Tender Resilience

On Being From Somewhere

My family hails from Cuba, Guatemala, and Türkiye. I'm American, but I feel deeply tied to my Latino roots. When I map extreme heat across Central America, I'm not looking at abstract data points. I'm looking at places my family is from, at the kind of outdoor work my relatives do, at communities that look like mine.

This proximity changes how you see the work. It makes it impossible to treat heat stress as just an interesting research question. It makes you notice when entire regions are systematically left out of climate research agendas. It makes you ask uncomfortable questions about who decides which communities are worth protecting.

I don't claim to speak for Guatemala or Cuba or Latin America. But I do carry the knowledge that my ability to do this work—to have the education, the resources, the institutional access—came from my family's struggles and sacrifices. That debt shapes everything.

Who Gets Studied (And Who Doesn't)

Climate research follows money, and money follows power. The result is that wealthy countries get studied exhaustively while the Global South—bearing the worst climate impacts—gets treated as an afterthought. Latin America faces extreme heat stress that will make outdoor work physiologically impossible in many regions, yet comprehensive heat vulnerability research remains sparse.

This isn't an accident. It's the result of funding structures that prioritize what's "strategically important" to wealthy nations, publication incentives that reward novel methods over urgent needs, and institutional gatekeeping that determines whose problems count as serious science.

The Extended Heat Index exists because someone had to decide that accurately measuring heat stress for outdoor workers matters. That this decision needed to be made at all—that worker safety in hot climates wasn't already a priority—tells you everything about how research agendas get set.

Working Outside the Gates

ClimaCoder operates outside traditional academic institutions, which means working nights and weekends, scraping together time between other obligations, building with whatever resources we can access. It's not glamorous. There's no lab, no research team, no grant funding the way institutional research gets funded.

But there's also no waiting for someone else to decide Latin American heat stress is worth studying. No navigating institutional priorities that treat the Global South as peripheral. No compromising on which communities matter based on what's fundable.

The trade-off is real: less stability, more precarity, constant exhaustion. But the work gets to be what it needs to be, shaped by urgency and need rather than strategic plans and funding cycles. That matters when people are already dying from heat that isn't being adequately measured or addressed.

What Gets Lost, What Gets Built

There's an emotional weight to working on climate that doesn't show up in the data. It's the weight of knowing that heat stress will get worse, that adaptation will come too slowly, that the communities least responsible for climate change will bear the worst impacts.

I'm not a climate victim. I have options, mobility, resources that many don't. But I carry the knowledge that my family, my communities, the places I'm from are all increasingly at risk. That proximity makes the work both harder and more necessary.

What keeps me going isn't optimism, exactly. It's the refusal to accept that we have to wait for someone else to care. It's the conviction that communities deserve research that serves them, not just research that extracts data from them. It's the belief that making tools freely available, doing the work transparently, centering the people most affected—that these things matter even when the larger structures don't change fast enough.

On Tenderness and Resilience

"Resilience" gets weaponized in climate discourse—it becomes a way to put the burden of adaptation on communities already struggling, to celebrate their strength while doing nothing about the systems causing harm. I don't want that.

But there is something tender in watching communities adapt, in seeing people take care of each other through impossible circumstances, in building tools that might make survival a little more possible. Tenderness isn't weakness. It's the refusal to become callous, to let urgency erase care, to treat people as data points.

This section is called Tender Resilience because both matter. The resilience to keep working when the scope of the problem is overwhelming. The tenderness to remember why it matters, who it's for, what gets lost when we forget to stay human in the face of systemic crisis.

On Names and Not Belonging

I go by Elif Kılıç now, but I've been Eliana Gomez, Elif Kilic—different versions of myself for different communities. My family is Cuban, Guatemalan, and Turkish. I'm American, but I've never quite fit neatly anywhere.

I was orphaned at two and raised by my immigrant grandparents after losing my mother. First-generation, low-income, former foster youth who worked three jobs at a time to make it through college and eventually across the country to graduate school. The access I have now—the education, the institutional resources, the ability to do this research—came from struggles and sacrifices, most not even my own, many were my family's sacrifices, that still feel raw.

When I map heat vulnerability across Latin America, I'm mapping places my family is from. When I build tools for measuring heat stress, I'm thinking about my relatives, my communities. That proximity is both a gift and a burden. It makes the work impossible to treat as abstract, but it also means carrying the weight of knowing these places and people are increasingly at risk.

Identifying myself has always been the hardest part about introductions. Which name do I tell which community? Eliana Gomez holds so much pain but ties me to the culture I know best, my Latinidad. Elif Kılıç sounds foreign to me but is my legal name. I belong to many marginalized and privileged groups—disenfranchised foster youth and lucky master's degree holder. Some of my identities were earned, some gently placed upon me, and some violently thrown at me.