one— it was supposed to be the semester to end all semesters. But on Wednesday, March 11, an email appeared in all their inboxes, announcing the closure of campus as the COVID-19 outbreak brought Los Angeles County, along with the rest of California, into a state of emergency. Suddenly, all their expectations were turned upside down.
Their final months as Pomona College students were spent off campus, either back home with family or in new living arrangements with friends and roommates. As the pandemic worsened, economic forces began to affect the job market while tightened university budgets constrained graduate programs.
Pomona College students in general fared well, according to a Career Development Office survey released in February that showed 90% of the Class of 2020 graduates participating in career activities—such as a job, internship, service opportunity, graduate school, fellowship or other related activity.
To dive deeper, we spoke to six recent graduates from the Class of 2020, who shared how they have managed in the months since graduating from Pomona. Spanning disciplines and industries, these Sagehens have endured their fair share of experiences that are unique to the year of the pandemic. These are their stories.
Karla Ortiz
“I’ll Figure Something Out”
“Growing up, my parents were always telling me: ‘We don’t want you work with your hands—we want you to work with your mind,” Karla Ortiz recalls. As immigrants, however, her parents knew little about college or scholarships, so Ortiz had to figure out everything on her own. “All I knew was how to get good grades and that I’ll figure something out.”
On March 11, 2020:
Karla Ortiz, a Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies major and math minor, was in the interview process for a paralegal/legal assistant position and had a few other résumés out for jobs in the legal and nonprofit fields.
And she did. As a QuestBridge Scholar, she earned a fully paid scholarship to Pomona, starting out on the pre-health track. After a full year of biology and chemistry, when she decided pre-health wasn’t for her, a methods course in Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies (CLS) soon filled the void. “I felt a very big sense of community that I hadn’t felt in any other classes. … In CLS, I felt I was being heard and understood, and so I decided to major in that, with a focus on immigration.”
She became a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and volunteered at a nonprofit, Uncommon Good, where she tutored and mentored youth. She took a leadership role with the First-Generation and Low-Income (FLI) program.
When the pandemic hit, Ortiz—who was set to graduate with a major in CLS and a minor in mathematics—again had to figure things out. She was in the middle of interviews for a paralegal position when entry-level openings began to disappear. Suddenly, the replies to her cover letters read along the lines of “We are no longer hiring for this position” and “We are freezing hiring for the time being.”
With her parents’ words in her ear, Ortiz never stopped giving it her best, even as her options dwindled. Anxious about not having a job lined up, she signed up in May for an online platform for jobs in education at independent and charter schools. A director of a private school in the Bay Area contacted her personally. “He said he saw my résumé and that I’d be a great fit.” As it turned out, he was particularly interested in Ortiz’s chemistry background—her first year of chemistry and her sophomore year when she became a mentor to a chemistry cohort for underrepresented first-years at Pomona.
“And so, we just went through the interview process: three interviews, got a reference from my chemistry professor, and they talked to another professor about my skills. I got the offer in the beginning of August, and the first day of classes was the 24th.”
A two-year teacher training program at the private school paired Ortiz with a mentor in the same subject, and her first few weeks were spent observing pedagogy in action: how the teachers interacted with students, how they taught the material, how to plan lessons. Now she’s teaching her own classes in ninth-grade chemistry—remotely at first, then as a hybrid mix of virtual and in-person learning.
Trained in CLS, Ortiz has keenly observed the disparities between her own experience as a pupil at an underresourced public high school in Las Vegas, where school lunches often involved semifrozen burritos and other heavily processed foods, and the private high school world in the heart of Silicon Valley where she now teaches. No frozen burritos here—fresh and healthy ingredients are the norm as cooks prepare wholesome meals for the students and staff.
Ortiz is not sure what the future holds. She plans to continue teaching through the end of the training program, arming herself with the knowledge and experience for teaching at the college level one day—perhaps. But she’s also considering business school, a career route she’d never considered before the pandemic. “Money is tight, and business school has crossed my mind.”
