Old Florida Vibes Scholarship

My plane landed into the humid tropical air of the Miami International Airport on October second, two-thousand-and-fifteen; in an ironic move north from cold Andean breezes to hot coastal mists. I spent my late childhood dipping my toes into brackish waters like red mangroves, setting roots in Biscayne Bay—fording through waters clouded with sargassum and the not-so-occasional beer cans off our shores. Since moving, I have pieced Miami together through trial and translation, learning about Bahamian labor in our canals through Michael Grunwald's The Swamp, learning English through Anna Quindlen's "A Quilt of a Country," and learning about Florida through my own reflection on the waters of Cutler Drain Canal C-100 behind my grandmother's home. I am a migrant from the last glaciated town of the Venezuelan Andes, a naturalized resident of Florida's sinking coasts, and a Miami Waterkeeper Ambassador, currently studying landscape architecture and urban planning at Harvard University—learning how to make South Florida’s cities coexist with water while caring for our nature and our people. More than an element, more than rain or storm, more than waves crashing ashore or material seeping from canals, water is a cultural record. It reflects how we treat the world and one another through the ways we move, contain, pollute, and regenerate it. South Florida's lifeblood is water—drained from the Everglades through engineered canals and seeped into the Atlantic. Fertilizers are dumped upstream to feed invasive sugarcane while releasing phosphorus and nitrogen pollution downstream, making concentrated profit at the expense of environmental damage—extracting from our landscapes faster than they can recover. It’s this very intersection of landscape urbanism, climate adaptation, and community impact that draws me towards work in territorial-scale water systems pollution treatment within urban settings. I see a future where extractive infrastructure transforms into regenerative landscapes, rewiring scars of exploitation into markers of how to radically imagine a better alternative. I want to reimagine inert canals as water bodies lined by pickerelweed and canna lily that filter water while providing habitat for fish and fireflies. I want water infrastructure to be intentionally slow, not efficient—canals as corridors where people can slow down and coexist with nature, civic and ecological spaces where people can fish and spoonbills can feed in clarified shallows rather than infrastructural afterthoughts of material movement. Within my concurrent degree at Harvard, I’m afforded the privilege and opportunity to imagine and reimagine the expansive possibilities of climate resilient infrastructural design—ones that allow Florida’s canal system be mired with filter marshes and material movement—and where our man-made canals, culverts, and lakes do more than move water; where they phytoremediate our water while teaching people to live and love our nature, the same way I’ve come to. As a Miami Waterkeeper Ambassador, I have hauled seine nets through Biscayne Bay’s seagrasses and studied how mangroves create habitat while anchoring soil. At Oak Grove Park, I have installed floating flowering wetlands as micro-scale water treatment of urban runoff. At Historic Virginia Key, I have replaced Australian pine and Brazilian pepper with sea oats, dune sunflower, and railroad vine, restoring our dune ecosystem while protecting South Florida’s first black beach from eroding away. After standing for four hours, I gave a public comment at Miami's Mayor's budget hearing, advocating against dispossessing the DERM of its power. Water is life only when our culture's reflection is transparent. I want to spend my life regenerating water so the next generations of Floridians see care, not neglect. in their reflections. I want to advocate for communities' right to remain by rooting them in nature and the OFV scholarship would support me in that mission.