Caleb Zimmerschied Valadez is a freelance writer. He can be reached at calzimval@gmail.com.

Marco Barcena’s career in civil service started with a stint as a lifeguard at the Bell Gardens pool during his freshman year of high school. He became a senior lifeguard and then pool manager, overseeing the pool’s aquatic operations for over a decade. Then he went into local government as an administrative specialist, securing grants to get soccer fields and parks built.

But even when he was working at the pool, Barcena realized the city was neglecting the facility. The pool was in such poor condition that by 2016, the city council decided to shut it down. “Imagine 350 kids not having a place to go, every day of summer, for two years in a row,” said Barcena. “To me, that means things are falling through the cracks.”

In 2018, the city council wanted to reopen the pool, but at one-third of its original Olympic size. Barcena felt the city council was not doing enough to communicate its plans to residents. Shrinking the pool would reduce the community’s already scarce recreational opportunities.

Bell Gardens is a 96% Hispanic or Latino, mostly Spanish-speaking community, where one in five residents lives below the poverty line. (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than one-third of Hispanic adults have ever taken a swim lesson.) It’s also one of the state’s most densely populated cities, with limited available space for parks and public areas.

“This is why projects like these are extremely important in our communities,” said Barcena.

These shortcomings motivated Barcena to move from behind the scenes and run for city council. His campaign emphasized not just a return to the status quo for the pool, but an expansion. After winning, his team began securing grant funding to reopen and remodel the aquatics center. Unfortunately, the pandemic delayed the renovations.

“I had to run for reelection in 2022, having not completed the pool,” said Barcena, “which was really hard because I was the ‘Pool Guy.’”

Despite the setback, Barcena won re-election in 2022. Contractors broke ground on the renovations in 2023, completing construction in about 18 months.

A reimagined aquatic center

While planning the renovations, the aquatic center team made sure to host community forums to find out what features appealed to residents the most. Osael Romero, the aquatics center manager, says he still remembers one memorable piece of feedback. “[A little girl] says, ‘I want to slide.’ And the engineer says, ‘Well, here, draw the slide.’ But hey, guess what we have now? We have a slide.”

The renovated center can fit around 2,000 people. It includes three heated pools, an outdoor amphitheater, a fitness room, a therapy pool, and a play area with water slides. Romero and Barcena hope that the additional features will encourage year-round use of the aquatic center. They’re getting creative with their program planning, with movie nights and splash water polo in the works. Other planned programs include bringing in seniors and people with disabilities for tailored swim lessons.

Romero and Barcena started in the pool world together, getting certified as lifeguards at the same time. While Barcena started working with the city, Romero went to school to become a pool technician. Their shared background made it easy to work together.

“I’m just very happy to be here in this moment, not just because of my current role, but as a community member because I live down the street,” said Romero. “I grew up here. I don’t plan on leaving. My son, he’s two years old, I plan on bringing him here. This is where he’s going to learn to swim. … We’re a community that deserves it, and we are worth it.”

Facility staff and Barcena decided to open the pool once renovations were completed late last winter, despite being outside of peak pool season. “Our local high school doesn’t have a pool at the moment,” said Romero. When they called us and asked, ‘Hey, can we use the pool?’ We said, ‘Come on in.’ When the city’s new swim team asked, ‘We know you have this new facility, can we use it?’ We said, ‘Come on in.’”

The Dreamer’s Aquatic Center at Bell Gardens

For Barcena and others, the new community amenity is more than just a pool. It reopened after an unprecedented, and at times, dangerous, surge in immigration enforcement in the area. Late last year, the council voted to rename the pool the Dreamers Aquatic Center, reflecting the community’s resilience, immigrant roots, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

“Our most vulnerable communities have been targeted. The country knows it, and the world knows it,” said Barcena. “We know that we’ve experienced these attacks, this hardship, but we also made sure to plant a seed of hope. And I think that’s what the aquatic center is … it shows that this hope is not only a dream, but it was born within the community and it’s a tribute to the resistance and perseverance of our community and the immigrant community.”

Barcena wants the momentum of the pool to boost other projects, like rebuilding a playground next to the pool or the county’s cistern project. Bell Gardens is also reimagining a space currently occupied by a nearby golf course. The city has been conducting community outreach to research design ideas and find grant funding.

He underscored the importance of identifying community members already engaged with those projects. Recommendations from aquatics center experts like Romero were crucial to how Barcena ran his campaigns and the redevelopment of the Dreamer’s Aquatic Center.

“Connect with experts, connect with the community, and find the overlapping area. [That] will help you get to where you want to be,” said Barcena.