CHAPTER THREE
OAXACALIFORNIA
Odilia Romero, forty-six
San Bartolomé Zoogocho, Oaxaca/Los Angeles, California
“GOOD AFTERNOON, SENATOR SANDERS. My name is Odilia Romero, indigenous Bene Xhon.”
Standing onstage at the Casa del Mexicano in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood in East Los Angeles, Odilia holds a microphone in one hand and in the other her speech for Bernie Sanders, then a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. It was May 4, 2016, and in the auditorium beneath the fifty-foot-high domed ceiling, four hundred people had gathered, a mix of pro-immigrant organizations, young activists, and members of the Latina community.
“I come from a sacred place where now very few people live; it’s a ghost town, because most of us now are here in Los Angeles,” Odilia says. She is dressed in a white skirt and blouse embroidered with brightly colored flowers, very typical of Zoogocho, the community she comes from. She explains that while indigenous communities are rich in culture and natural resources, every day indigenous peoples are forced to migrate north as a consequence of US agricultural policies.
“When we stand up for our land and human rights, we’re threatened with death by the Mexican police and army,” she says. We go from being landowners to becoming low-wage workers. But in the United States, we are in the same condition: we are over 20 percent of the agricultural labor force in California, but we face discrimination, structural racism, and labor exploitation, along with racism from our other Mexican brothers and sisters.”
Sitting on a stool on the stage with one foot on the floor, wearing a light blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves, slightly hunched over, his hair a tousled mess as usual, Senator Sanders looks at Odilia and listens respectfully, sometimes looking surprised by what he hears.
“What will you and your team do to build a broad, inclusive coalition that acknowledges our diverse community and create policies that recognize indigenous peoples’ right to stay home and make immigration voluntary instead of a forced necessity?” Odilia asks. “Will you prohibit any future agreements like NAFTA that increase unemployment, low wages, poverty, and displacement of indigenous people all over?
“Thank you, and welcome to Oaxacalifornia.”
Odilia is a Bene Xhon, which means “Zapotec people.” She was born in Zoogocho, in Oaxaca state’s northern mountains—“where we walk in the clouds”—in 1971, at the beginning of the decade that would bring the devaluation of the dollar and the decline of rural life in Mexico. Odilia clearly remembers the first wave of migration from her community. A flatbed truck would come every week on market days, and along with the market vendors, the truck would take people who were going away in search of opportunity. “A truck full of empty baskets, and empty men and women, hoping to fill their wallets they would leave behind their people, their language, their traditions, and their hearts to go over to ‘the other side of the fence’ for a few years,” Odilia once wrote, remembering those years.
Eventually her day to climb aboard the truck came. She arrived in Los Angeles in 1981, where her family was already waiting. She does not remember the exact date, but she does recall “the ugly buildings I saw here on Sixth and Union Streets,” her first impression of the city. She was ten years old, and she was struck by the jarring change in her environment, going from living in a natural landscape, next to a river lined with trees, to spending her time inside in a room she rarely left, in a neighborhood where she was not allowed to go outside to play.
“It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I think I suffered from depression, but I didn’t know it.”
Like most children who come to the United States to live, Odilia learned English quickly. When she was only fourteen, she even acted as an interpreter for another native of Oaxaca preparing for a state exam to be licensed as a hairdresser: he did not speak English well, and knowing that Odilia could speak Zapotec and some Spanish, he asked her parents if she could help him. When he got his license, he offered to pay Odilia for her help, but her parents refused. At the time, Odilia couldn’t imagine that being an interpreter could actually be a professional career, but now she remembers that experience as her first real interpreting job.
As is still the custom in many indigenous communities, Odilia married young, when she was just fifteen. Her first child, Janet, a girl, was born when Odilia was sixteen. For five years, Odilia lived the traditional life like so many women in her community, staying at home and raising a family. But she wanted more. She separated from her husband and began making a new life for herself and her daughter.
“There was a time when my people from Zoogocho looked down on me because I had left my husband and because I didn’t go to the parties. So I started doing other things,” Odilia says, remembering how her community tended to ostracize women who broke from traditional roles, even in the United States. “My parents did not speak Spanish very well then, and neither did I; a lot of people didn’t. I knew there was a need [for interpreters], but I never thought of it as a career. We had a restaurant, and a young man who came there to eat introduced me to Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, one of the founders of the Frente.”
