Green Voices

The EPA 10 "Maestro Escultor Vicente Lucero" school in Villa Mercedes, San Luis, opened its doors on August 1, 2003, under the original name EPED No. 2; it is part of the La Ribera urban development. Current enrollment stands at approximately 2,400 students across early childhood, primary, secondary, and adult education levels. Its principal is Eugenia Leites, and the school is located in the La Ribera neighborhood (La Ribera Housing Complex), approximately 8 km south of downtown Villa Mercedes, separated by the Quinto River.

For over twenty years, I've been telling my students that knowledge only matters when it leaves the classroom. In May of this year, twenty-two fifth-year students decided to put me to the test. It all started with a question we wrote together on the whiteboard at EPA 10 M.E. Vicente Lucero, the school in the La Ribera neighborhood of Villa Mercedes where I have worked for years. The question fit on a Post-it note: How can young people communicate and transform the environmental issues facing their community through art, technology, and civic engagement? It took us three months to discover that we had phrased it far too modestly.

We named the project *Voces Verdes* (Green Voices). My colleagues—Osvaldo De la Canal, Romina Olaviaga, and Daniela Díaz Gabutti—and I didn't give the students a syllabus on ecology. We gave them a data sheet and sent them out into the neighborhood. Throughout June and July, they walked the area block by block, photographing overflowing drainage canals and trash fires, marking everything on a collaborative map as if they were a small team of epidemiologists tracking a symptom rather than a disease. Then they went a step further: they drafted a twenty-question survey and knocked on 147 doors to ask their neighbors—not us—what was actually wrong. The answers stung a little, to be honest. 55.1% of respondents cited trash accumulation as their primary concern. Half mentioned pests and stray animals. Nearly four out of ten pointed to waste burning and water pollution. But one piece of data changed the entire course of the project: 88.4% of the neighbors said they lacked sufficient information—no maps, no charts, nothing—about the environmental problems on their own block. It wasn't ignorance we were uncovering; it was silence. No one had ever asked them, and no one had ever told them. That was the moment I stopped thinking of this as a class assignment and started viewing it as journalism—in the truest sense of the word: going out, finding out what is true, and giving that information back to the people to whom it belongs.

So, that is what the students did next. Instead of creating another poster with a recycling slogan that no one looks at twice, they built a mural. They designed a logo—voting on it from among several proposals—and painted it on walls where people already pass by every day. One of my students—a boy who had barely spoken in class all year—ended up designing an iron sculpture that stands today, still unfinished, in a corner of the schoolyard. They filmed short videos for Instagram. They printed QR codes that linked directly from a utility pole to the data they had gathered themselves. 92.5% of the neighbors we surveyed said that access to green spaces improves quality of life. The students decided that if the neighborhood couldn't yet have more trees, it could at least display—on every wall—proof of how badly they were needed. Then something happened that I still find hard to explain to colleagues who didn't witness it firsthand: the city began to respond. On July 4th, I walked into the Villa Mercedes City Council with a group of seventeen-year-olds who had never set foot in a government building, except perhaps in a photo from a field trip. Three councilwomen from the Environment Committee—Karina Maranguello, Cecilia Lucero, and Lucía Lacerda—sat down to explain, ordinance by ordinance, how waste management and green space policy actually work in the city. That same afternoon, the municipality's Undersecretary of Green Spaces, Fabricio Mena, discussed urban forestry and sustainable technologies with students who, just two months earlier, had thought a "public hearing" was something that only happened on television. On August 29—Arbor Day—the school became the setting for something none of us expected on such a scale: Federico Cacace, the San Luis Secretary of Environment and Sustainable Development, arrived at EPA 10. Alongside Vice Principal Eugenia Leites and Secondary School Coordinator Paola Aguilera, he joined students in planting the first trees on the school grounds in over a decade. It wasn't just a ceremonial act—the kind easily forgotten by the next day. For the students, it was the first tangible proof that their assessment—compiled by knocking on doors in the dead of winter—could actually translate into public policy.

I won't pretend this fixed the neighborhood. It didn't. While 76.2% of the neighbors we surveyed expressed a desire to get involved in environmental initiatives, "wanting to" and "organizing" are two very different things, and no single mural can bridge that gap on its own. An assessment, however honest, is not a sewage system. That tension is something I live with every day now: how to keep the goodwill of 147 people from evaporating the moment the school year ends and the cameras are turned off.

One of my students told me, almost in passing, that her key takeaway from all this was that knowledge doesn't end in the classroom; it truly comes to life only when used to understand, intervene in, and improve reality. I didn't teach her that phrase. She earned it—door by door, survey by survey.

Villa Mercedes is not a city accustomed to having its environmental policy shaped by a group of teenagers from a working-class neighborhood. La Ribera—officially the La Ribera Housing Complex—was established on April 19, 2003, with just 758 homes; today, it has over 1,400, housing more than 20,000 people in an area separated from the city center by the Quinto River, which for years acted almost like a border. Its streets bear the names of people murdered or forcibly disappeared during the last military dictatorship, alongside figures such as Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Anne Frank, and Mahatma Gandhi. It is a neighborhood with its own memory, an identity forged through sustained growth and—for a long time—services that arrived late. In this context, the fact that a group of students from a self-managed public school managed to sit down with three city councilors and two provincial officials in less than three months is no small matter: in a sense, it marks the first time the neighborhood has spoken for itself using its own data, rather than just voicing scattered complaints.

What interests me most about this experience, looking back on it now with some perspective, is that it inverted the usual order of environmental education. We almost always start by explaining to students what an ecosystem is, what climate change is, and what pollution is, and then—if there is time left—we suggest they "do something" with that information. Here, we did exactly the opposite. First, they went out and asked questions. Only later, with the data in hand, did they begin to understand why that data mattered. The learning didn't come from a textbook; it came from the awkwardness of ringing the doorbell of a stranger's home and the surprise of hearing a neighbor describe—in detail—a problem the students hadn't even included on their list

One scene has stayed with me. After a visit to the City Council, one of the boys told me he had never imagined a "real" councilwoman would personally explain an ordinance to him—treating his question as if it deserved a serious answer. For me, that remark captures the essence of *Voces Verdes* better than any statistic. It wasn't just about trash, trees, or murals. It was about a group of teenagers from a neighborhood often viewed from the outside with detachment or pity standing before decision-makers and being treated as valid partners in the conversation.

We aren't finished yet. Next year, we're going to set up a citizen science lab so that monitoring the neighborhood relies on sustained, long-term tracking rather than a one-off survey. We'll hold workshops on "green skills"—composting, gardening, and tree maintenance—turning our findings into practical tools residents can use in their own homes. And we're going to preserve the oral history of a neighborhood that, in just two decades, transformed from an empty lot into a community of over twenty thousand people; after all, understanding a place's origins is, in its own way, a form of caring for it.

It is a slower process than painting a mural. Yet, I suspect it is the part that will truly endure. What I know for certain is this: during one winter in Villa Mercedes, the loudest voice in the conversation about the environment wasn't that of a government official, nor was it mine. It belonged to a group of teenagers who decided that if no one else was going to ask the neighborhood what it needed, they would do it themselves—and then ensure the answer reached the people who needed to hear it.