Business school. A Ph.D. in sociology. A policy degree. Ortiz continues to mull over her future choices, knowing she will figure something out. But in the meantime, it’s back to ninth-grade chemistry.
Kyle Lee
“An Exercise in Being Vulnerable”
Kyle Lee is an extrovert by nature. An actor who took to Seaver’s stage as a theatre major, he also mastered the art of walking backwards while giving campus tours for the Admissions Office.
On March 11, 2020:
Kyle Lee, a theatre and clinical neuropsychology double major, had just returned from a final callback for an MFA program at UC Irvine and was excited to be in the midst of the admission process with a number of notable MFA programs.
“I’m a people person,” says Lee, who also designed a second major, clinical neuropsychology, in order to better understand people. While at Pomona, Lee thought he knew himself well. Then the pandemic surprised him with the hustler living inside him, as he puts it—the Kyle who makes things happen.
In the fall of his senior year, Lee had applied to a number of MFA programs in acting. He had spent hours and hours preparing monologues and getting ready for auditions, and he got final callbacks at a number of good schools. Excited about each and every one of them, Lee was feeling good—very good—about himself in the weeks leading up to that fateful spring semester, when everything changed.
He stopped hearing back from the programs around the same time Pomona began evacuating campus. When the programs emailed him again, it was a series of depressing messages. “Programs were emailing saying they had either closed or were no longer going to happen. These programs already only take about eight students, so now some are only taking four or six. Most programs just didn’t happen.”
The blow was a harsh one. “Honestly, there were a lot of times when I was wondering why I got this degree. I felt my skills were not useful … but it’s a pandemic and I had to learn to give myself grace.” Ongoing therapy and a close-knit group of friends going through similar struggles helped Lee get through it all.
In the weeks leading up to the announcement that all students must vacate campus, Lee didn’t believe things would be that bad. The shock of the evacuation took him aback. At first there was anger toward the College administration over the decision to evacuate. Then came fear. Lee wasn’t able to return home to New York. “I felt I was being left out in the cold. My mother is housing-insecure, and she was like, ‘I don’t know where you’re going to live.’”
Mixed with the fear was uncertainty. “I was on the precipice of the unknown. I hadn’t heard from my MFA programs, and I didn’t know where I was going to be. I was not sure if our [Pomona] jobs would keep paying us. Honestly, I wasn’t even thinking of graduation or the social aspect of things. I was just trying to figure out how to survive. I packed my stuff, and I just sat in the back of a car not knowing where to go.”
Lee ended up in Los Angeles after calling a friend, Miles Burton ’17, who had an extra room in an apartment he was sharing with another person. The room was spoken for, but Lee was welcome to stay there until the new roommate moved in. Lee was grateful for the respite, but the uncertainty of his life continued to hit him in waves. What followed were many weeks of despair and wondering how he would be able to afford his new rent and bills.
The job search in a pandemic was plainly and simply hard, says Lee. He took on various gigs to pay the rent: delivering food for Postmates, coordinating a training for a startup, becoming a freelance writer for a get-out-the-vote campaign in Georgia.
Even with his gregarious nature, Lee was hesitant to ask for help. But in early fall of 2020, after months of gig jobs and stressful thoughts, Lee reached out to his beloved Office of Admissions at Pomona, where he had worked for many summers and where staff members had taken him under their wing.
“I was like, ‘OK, Kyle, this is an exercise in being vulnerable.’ It was hard to tell people I still didn’t have a job—that I needed help. This felt so personal. I felt so vulnerable that I was scared to do that reaching out, but I reached out to Adam [Sapp, assistant vice president and director of admissions] … He moved his schedule around immediately and had a whole meeting with me about admissions jobs.”
Sapp encouraged Lee to apply for a temporary position as an outside reader for the Admissons Office. He got the job a month later, which helped Lee sustain himself while he searched for a more permanent job and prepared for another round of MFA applications.
