July 22, 2020 — With 59% of Mendocino’s new covid cases in the Latino community, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on July 21 to meet the demands of leaders from eight Latino groups around the county. In a letter to the board, signed on June 25 by many of those leaders, Roseanne Ibarra, chair of the Mendocino Latinx Alliance, requested an equity and diversity task force, and five points of Spanish-language communication about the pandemic.
The groups want mandatory translation of the emergency response plan, professional interpretation services, bilingual forums, and enough time during press conferences for the information to be conveyed in both languages. Currently, when there are press conferences, Jacqueline Orozco of Al Punto gets some time at the end to ask George Verastegui, Senior Program Manager of the county’s WIC program, questions that English-speaking reporters put to County CEO Carmel Angelo and Public Health Officer Dr. Noemi Doohan.
After a scholarly presentation by Dr. Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, the Director of the Center for Reducing Health Disparities at the UC Davis School of Medicine, Ibarra addressed the board. By that night, the number of cases on the dashboard, which is posted in Spanish and English, would reach 217, with 130 of them in the Hispanic/Latino community.
Ibarra told the supervisors she was grateful for the bilingual dashboard, but noted that this development didn’t come about until July 1. “Our overall concern from the group is that Spanish translation and interpretation has been an afterthought,” she said.
Loreto Rojas also addressed the supervisors. She is a member of the Latino Coalition of the Mendocino Coast and a producer of MendoLatino on kzyx. She’s also a Spanish professor, so she wants all the pertinent life and death information in good Spanish.
“Even the convocation to this meeting,” she said; “it was poorly translated into Spanish...If any of you go to a foreign country and you read information in English that is poorly written, you really feel bad about yourself. You feel that you are not getting the information that is properly or rightfully yours. So I hope you understand, when you read something that is poorly written in Spanish, it really discourages many people to trust what is being said.”
If monolingual Spanish speakers want the information, she explained, they have to be highly educated in how to navigate websites and fill out forms, which are often in English, and communicate with agencies they don’t always trust or understand. She reported that some community members she’s tried to help are afraid to get tested for covid because they don’t have insurance or they’re undocumented or they fear they’ll be taken away from their families and placed into the hands of the law.
Javier Chavez has encountered the same concerns. He is a representative of the South Coast Latino Coalition and the community liaison at Redwood Coast Medical Services, the clinic that serves Point Arena and Gualala, where the county had its first confirmed case of the virus. Chavez got to know the family, which was uninsured and whose papers were not in order, because the community got together to make sure they had what they needed. He said that when he went by their house with food, the man told him he was terrified, every time a marked county car from Public Health pulled up. “If there’s any way that you could bring a translator or maybe a bilingual health worker when you come and visit the families,” he said, “because that is really scary, just looking at the marked car... and, you know, no health insurance, no other resources, the only thing he had was the community to come and help him out.”
The man has since recovered, but was unable to get time off work to address the board on Tuesday. Dr. Aguilar- Gaxiola told the board that many members of the community are essential workers, who don’t make a lot of money and often live in small quarters with a lot of other people — friends and family, whom they trust. Keily Becerra also spoke about feeling sidelined by officialdom. She referred to a second letter, also signed by many Latino leaders, which was also sent to the board last month. “The fact that it’s taken an entire month to get to this point, I think, is really frustrating,” she said. She also wants more Spanish-speaking county workers serving the community. And she referred to a suggestion in that second letter, which was signed by, among others, the Reverend Andres Querijero of Our Lady of Good Counsel Church in Fort Bragg, where over 180 covid tests were conducted over the weekend. “Work with the churches. The churches are usually a great place, because people believe most of what is being said there...they have cultivated a relationship with their pastor and with that community...people who have historically been left out of these other structures, which are doing an inadequate job of providing that information.”
Mirana Ramos, who wrote that letter, invited supervisors and county staff to conjure up a mental image of the average person they believe m they’ve been elected or hired to serve. “That person, the one who is in your mind right now,” she said; “that’s the person whose health and welfare you are protecting. I know, of course, that you know, cause I know — we all know! Intellectually, that you’re serving all of your constituents, that’s what you’re there to do, and not just those who look like the person who you pictured in your mind just then. And we know...the average person who’s being affected in our county is a middle-aged Latinx person. It is not, maybe, that person who you pictured in your mind as the average.”
There will be a virtual bilingual forum on Health Disparities and the Latinx experience during covid this Friday at noon. For more information or to submit questions, email MendocinoLatinxAlliance@gmail.com