What makes a community? How do communities sustain themselves? Why do communities matter? These are just some of the questions tackled recently by students during their Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) projects.
These multi-week fellowship opportunities—which take the form either of research assistantships under the direction of a Pomona faculty member or student-designed projects—provide generous 10-week stipends that support a wide range of scholarly activities.
Here, we meet three students who embraced the opportunity to delve into different facets of community life.
Understanding and Improving a Farm’s Community Composting System
On a typical afternoon this past July, a visitor to Midnight’s Farm on Puget Sound’s Lopez Island might have spotted Lina McRoberts ’27 harvesting rhubarb, trellising Swiss chard or sticking a temperature probe into a steaming pile of compost.
A physics and gender and women’s studies double major, McRoberts spent 10 weeks living and working at the farm through an internship with the Lopez Community Land Trust. Alongside daily hands-on farm work, McRoberts drew on her physics knowledge to understand and improve the farm’s community composting system.
Composting is fascinating, says McRoberts, because while it is a biological, chemical and physical process, it also is a stewardship practice that transforms waste—brought to the farm by Lopez Island residents—into a shared community resource that is sold back to local farms, restaurants, gardens and community members. “Nutrients circulate, quite literally, through the island,” she says.
On the technical side, McRoberts wanted to know how airflow, temperature, moisture and microbial activity interact within large compost piles. Because the microbial activity driving decomposition occurs largely out of sight within piles that can reach 8 feet in height, temperature serves as one of the most important indicators of what is happening inside.
The composting project has led McRoberts to think about the broader systems and people that make community-scale sustainability possible, especially on a small island like Lopez.
“Living on Lopez Island has given me a deeper appreciation for both the possibilities and the challenges of community life,” she says. “The island is extraordinarily beautiful, but it also faces many of the pressures affecting rural communities across the country—housing affordability, rising land values, an aging population and economic inequality.”
During her time at Pomona, McRoberts has been increasingly involved in political organizing and social justice, which led her to seek out opportunities where she could use her science training in ways that felt directly connected to community needs. The Lopez Island composting project, she says, allowed her to apply physics in a context with tangible and immediate benefits.
“I am constantly reminded that technical knowledge is not neutral,” she says. “It matters deeply how we choose to use it, and I have found it remarkably rewarding to apply it in service of a community working to sustain itself.”
Generation X: Aging and Community Among Queer Men in Midlife
When Leo Peters ’28 found out that David Divita, professor of Romance languages and literatures and chair of the Anthropology Department, was writing a book about gay Generation X men in midlife, he eagerly signed on as a summer research assistant.
“I came to this project with a very personal motivation,” says Peters, an English major who took Divita’s freshman writing class. “As a young Asian American gay man, I sometimes feel disconnected from gay history and community because I know almost nothing about the gay men born in the generations before me.”
As well as analyzing the transcripts of more than 50 in-depth interviews Divita has conducted with gay men across the U.S., Peters has explored the historical contexts in which gay men of Generation X have lived. He has conducted research into how the meaning and usage of the words “gay” and “queer” have evolved throughout their lifetimes. He also has compiled an archive of the “safe sex” campaigns that emerged during the AIDS epidemic to understand how public health campaigns have developed over time.
“The scope of the book is still very open-ended, and so I feel I’m contributing to the project in a meaningful way,” says Peters.
Divita has found Peters’ close reading of the interviews and their subsequent conversations instrumental in helping him make sense of the lives he aims to document.
“Leo’s intellect, curiosity and sensitivity make him an ideal collaborator. So does his perspective as a gay man from a younger generation. He has helped draw my attention to aspects of the interviews by highlighting themes that strike him, such as the deep-rooted fear and sense of mortality that pervade the men’s recollection of adolescence.”
Learning about men who volunteered for AIDS service organizations during the epidemic has left Peters inspired to get more involved in his community. “Reading about the suffering they went through and had to overcome, I feel a desire to do more, and I feel a greater sense of gratitude for the freedoms that I have now.”
Work and Community Among Cooks in Latino Restaurants
Throughout high school, Ariana Delabra ’29 worked at a Mexican restaurant in her hometown of San Jose. Over time, she developed close relationships with the owners and her coworkers and realized it was much more than just a job. “It became another piece of my community,” she says.
At Pomona, Delabra has continued to reflect on this experience in her Chicana/o-Latina/o studies classes. With the mentorship of Gilda Ochoa, professor of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies, she designed an independent SURP project to delve further into the world of work and community among cooks in Latino restaurants.
Through interviews with Latino restaurant workers in the San Jose area this summer, Delabra aims to shed more light on their daily experiences, knowledge and stories and to explore the role these neighborhood restaurants play as spaces of cultural preservation and resistance within Latino communities in the U.S.
For these workers, this is not a side gig or a temporary job, she says. “This is their way of making a living, and it’s connected to their experiences and where they come from and their aspirations and dreams—it’s why they show up every day to do tedious-sounding work like standing on top of a hot grill or chopping vegetables for hours.”
Beyond this year’s SURP, Delabra—who is leaning toward a double major in Chicana/o Latina/o studies and politics—is interested in continuing to explore this area of research, perhaps even developing it into her senior thesis.
Delabra says she wants to honor the restaurant workers’ labor “out of admiration for the love and respect that they showed me as they welcomed me into their community and for the care that they put into the work they do.”