“I realized that I am someone who can roll with the punches and land on my feet. I’ve learned so much about myself and my capacity and my work—things I couldn’t have learned in grad school.”
In January, Lee accepted a full-time offer in business development for BlackLine, a cloud software company. He’s also been busy rebuilding his trust in himself after months of uncertainty. With a new set of tools and newfound knowledge of himself, Lee is once again applying to MFA programs that have reopened. He has a final callback in April for the Tisch School of Arts at New York University. Wish him luck.
Zachary Freiman
“The Campaign Staffer Life”
Suddenly last March, Zachary Freiman’s parents saw their brood of three adult sons return unexpectedly to the nest at the family home in Westchester, New York.
On March 11, 2020:
Zachary Freiman, a music and public policy analysis (PPA) double major, had just completed his senior music recital the week before spring break—a capstone event that his father had flown from New York to witness.
Before the arrival of COVID-19, Freiman—a double major in public policy analysis (PPE) and music—was excited to graduate during an election year. He dreamed about working for a big Senate race and living “the campaign staffer life”—where you “uproot everything, and you’re living in the supporter housing, in someone’s guest house eating pizza” while running phone-banks and doing door-to-door canvassing.
When the pandemic began, he was worried and anxious but continued with his academic work, including preparing for his senior music recital, a major capstone for most music majors. “I spent four years at Pomona pretty much running back and forth between Thatcher and Carnegie,” he recalls.
The week before spring break, his father flew in from New York for the recital, and Freiman remembers jokingly asking him to bring cardboard boxes and packing tape in case they needed to pack up his dorm. In the end, his father did help him pack up and get home.
During the next few months, COVID-19 hit the Westchester area hard, with shelves empty of toilet paper and trips to the grocery store fraught with worry. “We were scared and at home,” Freiman recalls. “My dad runs a small business, and that got hit really bad, and he was struggling. My mom was working in politics and was out of a job. We were all basically struggling as much as the country was and is. It was a deeply stressful, traumatic experience to be home during the pandemic with my whole family there, not knowing if it’s airborne, if we can go see our grandma, if we can go to the grocery store—we’d wipe down the bags, wipe each item out of the bag, wipe handles … We were neurotic. We couldn’t find yeast, couldn’t find toilet paper or even cleaning supplies.”
The situation only grew worse as Freiman continued to search for campaign jobs during a unique moment in history. After the initial scramble of campaigns regrouping to move operations to the virtual world of online organizing, Freiman got a notice from a friend that a Democratic campaign of some kind in North Carolina was hiring.
“Who it was for, I wasn’t sure, but I sent in my application,” remembers Freiman with a laugh. “Someone texted me back furiously: ‘We need to hire you.’ So I interviewed with this guy, and I didn’t even understand what this campaign was at first. Turns out, I began working for the Biden campaign in North Carolina.”
The job was virtual, so Freiman was working from home. His duties included helping get campaign volunteers into the virtual space. “We were having to teach the volunteers how to Zoom. We had to spend hours and hours with really lovely, elderly volunteers—volunteers who had been volunteering for years—we had to help them as if we were their grandchildren. I was part of a fleet of young staffers acting as grandchildren—helping them with tech problems. I’ve had to help my grandparents with these things like opening a browser, using Gmail, how to plug in your headphones.”
Freiman was able to travel to North Carolina for the last few weeks leading up to the election to safely canvass neighborhoods and go door-knocking while maintaining social distancing.
Today the campaigns are over, and Freiman has left his family home and moved in with with his former Pomona roommate, William Baird-Smith ’20, in Washington, D.C. He wants to be close to the action as he continues his search for meaningful political work.
Freiman’s experience with the campaign staffer life may not quite have been the post-Pomona adventure he had envisioned, but for now, at least, it was close enough.
