Funded Projects

Indigenous Health & Language Access Rights

Project Year

2024

City & State

Salinas, California

Program Name

CATCH Planning

Topic

Access/Barriers to Health Care (LHI)

Program Description

Last year, staff at Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO) asked me to counsel a grieving family after the sudden, tragic death of their child. I had heard on the news about the child’s death in our local community hospital, but I had never met the boy or his family. The parents spoke Mixteco and had limited English or Spanish proficiency. By way of an interpreter, they shared with me how their child had collapsed at home, inciting several horrifying hours of ambulance rides, emergency rooms, surgical procedures, and intensive care, before the child finally passed away. The grieving parents were understandably upset that the only time they were offered a Mixteco interpreter was after the child had died. “He had a congenital heart condition,” they told me. “We tried to tell the doctors, but I don’t think they knew.” They wondered if that could have saved him.  Monterey County is home to a large population of Indigenous Mexican families, many who primarily speak a Mesoamerican language, such as Mixteco, Triqui, Chatino, or Zapateco. Many of these families share a common frustration about the difficulty of navigating vital community institutions, such as hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and schools. Community organizations, such as CBDIO, provide crucial support for many of these families with the help of bilingual/trilingual community workers, who communicate with families in their preferred languages, help families navigate community services, assist with social services applications, and organize around issues related to language rights, housing, workers’ rights, and access to health care services. One CBDIO office is based in Greenfield, California, a rural city in southern Monterey County that is home to thousands of Indigenous families, including hundreds of children living in households with limited English and Spanish proficiency.    The goal of this project is to identify some of the places where Indigenous families most struggle to access health care or social services because of issues related to language access. By organizing a series of community workshops, we hope to encourage community members to share stories, skills, and support for each other in navigating community health settings. We hope to develop a “Community Report Card” to evaluate the perceived strength of language access rights in Monterey County from the perspective of monolingual Indigenous parents. We anticipate that the community report card format can be used as a powerful visual and written communication tool to engage involved partners in building community capacities to support monolingual families in Monterey County. The long-term goal of this project is to establish a community-led coalition to strengthen language access rights for Indigenous families in South Monterey County. 

Project Goal

To evaluate the strength of language access rights in Monterey County by identifying the language-related needs of Indigenous children living in households with limited English and Spanish proficiency in Greenfield, California. 

Project Objective 1

Between September 2024 and March 2025, we will implement a series of 8 community workshops, 4 in Mixteco and 4 in Triqui, focused on the experiences of at least 24 monolingual Indigenous parents in navigating different health care settings to identify linguistic barriers to health care access in different community health settings in Monterey County. 

Project Objective 2

By June 2025, we will create a “Community Report Card,” with a visual component and written executive summary, that identifies and evaluates language access rights in at least 10 distinct and specific community health settings in Monterey County.  

Project Objective 3

By June 2025, we will share the results of the “Community Report Card” in a community town hall, conducted in both Mixteco and Triqui, with at least 24 families to review findings and identify at least 3 next steps, including but not limited to forming a coalition, planning a meeting with involved community health settings, or applying for a grant to continue the work.

AAP District

District IX

Institutional Name

N/A

Contact 1

Ivan Marquez, MD