Hector Rivera has done a lot of traveling while at Duke. To be more accurate, he has been to 23 countries. Most them on Duke’s tab.
Rivera, a senior in Earth and Ocean Sciences, was no stranger to travel when he came to Duke. Born in El Salvador, he arrived in the U.S. at the age of 12, speaking no English. By the time he graduated high school, he was not only fluent in English, he had a Gates-Millennium scholarship and an acceptance to Duke.
In his freshman year, Rivera applied to the DukeEngage program in Chile, and it was a trip that transformed him.
“Chile is perhaps the farthest I had ever been as of 2012. It was a mind-opening trip and it really triggered my desire to see the world. I felt a need to explore and see what’s out there.”
He did his DukeEngage project in Santiago de Chile, then went north to explore the Atacama Desert. “The Atacama Desert was my favorite place in Chile, probably my favorite place in the world,” Rivera said. “I had never seen a place like it. It’s high up in the Andes, the driest desert on earth, the skies completely clear. I was amazed that cultures managed to thrive there for thousands of years. We went to some ruins and saw ancient petroglyphs. One was drawn of a monkey riding a llama, which made me realize this culture had contact with peoples from the Amazon thousands of years before the conquistadores.”
His next experience led him to change his academic major.
“I met Dr. Paul Baker while doing a profile on him for the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies website. He saw that I was very interested in the environment. He was leading a course for graduate students to the Amazon, and he had a very multi-disciplinary approach,” he said.
Baker suggested Rivera take his class and soon he was part of a team researching how climate and geology interact to shape the distribution and generation of biodiversity in the Amazon/Andean forests through time.
That led him to a Study Abroad project in Australia and New Zealand to study biogeography and a volcanology course in Hawaii that influenced him to change his major to Earth and Ocean Sciences, with a particular interest in igneous petrology.
While on a Duke in Singapore study abroad program, Rivera was able to add Cambodia, Malaysia, and Indonesia to his list. Never having been to a Muslim country before, he found Indonesia fascinating.
Most recently, for his Senior Capstone Experience, he joined sedimentary geologist Gary Dwyer in a field trip to Ireland, where he studied a variety of geological formations.
“He took us to Ireland and we followed the coast clockwise around Ireland and Northern Ireland. It put into practice everything I had learned in my studies at Duke,” Rivera said. “This course cemented my desire to work in this field. All paid for by Duke.”
Rivera studied in Peru and traveled to Machu Picchu.
Being a traveler has opened Rivera to many cultures and great opportunities to meet new people, but he has also run into issues such as corruption, anti-immigrant feelings and racism.
Being an immigrant to the U.S., he was a bit surprised to encounter anti-immigrant feeling in South America.
“In Argentina, a man saw me walking in the street and came out of his house to tell me to ‘go back to Bolivia!’ I told him I was from the United States, and then he didn’t know what to say.”
Rivera traveled to several South American countries on his El Salvadoran passport because, in some places, Americans are expected to pay reciprocity fees. But in Chile, he encountered problems with this passport as well.
“The customs agents started questioning me, did I come here to work, all of these questions. It made me realize that Chile is at another level in Latin America. Here I was, facing the same suspicions that immigrants in this country face.”
All the opportunities Duke provided have given Rivera even more of a desire to travel, he said.
“No one in my family likes to travel at all. Now they want to see my photos and hear about my experiences," he said. "I feel I am opening up the world to my family as well.”
Now that he has graduated, Rivera looks forward to traveling more this summer before spending a gap year before graduate school working perhaps with the National Parks or teaching overseas. “My life’s goal is to visit 100 countries before I die. I’m almost a quarter of the way in.”
While at Duke Hector Rivera has visited 23 countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Below, Rivera stands in of the Royal Palace in Madrid.