Zaira Apolinario Chaplin
“Frazzled, Confused and Lost”
Zaira Apolinario Chaplin recalls returning to her family in New York—the epicenter of the coronavirus at the time—after campus was evacuated last March. She arrived home with a cold. Fearing the worst, she camped out in the living room. Her makeshift bedroom served as a remote classroom, and her suitcases were her closet. “I was super frazzled, confused and lost.”
On March 11, 2020:
Zaira Apolinario Chaplin, an international relations major, had a job offer in hand with Accenture and was planning a fun summer, with a research project and a trip back to Brazil, where she studied abroad.
Her mother, Erminia, worked as a caregiver at the time and had to travel to Florida with the family she worked for, heightening the stress that Zaira was already feeling in those early months of the pandemic.
Fortunately, professors extended a lot of deadlines. Her thesis readers continued to support her, but living through a pandemic while trying to wrap up your final semester of college was difficult. “I was nowhere near as productive as I was in school. But I thought, ‘I have to get it done. I have to graduate. I cannot end on a negative note.”
Not only did she graduate; she was awarded the John Vieg Senior Prize in International Relations for her thesis.
She kicked off her summer by spending quality time with her family. She started learning to crochet; she baked; and she took up gardening with her mother. She kept this up as she started a part-time research gig working for Professor Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes.
An international relations major, Apolinario Chaplin had secured a job as an analyst with Accenture in San Francisco that was slated to start in early fall. As she was finishing up her research work for Douglass-Jaimes, she received an email from Accenture pushing back her start date to January 2021.
“That gave me time to spend time with my partner in her home city of Rio de Janeiro,” says Apolinario Chaplin who remembers multiple canceled flights until she finally booked a flight and made the trip to Brazil, where she tested negative for COVID-19 and booked an Airbnb. “It was nice to have some breathing room, have a little bit of space and also to have my own apartment, naturally. I just cooked a lot and tried so many recipes, I made all kinds of soups and just really spent a lot of time with myself,” she says. “I learned how to box braid my hair and experimented with styling kinky black hair textures like my own. I joined a Facebook group called ‘Safe space for Black girls who never learned to braid,’ and it was really emblematic of the special, online quarantine communities that many people sought out in the early months of the pandemic.”
The time in Rio was a contrast to the past few months in New York, where the only places she could get outdoors were in parks. “Versus in Rio, you can go camping, hiking, and that really changed the way I spent my time, to be able to be in fresh air and not be concerned with contaminating other people.”
Even with the outdoor opportunities, Apolinario Chaplin experienced a side of the pandemic in Rio that she wasn’t used to. “Generally, people weren’t taking the pandemic very seriously. Every single restaurant was open; clubs were open; bars were open; every other person was wearing a mask. People tended to treat the pandemic and the discussions around social distancing as something banal, a minor inconvenience.”
Apolinario Chaplin came home to New York in January. Her mother had quit her caregiver job and was now cooking Brazilian food and selling it via an app called Shef. “It’s been nice to see her entrepreneurial side, and it’s a big relief for me because she doesn’t have to travel with the family anymore.”
Since her start with Accenture, her life has been more of a whirlwind than the relaxed months she spent in Rio. Training was intensive, but she started with a cohort of other new, nervous beginners like herself. Accenture sent her a work computer and a headset, and she now works from home, with a schedule that has been busy but flexible. But Accenture also has a branch in Rio, and the thought of transferring there someday gives Apolinario Chaplin a special goal to work toward in the future.
Miguel Delgado-Garcia
“A Roller Coaster I Was Riding”
During the fall of his senior year, student body president Miguel Delgado-Garcia, was putting in a busy schedule to ensure that he would have a smooth spring semester. A public policy analysis (PPA) major, he had done all the research he needed for his thesis, which he was going to write in the spring. He jumped into the hiring cycle for consulting firms and secured an offer from The Concord Group, a national real estate strategy firm. He was also traveling twice a week into Los Angeles for an internship, all while fulfilling his duties as president of the Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC).
