From inside the Latinas Welding Guild, O’Neill Sustainability major Wendy Catalán Ruano helped recreate an icon of the 2024 Paris Olympic Summer Games.
Like Catalán Ruano, the students with whom she works are welders. At the guild, she helps them with course admission, scholarships, and gets them started as they enhance their skills through hands-on work. In 2024, that work included creating a replica of the Eiffel Tower that served as the centerpiece for the Paris Olympic swimming trials in Indianapolis.
“The plan was always to build an Eiffel Tower,” Catalán Ruano explains. “The Olympics team and local officials wanted to work with a nonprofit and were attracted to the guild’s mission.”
The nonprofit offers welding and manufacturing training to support students from marginalized communities. Its founder and executive director, Conseulo Lockhart, created it to empower students and increase diversity and opportunity within the field of welding.
Catalán Ruano says Lockhart put pen to paper as soon as she heard about the idea. She began writing applications and drawing drafts that would help open doors for the organization and, more importantly, students.
“We wanted our students and graduates to be able to dream of the sorts of projects they could work on in the future,” Catalán Ruano says. “This project took them beyond learning to weld and really helped them see how welding can translate into a career.”
That included gaining experience in reading blueprints, understanding client needs and deadlines, project management, using 3D printers to create models, and getting an idea of what it’s really like to be a working welder.
“Welding isn’t a 9–5 job,” she explains. “Our students learned that in this project. They put in a lot of extra hours on this piece.”
Weld by weld, the tower came together in sections and the move began in June. A semitruck carried the sections to downtown Indianapolis for the final assembly. Once completed, the replica Eiffel Tower weighed nearly 12 tons and stood 66 feet tall—the centerpiece of the city’s Olympic activity.
With each weld, the students moved one step closer to completing not only a massive piece of public art with global ties but also to opening new doors for themselves in their own futures.
That’s what Catalán Ruano is focused on for herself as well. Her family came to the United States from Mexico when she was just a baby. Without legal documentation, she relied on other means to advance her education. She received a full track scholarship to attend her first university and earned an associate’s degree in business administration. But she wanted more.
“My dream was to get a bachelor’s degree,” she says. “I had some very hard life circumstances going on at the time, and I had to take a major pause on school.”
It wasn’t until 2021 that she was able to restart her dream. A course in ethics during her first university experience had inspired her to pursue a new path focused on sustainability and justice.
“I was very drawn to issues involving people and community and equity and justice,” she says. “Coming from an immigrant household, we also are very conservative about our resources, which is one reason I wanted to learn more about the strategies that exist around sustainability.”
Those two interests are what led her to the O’Neill School and to the guild, where she’s been able to combine equity-centered work with sustainability efforts.
She says the guild used to purchase raw material for lessons, which was costly. To address that, guild leadership developed a community partnership that provides them with recycled materials their students can use to practice.
“Most recycled material can be turned into something new,” she explains. “We can grind it down as if no one ever welded on it. It’s really important for our students to know they don’t need have to have a lot of new material to make something beautiful.”
She’s hoping to expand on the guild’s sustainability efforts. In fall 2024, she’s taking a new course with O’Neill associate faculty and IU Associate Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer Jessica Davis about greenhouse gas emissions. Catalán Ruano wants to take what she learns there and bring it into the guild to help manage its emissions and create a safer environment for students.
“One of the most frightening things in welding is the amount of harm we’re exposed to, especially with the gas and chemicals we use,” she explains. “I want to learn how we can create a safer environment for our students.”
Whether it’s working on sustainability-related issues or lighting her own torch to help create something that brings communities together, it’s a future of possibilities that excites Catalán Ruano the most—both for herself and her students. While they don’t receive the global recognition Olympic athletes receive, they can still serve as examples to others.
“I want to empower women and others to know they can do things, like welding, that are sometimes labeled as ‘for men,’ especially in fields that are often traditionally dominated by white men,” she says. “It’s very inspiring that we get to be representation for many people who look like us.”
