Outreach workers offer language support, help to find social
services
Felicitas Gonz
ález and Casimira de Jesus work out of a small office at R.O.
Hardin school. They aren’t teachers at the elementary school, but
they are educators of sorts. The two women work as outreach workers
for the Binational Center for the Development of Oaxacan Indigenous
Communities, a nonprofit that offer
s services such as translators, workshops on labor laws and
other support to Oaxacan families living in the United States. The
two women, originally from Oaxaca, were hired with a grant from
First 5 San Benito.
Outreach workers offer language support, help to find social services
Felicitas González and Casimira de Jesus work out of a small office at R.O. Hardin school. They aren’t teachers at the elementary school, but they are educators of sorts. The two women work as outreach workers for the Binational Center for the Development of Oaxacan Indigenous Communities, a nonprofit that offers services such as translators, workshops on labor laws and other support to Oaxacan families living in the United States. The two women, originally from Oaxaca, were hired with a grant from First 5 San Benito.
“I like to work a lot with the [Oaxacans],” González said, speaking through a translator at first, and then cautiously answering in English. “They need a lot of help. They don’t know how to read or write Spanish.”
González and de Jesus dressed in traditional red huipils, garments that are woven on a back loom and take up to three months to complete. The pair visit the homes of families and sometimes help them in their office at R.O. Hardin.
“We tell parents how to prepare their children,” González said. “They call us when they go to clinics and schools.”
González learned to speak Spanish when she was 10, and later studied English for a year and a half at Gavilan College. She has lived in the United States for nine years with her father, sisters and brothers. Her mother stayed in Mexico.
“I’ve always worked as a volunteer since I was 10 years old,” she said of her reason for taking a job that allows her to help others.
Double language barrier
More than 700 Oaxacan people live in San Benito County. Most of them do not speak English or Spanish, making language even more of a barrier. In addition, cultural differences such as the use of traditional medicine and arranged marriages for teenage girls makes it even harder for the families to navigate life in America.
The families come from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, where there are as many as 16 indigenous languages and just as many cultural groups. The most common indigenous group in San Benito is Triqui, though there are also Mixteco and Zapoteco residents settled here.
“We were finding it hard to administrer services to Oaxacan populations,” said Casey Castillo, the executive director of First 5 San Benito.
Even with the outreach workers, they still needed to adjust their method of meeting with people.
“We set up the office and thought families would come to us,” Castillo said. “We found it was more normal culturally to go to them, to their homes.”
Since they started in July, Castillo said two of the families have enrolled their children in the First 5 preschool.
Adam Sanders, a probabation worker, started volunteering five years ago at workshops for indigenous people that were funded through a grant from the March of Dimes. Originally from Northern California, near the Oregon border, he grew up in an area with a large Laos population and became interested in the plight of migrants.
“Six years ago, nurses noticed a high infant mortality rate in younger mothers,” Sanders said. “They were not getting perinatal care, not seeing doctors. Most of them were Triqui de San Juan Copala. The barrier was language.”
When they first invited Oaxacan women to workshops, they wouldn’t attend unless their husbands were also invited, Sanders said. But the women would not talk about things such as pregnancy and body functions in front of men.
“The main emphasis is health and understanding their rights,” Sanders said. “They are becoming more educated.”
The volunteers now invite entire families, but offer separate workshops for men and women, that include topics such as prenatal care, information from the California Rural Legal Assistance and information on testing blood sugar.
“One thing about the Triqui is that it may take a while to get trust,” Sanders said. “But once you do, you have a big extended family.”
At a recent workshop for healthcare workers, educators and others who work with Oaxacan populations, presenters from the Binational Center for the Development of Oaxacan Indigenous talked about life in Oaxaca, the reasons for migration to the United States and other aspects of the culture. The speakers inlcuded Nayamin Martinez Cossio and Odilia Romero, as well as Sanders and González.
“A lot of the time minority people don’t have a chance to disclose their personal beliefs,” Cossio said.
Life in Oaxaca
The families living in Oaxaca survive on subsistence farming, and up to 73 percent live in extreme poverty. The average education level is four years for indigenous people, and up to 40 percent of indigenous women and 24 percent of indigenous men are illiterate.
“In Mexico, [residents of] rural areas can get along without reading and writing,”Cossio said. “But when they come here, it is a country of papers.”
Health care is hard to come by for them in Mexico, with 76 percent of the population without access to doctors, nurses or hospitals.
“The predominant illnesses are those related to poverty,” Cossio said, such as intestinal infections, tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases. Other illnesses such as diabetes and hypertension are increasing.
Though Oaxacan families come to the United States for better job opportunities, many of them still have strong ties to their culture.
“Something that holds us together is our history,” Romero said. “Many of us are very in touch with our Pre-Hispanic traditions.”
Traditions
Some of those traditions include El Tequio, guelaguetza and the Day of the Dead. El Tequio is a concept of “community work for the benefit of all,” according to Romero. In many Oaxacan communities, when a road needs to be paved or a school built, everyone in the community pitches in. Guelaguetza is another community concept in which every family in the community shows up to celebrate a baptism or other events, and offers food or other help to the families.
They also practice traditional medicine and believe that illness is caused by strong emotions, supernatural phenomena or an inbalance of hot and cold in the body, Cossio said.
“They don’t tell what the symptoms are, but explain the history of what happened a month ago,” Cossio said, of how traditional healers diagnosis people.
Practices include the use of midwives during pregnancy, sweat baths to restore the hot and cold balance in the body, and more than 200 medicinal plants and herbs for different illnesses.
In addition, the families often have traditional female and male roles.
“Women are very modest and don’t look men directly in the eyes,” Sanders said.
Some families practice arranged marriages, and in Oaxaca it is typical for women to marry between 12 and 15 years of age. Men marry between 18 and 21.
González explained some of the traditions around marriage to the workshop participants. A man has a representative go to the woman’s house to talk to her father about marriage. For several weeks, the man and his representative will visit once a week to negotiate a dowry, which often includes food and drink for the wedding ceremony. She said the dowry is so that the father knows the man is serious about caring for his daughter.
“Everybody knows everybody. [The father] will do it if he knows the young man is from a good family,” González said with the help of a translator. “If he doesn’t know him, or thinks he might be bad, he won’t,” allow his daughter to marry.
Some of the traditions are changing slowly, González said.
“Girls who go to school just run off with their boyfriends,” González joked.
For more information on the Binational Center for the Development of Oaxacan Indigenous Communities, visit centrobinancional.org or call 559-499-1178. The local office is located at 801 Line Street. Felicitas Gonzales can be reached at 637-4824 and Casimira de Jesus can be reached at 637-4834.