On March 11, 2020:
Miguel Delgado-Garcia, a public policy analysis (PPA) major and student body president, had already accepted a position with a L.A.-based consulting firm and did not anticipate any changes in the offer.
As spring began, his busy fall seemed to be paying off. In the weeks leading up to the evacuation of campus, Delgado-Garcia had been going out with friends and enjoying his last semester at Pomona. Then: “I was in theatre class when we got the email, and initially, I just felt shock and awe. I saw Dean Ellie Ash-Bala and we’re just sitting together in disbelief when Dean Josh [Eisenberg] came out and said, ‘OK, what are we going to do?’”
From then on, it was all business for Delgado-Garcia, who helped set up a meeting between the ASPC and Pomona’s executive staff, getting it livestreamed and ensuring they asked all the pertinent questions on behalf of the student body. Amidst senior activities and pre-spring break celebration, the student body chose to unify and advocate for each other. “I think that was the beginning, when we had to pivot and acknowledge that we’re in a new world.”
For Delgado-Garcia, that included working with student activist groups to secure housing and funding for students who had to leave campus but didn’t have a viable place to go to on short notice. “That was difficult because I always felt stuck in the middle. I was elected to advocate for the students, but I also understand the struggles the College was facing. It was a constant, nonstop remainder of the semester. I remember calling Professor Eleanor Brown, my thesis reader, and just breaking down. I didn’t have my thesis draft ready. I shared what was happening in ASPC. She helped me calm down. All my professors were supportive. It was definitely a difficult semester. It was a huge transition, and then one day, I submitted my thesis and graduated.”
By this point, Delgado-Garcia had moved back home with his father. “Suddenly I was in my childhood room, where I had applied to Pomona. I hadn’t planned on moving back home after graduation. I thought I was going to move directly to San Francisco, and here I am.”
And then, the week before finals were due, Delgado-Garcia got an email from The Concord Group informing him that they wouldn’t be able to hire him. “At least through the remainder of the semester, I knew I had a plan because I had a job … and then my job was gone. The carpet was pulled out from under me. They informed us that due to the pandemic, and in order to honor their current employees, they wouldn’t be able to bring us on. They had halted all hiring.
“I graduated, and suddenly I was an adult with a college degree, with no job, living at home. It was a span of six weeks after graduation where I slept a lot, read a lot of books, went on a lot of hikes. There wasn’t a lot to do being quarantined in L.A. I applied for a couple of jobs. It really knocked down my morale in general: I had been on a high, a roller coaster I was riding, and it suddenly dipped.”
Luckily for Delgado-Garcia, The Concord Group sent him a second email a few weeks later, re-offering him the position. At that point, he had activated his Claremont Colleges’ network and through a connection, had secured an offer with another consulting firm. Ultimately, however, he went with the original job offer.
In the end, Delgado-Garcia is grateful to have lived through those experiences to grow as a leader and as an individual: “It steeled me.” Because he’s working remotely, Delgado-Garcia is just now starting to feel confident in his job, nearly eight months later. He’s moved out of his father’s house and in with one of his longtime best friends, Nicole Talisay ’20.
He’s thinking about graduate school for the future, but for now, he wants to soak up as much as he can. Eventually, with a master’s in public policy in hand, he’d like to work in the public sector. “I’d love to go get my master’s in two to three years, but I’m not ready to go back [to school] yet. Especially not in a pandemic.”
Norani Abilo
“The Uncertainty of the Pandemic”
Norani Abilo had a clear plan for her next two years. She would take the first year off after graduation and apply to medical school the next year. During that two-year gap, she planned to work in a clinical research setting to gain clinical laboratory hours and build strong relationships with health care professionals. All in all, a solid plan, she thought.
On March 11, 2020:
Norani Abilo, a molecular biology major, was in the middle of her job search looking into clinical research jobs—part of her plan to gain precious clinical hours in preparation for medical school, for which she planned to apply the following year.
