Por Stephanie Krzywonos
“Please sit,” I asked my mom, then announced: “I am going to live and work in Antarctica.”
She couldn’t speak at first. I didn’t blame her.
Her parents—my grandparents—had emigrated from the deserts of Mexico to California’s Central Valley.
My mom worked in the fields alongside them, in miles-long rows, picking fruits and vegetables since she was only eleven. That was her introduction to “the great outdoors.” As a result, she hates being in direct sunlight, often wearing a huge sunhat outside and sometimes shading herself with an umbrella, too.
Here I was, her only daughter, migrating to Antarctica, the world’s largest desert, for seasonal work, a place with 24-hour daylight from October to February. Instead of tomato fields, my fields would be filled with hundreds of miles of glaciers—ice that is, in some places, two miles thick. I wanted to belong to that frozen world.
But when I first arrived in Antarctica, I quickly felt out of place. I had loved being in nature since I was a little girl, but I didn’t feel “outdoorsy” enough in some of the stereotypical ways my co-workers were. I didn’t have technical sunglasses or the fanciest gear. My backpack wasn’t covered in National Parks patches. I hadn’t “bagged” any peaks to speak of. I didn’t know how to ski. I had grown up playing in creeks, climbing trees, riding my bike, and camping—those were the vacations my family could afford.
I knew Antarctica didn’t have an Indigenous human population, but I hadn’t known (and should have guessed) that I was going to a place that has historically been dominated by white people and culture, more so than any other place I’ve lived.
Mostly, it didn’t bother me. As a white-passing mixed-race Xicana, I often blend in. Sometimes in Antarctica, I wished I didn’t. The ugly legacies of colonialism and racism occasionally reared their heads and reminded me why the global majority was mostly absent in Antarctica. Occasionally, I wondered why—in a place so vast and spacious—it felt like there wasn’t room for all of us.
I spent six summers in Antarctica and one winter, where I didn’t see the sun’s yolk for 131 days. Once, when everyone was told to return to our dorms from the buildings we worked in because the weather was so bad, I nearly got lost outside. During the blizzard, one of my co-workers, one of the other rare Latinos on station, got separated from the group he traveled with, and SAR, the search and rescue team, was activated to find him. He survived by sheltering in a nearby building.
The next day at lunch, my co-workers and I dissected management’s outrageous decision to send us into the storm. The man who got lost spoke broken English; his first language was Spanish. One of my friends said, “that’s why we can’t have those people here,” as if his language skills had anything to do with getting lost. My face burned.
Spain, Chile, and Argentina have a long history of engagement with Antarctica—but, like many other nations, it has not always been respectful. Indigenous people have a long history of engagement with Antarctica, too. In 1985, the bones of a twenty-one-year-old Mestiza were found on an Antarctic island. She had died between 1819 and 1825 and was a descendent of both Europeans and the Yagan people of Chile, Earth’s southernmost Indigenous people.
But being there “first,” or having the technology, equipment, and expertise to survive in Antarctica, are not meaningful measures of heritage in or engagement with the outdoors.
I grew up in a small town in Michigan, which was surrounded by corn and soy fields. Once, as my mom and I were driving past a field, I noted a large tree in the middle of neat green rows.
“Why doesn’t the farmer just chop down the tree?” I asked aloud. “That way there is more room for the crops?”
“That tree is for the workers,” my mom said. “So we can have shade.”
It made sense as soon as she said it, and I felt myself blush. Many years later, I know that the tree in the field shouldn’t just be viewed for its usefulness, but as a life to be respected no matter what.
I learned to view Antarctica in the same way: a living place with agency. Part of what helped me change and contextualize what I was experiencing in Antarctica, especially with the sun and the moon, who became like deities to me, were the stories of my ancestors, which I wrote about in my memoir, “The Blue Hours.”
Xkik, the “Blood Woman,” and her desire to eat the fruit she found in Xibalba, the Mayan underworld, helped me understand my own desire to winter in Antarctica. After the sun disappeared for four-and-a-half months, I watched the blackness of outer space fill the sky. The Aztec and Maya stories about how at dusk, the sun turning into a jaguar made sense: the jaguar, as velvety black as my world became, is a fierce and strong animal, qualities I would need to survive.
Antarctica, no matter how far away she seems, is part of what allowed humanity to evolve, and like a lone tree in a vast field, she shades us from the worst of the changing climate.
In a way, we all belong to Antarctica as much as we belong to anywhere on Earth. Antarctica showed me that as earthlings, the outdoors is everyone’s birthright, and that the most meaningful way to be “outdoorsy” has nothing to do with expensive activities or gear. Instead, it has everything to do with respect, reverence, connection, and living in solidarity with other beings, wherever we are.
Stephanie Krzywonos is an essayist and author who spent 886 days of her life living and working at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Her first book, “The Blue Hours: My Summers and Winter in Antarctica,” is forthcoming from Washington Square Press on December 1, 2025. You can read more of Steph’s writing at stephkrzywonos.com.