Odilia was referring to the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB), which describes itself as a coalition of organizations, communities, and individuals based in Oaxaca, Baja California, and California, seeking to contribute to the development and self-determination of migrant and nonmigrant indigenous peoples, and to fight for the defense of human rights and for justice and gender equality on a binational level.1 When she found out about the work they did, Odilia joined a nonprofit associated with FIOB, the Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaquenno (CBDIO), where she got a job. Once there, she learned that migrants from other indigenous communities, like the Mixtecs and Triquis, had needs even greater than those of her community from Zoogocho, which had an established support and solidarity network in Los Angeles.
Mexico is a multicultural, multilingual country where seven million people speak indigenous languages. Of those, more than a million speak only one of seventy-two indigenous languages, and no Spanish.2 This population is concentrated in a few of Mexico’s thirty-one states. Oaxaca, which, along with neighboring states Guerrero and Chiapas, is one of the three poorest states in the country, is also the state with the largest indigenous population, at over 1.5 million. With over sixteen ethnolinguistic groups, four out of every ten inhabitants of the state speak an indigenous language, and 14 percent of the population do not speak Spanish. This figure is even higher among women: of every ten people who only speak an indigenous language, six are women.3 In recent decades, members of these groups have increasingly been migrating to the United States. According to current estimates, 500,000 indigenous Oaxacans live in the United States, and 70 percent of them live in California.4
Aside from a lack of documents, for migrants who do not speak Spanish or English, it’s a challenge just to find interpreters to help with carrying out official business—with the government, signing contracts, or when seeking medical attention or legal help, sometimes in what could be matters of life or death. States like California generally provide interpreters for non-English speakers, but Mexicans are assigned Spanish-language interpreters. Because of the work FIOB started to do on this issue and some other projects on indigenous languages—like legal orientation for immigrant families and entrepreneurship workshops for indigenous women—authorities recognized the need for interpreters fluent in indigenous languages.
“The Frente has been doing this for twenty-five years,” Odilia points out. “The first interpreter training was for the community in San Juan Bautista, they did not have this kind of support. Then they did a second with the Mayans, and later the languages needed were Mixtec, Zapotec, and Quiché. We more or less met that demand, but for a long time there have been other languages that need interpreters and we are overwhelmed.”
The need for interpreters is most acute in two places: hospitals and courts. Odilia has worked in both, interpreting from English to Spanish or to Zapotec, the language of many of her fellow Oaxacans who have settled in Southern California. The matter has grown more complicated as migration has diversified, in terms of places of origin as well as points of destination. In places where migration of indigenous peoples is just beginning, finding interpreting services is practically impossible.
Odilia emphasizes that the worst part is not the lack of services, but that some businesses offering interpreting services to government agencies do not have a full command of the languages they offer, or their dialects. Aside from being a kind of fraud that is very hard to prove—if no one speaks the language, how can an inaccurate translation be identified?—this poses a real danger to the community.
“If you don’t know how to accurately describe a certain kind of cancer, for example; if you can’t explain the instructions for a prescription; if you are not familiar with the vocabulary used in immigration court; if you’re not prepared emotionally, psychologically, to deliver the news that a baby is going to die, then how do you do it?” she says. “It’s a disaster.”
Dozens of cases have ended in disaster. One of the most widely known is that of Cirila Balthazar Cruz, a Oaxacan woman from the Chatino community. Cirila lived in Mississippi, where she worked in a Chinese restaurant and shared a room with other migrants. She was pregnant and went into labor one night in November 2008. She spoke no English and knew just a few words of Spanish. She flagged down a police car that took her to the hospital, where she gave birth to Rubí Juana Baltazar Cruz.
While she recovered from the birth, Cirila was visited by a Puerto Rican interpreter who asked her several questions in Spanish about her socioeconomic situation. Later, Cirila would say she could not answer her because “she talked really fast and I didn’t understand.”5 The interpreter determined that Cirila was not fit to be a mother, and the Department of Social Services assumed custody of her infant daughter. Cirila was released from the hospital without her baby. A few days later, a couple who was interested in adopting her was given temporary custody.