“I was thinking that I could still apply to jobs outside of California, so I was trying to think about my options,” she recalls. “I hadn’t applied to too many yet when the pandemic hit, and then applications were put on hold, and I was asked to wait longer for decisions. I was starting to stress out and wonder what’s going to happen post-graduation. That’s when I started applying to as many jobs as I could, but no one was really getting back to me.”
In all, she applied for almost 200 different jobs. Some employers did get back to her and even interviewed her before they halted or let her know they were moving on to someone else. It was after some months of this that Abilo applied to a pharmacy technician opening at a local CVS Pharmacy in Encino, California. “It wasn’t part of my original plan,” says Abilo, who is from Los Angeles, but the pandemic has forced many a well-laid plan to go awry.
The position didn’t require certification. CVS trains you on the job, explains Abilo. Working part time since November, Abilo has been able to study for the MCAT and focus on her medical school application materials as she works with Pomona’s Career Development Office through the process.
Back on track for her long-term plan, Abilo is now facing a new hurdle: canceled, postponed and overbooked MCAT testing dates. There are applicants from the last pre-med cycle who weren’t able to take the MCAT because of COVID-19, and they are the ones being prioritized by MCAT testing centers, explains Abilo. “My MCAT keeps getting canceled or pushed back. Right now I have to decide [what to do] because I’ve already submitted to the Pomona Pre-Health Committee, and I have to let them know if I’m applying or not this June. I feel the uncertainty of the pandemic, and not knowing what I’m doing in five years is stressing me out more.”
This stress of the unknown is nothing new to Abilo, who spent her last few months as a Pomona student helping her fellow first-generation and low-income community find housing after the campus was evacuated. Abilo was able to stay with a friend in an apartment near campus but then moved back in with her mother.
Abilo and her mother, a caregiver, live in the Pacoima. They share a converted garage that doesn’t afford much space to either of them. Living with her mother, Abilo held off applying to hospital jobs for fear of contracting COVID-19 and not being able to isolate in their cramped quarters. But now that both have gotten the COVID-19 vaccine, Abilo is considering applying to these jobs—although CVS has proved to be a valuable learning experience.
“Even the pharmacy was pretty scary at first,” she admits of the fear of contracting the virus. Abilo has dealt with customers who refuse to wear a mask, even when standing near elderly, more vulnerable people in line. Other customers are coming in while ill, sometimes just getting over COVID-19. Others are just plain rude.
It’s not all negative though. Abilo is gaining precious clinical experience—and she’s learning a lot from the patients and from the pharmacists. In addition, she’s met some lovely customers. “There are good customers, older folks who don’t have anyone at home. They’re happy to see us, as we’re the only source of interaction they’ve had in weeks.”
2021: Another Year Without Streamers?
Even as Abilo deals with the anxiety of her MCAT being endlessly postponed and her plans potentially laid waste by the pandemic, she’s also thinking sympathetically about the Class of 2021. “Class of 2020 had it rough, and I know Class of 2021 will too.”
As we enter year two of the COVID-19 pandemic and a second academic year that may end without the festive blue-and-white streamers over Marston Quad marking Commencement, the situation will again test the mettle of young Sagehens. Like the class before them, these new Pomona graduates may be taking their graduation photos in their own driveways and front yards. And like their predecessors, they may have to make their way in an economy still struggling toward recovery.
Like the Class of 2020, members of the Class of 2021 have been indelibly marked by the events of the past year, but they also will be able to say, in their turn, that they struggled, coped and eventually found their way in the midst of a global pandemic unlike any other in at least a century.
Gardener of the Sea
For years Gator Halpern ’12 studied ecology, biology and environmental management during our era of worsening climate change. His research took him to the Andes, the Amazon and elsewhere as he witnessed deforestation, overfishing and bleaching corals. But his work wasn’t yet having quite the impact he wanted.
