Alumni Spotlight: Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski

Former HBS student, Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski (KSAS ’17), discusses mixed identity, the intersection of sociology and public health, and her position at the ACLU.

Hometown: San Francisco, California
Graduation year: Class of 2017
Program: BA in Public Health and Sociology
Fun fact: “I’m working on a podcast about mixed identity focused on what it’s like to live in between two worlds – on in-betweenness – inspired, in part, by my life as an Ecuadorian from California. My interest in public health and sociology is a result of growing up between two countries.”

Q: What sparked your interest in public health?

A: My mother was a huge influence. She worked at the San Francisco public health department when I was growing up, helping folks with mental illness navigate the vast social service network in the city. She was my first blueprint for the marriage of social justice principles and practical advocacy.

Another factor was growing up between California and Ecuador, with family in each place. I grew up in San Francisco, but I was born in Tumbaco, a small town outside of Ecuador’s capital, Quito, and returned throughout my childhood. In-betweenness can be hard – you don’t quite feel like you belong in either setting – but I also think it makes you more critical. Questioning the “natural” order of things in each place is perhaps a more routine practice when the order of things is so different in the worlds you occupy.

One such moment that now feels like a lifetime ago, but really jump-started my interest in environmental justice was in middle school. In sixth grade, I watched Crude, a documentary on the environmental and human damage caused from Chevron’s largely unregulated oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon. 11-year-old Mollie was pretty struck. Chevron’s oil extraction had poisoned the rivers, lakes, and land for nearby indigenous communities, like the Cofán, and the company was not being held accountable for their actions.

Crude stressed that the environment and the human are inextricably linked, and both are subject to corporate greed. That stuck. Similar examples reared their head closer to home: how radioactive pollution had contributed to high asthma rates in Hunter’s Point, a historically Black neighborhood in San Francisco, how lead poisoning was highest in neighborhoods with large Black populations in Baltimore. The lessons that Crudeimparted on me have always reappeared in different contexts because they are timeless, unfortunately.

Nine years after watching Crude, at a “pick your major” fair at Johns Hopkins in my first semester, I stumbled across the public health major. It was a real “aha!” moment. I could combine my interests, the environment and people, in an interdisciplinary fashion.

Q: What led you to HBS?

A: I graduated from KSAS in 2017 as a sociology and public health double major and a Latin American studies minor. As part of my senior year public health curriculum, I took graduate-level courses at JHSPH and commuted from Homewood to the public health campus.

I took classes that interested me, and it turned out that they were mostly in HBS. My coursework ended up being very focused on examining social determinants of health, on the interaction of our lives – what we eat, what we do, what stressors we face – and our bodies. This felt key to better understanding environmental racism in Ecuador and other contexts. As a hopeful future legal advocate, I think understanding how corporate and state interest influence community health in different contexts is critical.

Q: What was it like to study at JHSPH as an undergraduate?

A: One of the things that I really enjoyed about being a public major in HBS and at JHSPH was that I always felt welcomed. I was a little daunted by the idea of being one of the few undergrads in a sea of graduate students, but I deeply enjoyed the coursework and felt very supported by the faculty. At least from my perspective, it felt like JHSPH professors saw interacting with undergrads as a moment to engage with young, could-be public health practitioners and change-makers. Their open-door policies felt sincere.

Q: Would you talk about some of those mentors you met at JHSPH?

A: There are so many! Michelle Kaufman is a fabulous professor who helped shape my understanding of the importance of theory in informing public health interventions. In her global LGBT health class, we explored theoretically informed explanations for and possible solutions to combat violence faced by queer people around the world. As a sociology major, I was excited by this approach. She gave me a list of reading recommendations when I graduated – the ultimate gift.

Peter Winch is another. He taught my Global Health Practices and Principles class. We learned about health systems and the influence of colonialism on a country’s ability to respond to crisis. He is keen to discuss, no matter the subject, and is very much a polymath, so our classes covered a lot. He is also willing to connect students to people in his circle if you show up and put in the work.

Q: Post-graduation, you interned with the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office and, later, with the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (the Center for Migrant Rights) in Mexico City. How did you find those opportunities?

A: I had a hunch when I graduated that I was interested in being a lawyer, but I wasn’t sure. I had never had any internships or real exposure to legal environments in undergrad. I knew that law school is long and hard and expensive, so I decided to take some time and figure out if this was the right decision for me.

After graduation, I went home to San Francisco and started interning in the immigration unit at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. I interned there for four months, supporting the attorneys by assisting with fact-gathering to stop the deportation of our clients, interviewing family members of detained individuals, and helping to conduct interviews at the local ICE detention center. It was really hard work. It also underscored how climate change, land loss, and neoliberal policy had pushed people to emigrate; so many of our clients had been farmers without arable land, jobless because of tough economic circumstances in their home countries.

I moved to Mexico City after that, to intern at the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, which works to protect the rights of migrant workers in Mexico and the U.S. Lisa Folda, a former public health advisor, actually recommended I apply for an internship there. I assisted with client intake and different advocacy efforts to support migrant workers going between Mexico and the U.S., including testifying at the Maryland Senate in support of SB 526, a bill that would lend more support and protection to guest workers. I have family in Mexico, so I visited them and got to explore Ecuadorian-ness in Mexico, another instance of in-betweenness.

Q: What was the hardest aspect of taking a post-bac gap year?

A: The year was not funded, so all travel and living expenses were all paid for with savings from my undergraduate job and summer jobs. I wanted to be able to take time after school to think about my next steps forward, but the financial realities were challenging, particularly as I was a low-income student. It’s a privilege to take a gap year, and as much as I felt daunted by it, I decided it was the right decision for me. I lived very frugally that year.

Q: What brought you to your current position at the ACLU?

A: I was interested in learning about impact litigation, litigation that tries to create societal change and influence case law, to figure out what kind of legal work I’d be interested in doing.

I joined the Women’s Rights Project as a paralegal in late 2018. My tasks are varied. Some days, I’m conducting intake with food workers; other days, I’m knee-deep in an online database researching the sociological impacts of sexual harassment. It’s allowed me to better understand how gender is another social determinant of health – how gender and its social construction factor into, and often detract from, an individual’s wellbeing. It’s also been a helpful exercise in further narrowing down what kind of work I want to do in the future.

Q: What’s next?

A: I’m applying to law school this fall. I’d like to work on environmental and racial justice issues. I’m particularly interested in how resource rights are compromised for indigenous populations in resource-rich contexts, where extractive efforts often supersede human rights.

As an Ecuadorian-American, I want to return home to assist environmental justice movements on the ground, led by Ecuadorians. My role as an Ecuadorian-American is, I think, really a strategic one, as I’m able to access different resources and trans-national communities, but I am conscious of not co-opting efforts that should be led by indigenous people.

This interview has been edited and compressed. The views expressed in this article are the subject's own.