The case went to court, where the interpreter justified her finding of child neglect on Cirila’s part, claiming that the patient offered sex in exchange for housing, that her husband had abandoned her, that she wanted to give her daughter up for adoption and go back to Mexico, and that she was an undocumented immigrant who had already “abandoned” two other children in Mexico. A series of torturous court appearances followed for Cirila, without an interpreter who spoke Chatino, the only language she knew. Fortunately, a civil rights organization in Mississippi contacted FIOB in California and it found a Chatino interpreter for Cirila. Then, through the interpreter, she could finally explain that she never wanted to give her daughter up for adoption and that she had never abandoned her children in Mexico but had left them in her mother’s care while she went to the United States to work and provide them with a better life, like so many migrants do. The local court was unmoved and terminated Cirila’s parental rights, even denying her visitation privileges. A long year had to pass while the Southern Poverty Law Center waged a winning legal battle on her behalf. Finally, Cirila got her daughter back.
There are many cases of men and women in California who have been found guilty of crimes and served prison sentences as a consequence of a communication gap between the defendants and the courts.6 To address this, in 1996, FIOB started the Project of Indigenous Interpreters with the aim of training indigenous migrants in interpretation techniques, legal terminology, and professional ethics. In 2006, twelve indigenous women who spoke Mixtec, Zapotec, Triqui, and Chatino, in addition to Spanish and in some cases English, received interpreter training, with an emphasis on health care so they could work in clinics and hospitals. Odilia was among them.
It’s Friday in Los Angeles, and the heat announcing summer’s arrival can be felt rising in the air. Odilia, who I have known for several years through my work writing on migration issues in Southern California, meets me at a café a half block from Children’s Hospital, where she is working as an interpreter. The hospital is full of stories of pain, and of hope. Founded as a nonprofit in 1901, it is now considered the best children’s hospital in California and one of the top ten in the United States.7 Children and their families who come to the hospital generally receive unwelcome news involving organ transplants or intensive treatments for diseases like cancer and leukemia, but they also get resources to support them. For families who do not speak English, one of those resources is an interpreter’s services.
The hospital has a permanent staff of Spanish-English interpreters and hires freelancers such as Odilia when it needs additional people to translate the type of Zapotec she speaks (there are several variants of that language). Of the freelancers, Odilia is the only one who speaks an indigenous language. She is often asked to try to find other interpreters through her networks. She has seen families at the hospital from Oaxaca and Guatemala who speak dialects of Zapotec that she does not understand, as well as Chinantecan, Mixe, Mam, Kanjobal, and Chibchan. If the patient and his or her family can communicate only in one of those six languages, no interpreters are available.
As for courtrooms, recent months have seen rising numbers of indigenous peoples from Guatemala: Zapotecs from the southern sierra who, Odilia tells me, started migrating because of mining concessions in their areas that made the fields no longer arable as a result of unplanned water exploitation and soil contamination, among other factors. Another growing group is the Triqui, fleeing political conflicts in their region. For the Raramuris, from northwest Mexico, their problems stem from their location near the US border: narco-traffickers use them as drug mules, and when caught, they have been sentenced to prison, even though they could not understand anything that was said at their trials for lack of an interpreter.
“Indigenous communities are faced with the structural racism of the justice, health-care, and education systems in the United States; with the language barrier on top of that, but also cultural issues, because in our communities, justice is not punitive,” Odilia explains. “The other day we were in a workshop for training new interpreters, and the instructor asked, ‘How would you say “judge”?’ There were Quichés, Zapotecs, and Mixtecs, and we thought it would be something like ‘the big man,’ or ‘the principal,’ or ‘the elderly man,’ because that’s who has authority—the role of judge does not exist in our communities. ‘And how would you say “court”?’ That would be ‘the big man’s house.’ ‘How would you say “prison”?’ Iron house, or metal house. ‘And how would you say “juvenile court”?’ Then that would be the house for children who do not walk straight, because you’re not going to say they did something bad or good. In our cosmic vision, when the child does not walk straight ahead, there is time to put him on the right path. It’s not like the punitive system in the United States that throws you in jail because you stole a pizza.”
In addition to the differences in customs and word usage in indigenous communities, the justice system in the United States is also quite different from the Mexican system. The team Odilia works with is currently developing a glossary to help people express ideas in indigenous languages, because in both the medical and legal fields, complex terms that come up can be very challenging for interpreters.