“I felt like I was almost helping write the obituary of the world without actually getting out there on the front lines and doing something about it,” Halpern said. His passion motivated him and his colleague, Sam Teicher, to found Coral Vita, a company dedicated to coral farming and reef restoration. After having seen firsthand the declining health of coral reefs, he decided that “working with these ecosystems that are, really, canaries in the coal mine when it comes to climate change—the first ecosystems to collapse—is a great place to try to make a difference.”
The United Nations, government agencies and nonprofit groups like the Coral Reef Alliance and the Reef Ball Foundation have been working for years to raise attention and expand efforts to protect coral reefs. Halpern and Teicher started Coral Vita in 2015 in an attempt to act more quickly than other organizations, if possible, to secure funding, cultivate resilient corals and return them to reefs to help them recover and survive as ocean waters continue to warm and become more acidic. Halpern and his team currently work at Grand Bahama Island, just about 100 miles east of Miami, and his vision is to scale up their efforts to reefs elsewhere, too.
Corals are both tough creatures and the scaffolding for the homes of numerous other animals. Stony corals are like slowly growing skeletons, hosting thousands of microscopic algae in mouthlike openings on every polyp, which photosynthesize during the day and provide energy to the coral. Coral reefs, the animal forests of the seafloor, can stretch for hundreds of miles or more, and they surround most of the Bahama islands where Halpern works. They teem with thousands of fish species, clams, lobsters, sea turtles and myriad other organisms—25% of all marine life—that enjoy the ample shelter and sources of food, whether they call the reefs home or are just passing by. All this makes coral reefs important thriving ecosystems during normal times.
Climate change is the new normal, though, putting these whole, interconnected marine communities at risk. Marine scientists have seen ocean waters gradually warm for decades, while subjecting reefs to particularly warm episodes more often. Like a vulnerable coastal community during hurricane season, coral reefs roll the dice every year.
Sometimes water as much as 2 degrees Celsius above average will wash over a reef—or worse, linger in the area for a while, making the corals overheat. Current climate projections predict that the pace of warming will accelerate, said Stuart Sandin, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. “What we’re seeing is that these hot water events, often associated with El Niño patterns, are more frequent and less predictable.”
Gator Halpern shows off one of Coral Vita’s outdoor water tanks
Continually warming waters will threaten coral reefs on a massive scale in the coming decades, and after that, climate change will gradually acidify the oceans as well, eventually making it harder for corals to make their durable skeletons. “We’re already having massive coral reef loss right now, and it’s only projected to get worse,” said Andréa Grottoli, an ocean scientist at Ohio State University in Columbus. If we continue on our climate trajectory, up to 90% of coral reefs could be lost by 2050, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and it’s not clear whether there will be enough coral surviving to maintain all those diverse ecosystems.
When seawater surrounding a reef warms by just 1 degree Celsius for 10 days or longer, the corals’ health takes a hit. They eject their little algae as their carefully balanced symbiosis breaks down, halting their key energy source. Corals then hang on by depending on their fat reserves and snagging microscopic plankton for food. One can see through to their white skeleton at this point, in what’s called coral bleaching, which isn’t by itself a death sentence, Grottoli said. But if the waters don’t cool soon, within months the corals begin dying off and their ecosystems collapse.
If corals survive the bleaching period, it can take years, even decades, for them to make a full recovery, she said. Unfortunately, Grottoli and other scientists foresee a near future with bleaching events happening annually, with the cumulative effect killing off more and more sections of coral reefs. The reefs won’t grow back to their former splendor, or even survive this century at all, unless something major changes.
That’s where Halpern and Coral Vita come in. They’re farming a variety of healthy and resilient corals and returning them to the sea, helping to revive dying reefs so that as many can survive this warm century as possible.
Halpern and Teicher have launched what they call the world’s first commercial land-based coral farm. For their pilot project, they’ve partnered with the Grand Bahama Development Corporation and Grand Bahama Port Authority, and they’re working with scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Mote Marine Lab in Florida and the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology, as well as university researchers. Their main coral farm involves 30 outdoor water tanks the size of a dining room table, about four by eight feet. They conveniently built the coral farm next to a canal, so they can pump fresh seawater directly into the tanks. They’ve collected healthy fragments of reef, including brain coral, star coral, pillar coral and other species, and they farm them in the tanks for six to 18 months before returning them to the wild.
