It Was Never a Disadvantage – Bilingual Science, Belonging, and Reclaiming Language

How three volunteers turned a flyer at Cal Poly Humboldt into Ciencia Para Todos — a bilingual STEM community built on the idea that Spanish is a superpower, not a setback.

Christian Trujillo leading a nature walk with Ciencia Para Todos

I learned Spanish the long way — through travel, through classrooms, through years of catching maybe eighty percent of a joke and nodding along anyway. I've never once had to defend my right to speak it. So when Odalis Avalos told me she spent years believing the opposite about her own first language, I wanted to understand how that happens — and how you undo it.

Odalis grew up in Fresno, speaking Spanish at home, not learning English until kindergarten. She remembers taking home a tape just to catch up on the ABCs her classmates already knew. By the time she left for Cal Poly Humboldt — eight hours from home, mostly white classrooms, nobody who spoke or sounded like her — she'd already come to a quiet conclusion: that having Spanish as a first language was a disadvantage. It had cost her something. It made her different. It came with imposter syndrome that followed her all the way through a bachelor's degree and a master's.

Then she found a flyer.

Odalis Avalos in a field of wildflowers at Cal Poly Humboldt University

It was for a new student group called Ciencia Para Todos — Science for Everyone — started by two of her classmates, Christian Trujillo and Diana Martinez, who'd met in an environmental science cohort where they were usually the only two people of color in the room. Christian remembers the moment it started: walking through the redwoods on a field trip, turning to Diana, and just asking, "¿Habla español?" They started speaking Spanish to each other in class after that — and watched their classmates' faces change.

"It felt like they were seeing us as outsiders," Christian told me. "I mean, we already felt like outsiders at Humboldt State. But in our classroom it didn't feel welcoming at all."

Christian Trujillo showing a child how to use binoculars on a walk with Ciencia Para Todos

That feeling curdled into something more useful: anger. Christian, whose mother is from El Salvador and Nicaragua, had grown up with a strong sense that something was missing from how they were being trained to teach science. "We were only taught to teach upper white middle-class students and families," he said. "Every time we tried to question that, we were shut down." So he and Diana did the only thing that made sense to two people who felt locked out of the room: they made their own door. "Let's just throw a flyer together and see what happens," Christian remembers thinking. "That's literally how it got started."

Odalis showed up to that first meeting and stayed for seven years.

Diana Martinez from Ciencia Para Todos

Here's the moment that stopped me, though. Their first real program was at Fuente Nueva, a dual-immersion elementary school, teaching a lesson about bees — in Spanish. Odalis was there.

"There was something so healing about having been able to provide that space for these children to feel comfortable," she told me, "and to feel that actually this Spanish was not a disadvantage. It was a superpower."

Not despite being different from her classmates at Humboldt. Because of it.

Ciencia Para Todos at a tabling event

That reframe is the whole engine of Ciencia Para Todos now. Diana, who switched almost entirely to English after being forbidden from speaking Spanish in school as a kid, described the same lesson from her side: watching the kids "pull my Spanish out like worms" — unafraid, unselfconscious, certain that speaking it was simply theirs to do. Parents came up afterward to thank them, in Spanish, for teaching in a language their own children's other classes never used. Diana hadn't expected that part. "I began to realize, okay, yeah — you're taken for granted," she said, about growing up somewhere with more access to Spanish-language resources than the families she was now serving hours away.

Seven years later, Ciencia Para Todos is still entirely volunteer-run, spread across Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, and its original Humboldt State chapter, and only recently earned nonprofit status. They've translated science materials for US Fish and Wildlife, NASA, and Redwood Parks Conservancy. They still, sometimes, have to say no to new programs, because there aren't enough hands. What they need now, in their own words: grant-writing help, funding, and visibility.

Volunteers with Ciencia Para Todos posing for a group photo

What stayed with me longest wasn't the origin story, though — it was something Odalis said near the end, about a friend who never grew up speaking Spanish at all, who taught her that "you didn't have to know the language to be part of the culture." That belonging is a spectrum, not a gate. If you've ever felt like you were on the outside of a language or a landscape that should have been yours, that's worth sitting with.

Find ten minutes today and look up Ciencia Para Todos online or on Instagram. Read their strategic plan. If you're a Spanish speaker in California, consider showing up to a meeting. If you're not, share what they're building with someone who is.

Listen to this week's episode of Hopeful by Nature wherever you get your podcasts.

— Scott

Wildward Institute supports organizations, educators, and parents building meaningful relationships between young people and the outdoors. Learn more at wildwardinstitute.net.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Ciencia Para Todos

• Latino Conservation Week — latinoconservationweek.com

Subscribe to Hopeful by Nature to get the next story in your inbox.