An interview with Move Mountains Project Executive Director, Shirley Romero Otero
By Anna Lee Vargas.
Since its official inception in 2014, Move Mountains Project (Move Mountains) has served as an art and entrepreneurship community education program that builds sustainable platforms for the youth leaders of San Luis, Colorado. Move Mountains’ mission is to encourage youth, as heirs to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, to develop deeper understandings of art, resource preservation and entrepreneurship in order to empower active community citizens through a focus on local and global social justice issues.
Since lack of employment is a major obstacle for youth of the San Luis Valley, Move Mountains supports youth in their exploration of meaningful work and equips them with tools for achieving their goals.
Through a year-long individualized leadership program, Move Mountains’ youth focus on career exploration and development rooted in land, water and cultural identity. The program provides scholarships for post-secondary education and stipends for completion.
Additionally, Move Mountains fosters civic engagement, academic success and connections between identity and history among San Luis youth in eighth through 12th grades.
Shirley Romero Otero, Executive Director of the Move Mountains Project, stated, “Move Mountains was created for several reasons. One of those was specifically to work with heirs to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant because those young people are going to inherit the benefits of their parents and grandparents and, by that, I mean they will inherit the land and with the land come the keys. Through Move Mountains, of course, they learn about land, water and food sovereignty but, throughout the years, we’ve done so many other projects with hundreds of youth, all from Centennial and from Costilla County that include anything from teatro, oral histories, hiking, camping, social justice issues and cleaning up our communities. We have picked up tons of trash, specifically along the acequias. With partnerships from other organizations, we’ve been able to provide different experiences that our youth here don’t get because we live in a poor, rural community where resources are scarce.” Ideally programs like Move Mountains will also play a role in keeping youth away from drug culture. In addition to low economic opportunity, Romero Otero sees the opioid crisis, specifically fentanyl, as being “one of the biggest threats that youth are facing.”
Romero Otero also reflected on some of the wonderful opportunities that youth receive from living in the San Luis Valley: “We’ve got fresh air, the beautiful nature around us and places for outside recreation, which is good for mental health. These reasons are why we do so much outside programming with the youth. We’re a small community where we still have that community connectedness, close knit families and some sense of safety. It’s a good place to raise a family.”
To Romero Otero, building platforms for youth to stand on is critical. She explained, “Our youth are the only hope that I have for our community and our world. Since I see the Move Mountain youth consistently from the 8th grade until they graduate, I see the growth in them. I see how they pay attention, how they speak up, how observant they are and see them making wise decisions. It is the only thing that gives me hope.”
Romero Otero has spent her life advocating for youth, land and those who have been historically excluded. Romero Otero was born at her grandmother’s house in 1955 in the village of San Pedro, Colorado to her parents Moises and Esmeralda Olivas Romero. She learned community organizing from a young age as she witnessed her parents and grandparents work to ensure communal access to common land on the La Sierra portion of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant in Colorado, particularly after that access was taken away in 1960.
Romero Otero traces her ancestry to Mexican arrivants and Jicarilla Apache and has spent her life as a public educator and leader for land rights in Southern Colorado. Following in her parents’ footsteps, she has taken on wealthy absentee landowners who blocked communal access to common land on the La Sierra portion of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant in Colorado. She has been deeply involved in a decades-long court case that culminated with a 2002 Colorado Supreme Court decision restoring grazing, wood gathering and other use rights to the original land-grant families and successors. She is the former President of the Land Rights Council (which she co-founded in 1977) and is a former member of the Board of Directors of The Acequia Institute.
In addition to serving for more than a decade on fundraising committees for low-income families and as chief organizer of the annual La Raza Youth Leadership Conference from 1992 to 2009, she has also served on the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition and the Latino Advisory Committee for the Colorado Commission on Higher Education.
Her philosophy as an educator, land rights activist, youth advocate and community organizer is guided by her Chicano/Indigenous cultural identity which is deeply rooted. Her guiding value in all these areas is summed up by the principle of generosity. Romero Otero shared that “Being generous with our knowledge is vital whenever we are confronting the erasure by the dominant society of who we are and of the places we co-inhabit with all our relations, including all human beings, animals, plants, trees and resources such as water. Generosity also means that in working with our youth, we are guided by a desire to empower them to be integral parts of the process of social and economic change in the service of environmental and social justice. This philosophy affects how I approach community organizing, which must be bottom-up. Community participation means building the next generation of organizers rather than just leading the people. It also means cultivating leadership among people who have been excluded, such as women, LGBTQ+ and others. It is our moral obligation to share the knowledge they need to become self-organizing agents of change and a political necessity.”
Learn more about Move Mountains Project, visit www.movemountainsprojects.org.