Gator Halpern dives near a Bahamian reef
Halpern and his team’s coral farming involves taking advantage of two important techniques. First, they perform what’s called micro-fragmentation, splitting up coral colonies into little pieces that soon fuse back together, dramatically speeding up coral growth rates by up to 50 times, so that they grow rapidly within months, rather than in decades, as they’d grow in nature. A coral colony grows asexually by cloning itself into hundreds or thousands of connected animals. For the entire time Halpern and his colleagues have a coral at their farm, they break it apart, fuse it back together, and repeat, keeping it in that high-growth state. If the corals come from the same original parent colony, they quickly heal from the procedure and grow normally afterward. This permits the Coral Vita team to select the very slow-growing corals that make up the foundation of the reef, more of which are needed for reef restoraton. Without micro-fragmentation, the team would be limited—as other groups have been—to only the fastest-growing corals.
Halpern and Teicher’s second technique, “assisted evolution,” is what it sounds like. They gradually crank up the heat and acidity in their tanks to see which kinds of corals can adapt to the rising sea temperatures and acidifying conditions expected to be common in 2050 or further in the future. They take the strongest corals of the batch and use them to seed the next batch, and then repeat the process. “Some corals do work better than others, but all species have the ability to adapt, and they all have a range of tolerance that they’re able to survive in. We can work with any species to increase that range and make them more resilient to climate change,” he said.
For the final step, Halpern and his team just have to transplant the healthy corals to the reef when they’re ready. They scuba dive down and graft the corals to the existing, degraded reef using nothing but underwater drills and glue. Once the corals are established back on the reef, the reef quickly comes back to life. “Fish immediately sense the coral there and start moving back among the branches. It’s pretty magical,” Halpern said. His hope is that the most resilient corals become a significant part of the reef, which then adapts naturally to climate-influenced conditions.
To realize their goals, Halpern, Teicher and their nine employees, four of whom are Bahamian, have many challenges to overcome. The first comes from events caused by climate change itself, such as Hurricane Dorian in September 2019, which may have intensified because of warm air and water vapor in the atmosphere. Dorian battered the Bahamas with 185-mile-per-hour winds and increased rainfall, though the storm surge’s damage might have been worse had the surrounding coral reefs not provided a natural seawall. As it wreaked havoc throughout the islands, the hurricane destroyed Coral Vita’s farm, and Halpern and his team are still rebuilding today.
Another challenge could arise if assisted evolution turns out to be more complicated than expected. There’s no guarantee that picking resilient corals for the future will work as planned.
“Whatever is surviving and growing well in your nursery might not be the one growing well in the reef. There is no consistent winner” among the corals, said Mikhail Matz, a biologist at the University of Texas at Austin. One type of coral might fare well one year and then poorly the next. That’s partly because future conditions might require not only heat tolerance, but also the ability to live well with new organisms, tolerate disease and recover from storms like Dorian, he said. But Halpern isn’t putting all his eggs in one basket, as Coral Vita grows at least 20 different kinds of corals.
Coral Vita and other coral farming efforts currently seem small compared to the size of the global problem, but that could change. While coral farms can revitalize a valuable local reef here and protect a fish spawning site there, they need to be scaled up. Halpern plans to eventually have at least 100 tanks at the Grand Bahama farm, and eventually his vision is to expand to other reefs beyond the Bahamas. He also takes a community-based approach, training local divers and staff to manage the farm, an approach the team could apply elsewhere.
Most scientists agree that projects like Coral Vita’s can play a part in our society’s effort to respond to climate change. “There’s certainly a role for coral farming to complement other efforts,” Sandin said. “If we use all the tools we have, we have an opportunity to make a real difference.”