“In the hospitals, there are illnesses like muscular atrophy. What is that? Sometimes you don’t even know how to say it in Spanish. The cases that come to Children’s Hospital are sensitive.” Odilia reminds me that because of patient confidentiality, she cannot go into detail about specific patients. “And you realize there are people who don’t understand, they don’t even know what the diagnosis is. The worst thing that I’ve ever seen happen there was seeing how someone’s son died, and they never had an interpreter; they never knew why he died. They never knew why a resuscitation team of twenty doctors came into the room to try to revive him. No one could explain what they were doing to their child.”
For years, the issue of interpreting for non-English-speaking parents has come up not only in hospitals and courts but also in schools and government offices. Often, children who grow up speaking English at school and Spanish at home act as interpreters for their parents, helping them fill out official forms, translating instructions from operating manuals, and sometimes serving as interpreters in their own cases at schools and hospitals, which can of course be problematic.
When our conversation touches on this subject, Odilia recalls an incident from her own childhood. When she was in middle school, a boy was picking on her, and she responded by hitting him with a stapler, injuring him. The school suspended Odilia for a week and called her parents. But her parents did not speak English, and the school’s principal did not speak Spanish or Zapotec, so it fell to Odilia to translate for the principal. Instead of reporting her suspension, Odilia told her parents that because of her outstanding work, the school had given her a week’s vacation.
“These things still happen today. I see it at the hospital; I see it [in] the courts; I see it at school: the child is the interpreter, and of course that is not the best person to ask to be your interpreter, especially at school!” Odilia says with a laugh, remembering her own example. “Imagine what can happen with doctors. You can’t say to a kid, ‘Tell your mother she has cancer and she’s got six months to live,’ but that is what is happening on a national level, in Spanish and even more with indigenous languages, because there’s no alternative.”
Paradoxically, the access these children have to bilingualism and even trilingualism, in Odilia’s case, as well as the level of responsibility they assume from a young age, means they have far greater academic and professional opportunities than their parents’ generation. During her speech to Bernie Sanders, Odilia underscored this point.
“We have integrated into US culture. We vote. We have graduates from Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, and UCLA, not only with bachelor’s degrees but also with master’s and PhDs. We contribute economically and culturally to the social fabric of the United States. We are proud to call ourselves Americans, because we are the original owners of the American continent, yet we are also proud to be a part of this great country. We also have the right to be treated equally.”
An interesting characteristic of this generation of Oaxacans who have successfully taken their places in the upper echelons of US society—including Janet, the daughter Odilia had when she was just fifteen, who graduated from UC Berkeley—is that they maintain a fierce pride in their indigenous identity. This marks a clear difference from the previous generation. Many people over forty remember their childhoods growing up as Latino immigrants as a time when their culture was not viewed positively: they had to try to speak English, eat what everyone else ate, wear what everyone else wore. Many parents even forbade their children to speak Spanish so they would not be seen as “different.”
“Now, kids bring their lunch to school and they can bring a torta or nopales, and it’s normal,” says Odilia. “In the eighties, no one would have dared, at least I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have dreamed of eating beans in front of all those kids who thought I was weird because I didn’t know Spanish or English. They made fun of me. They said ‘You’re an Indian,’ and I would just say ‘Uh-huh,’ because I didn’t understand. I never would have imagined that we would get to the point where kids could go to school with their quesadillas or their beans.”
Odilia believes cultivating pride in one’s heritage helps children deal with identity issues that affect many migrant families. She has a seven-year-old son, Bianí, and an eight-year-old granddaughter, Amelie. A few weeks earlier, they told Odilia they wanted to talk to her about something, and Amelie said, “Grandma, you’re gonna teach us Zapotec; we can’t let it die.” Bianí added, “I want to learn, too, because we’re from Zoogocho.” How could she say no? Odilia set to work, and now she posts videos on her Facebook page, “How do you say [animal name] in Zapotec?”—illustrated and explained by Bianí and Amelie.
Although access to an indigenous-language interpreter is often complicated by the lack of qualified people, it is also closely tied to public-policy development by the federal government, state governments, and on the municipal level, and to budgets that pass to support those policies. In most cases, one determining factor for the allocation of resources for certain programs and services—schools, hospitals, police departments—is the information gathered by the US Census.
The directors of the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales and the Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño understand this very well. In 2010, when the most recent US Census was taken, the organizations launched a campaign urging their communities to participate and to specify their indigenous origins on the forms. With higher participation, the aim was to get a more accurate estimate of the number of indigenous peoples living in the US and, therefore, gain better representation and services for them in the public sphere. Flyers and educational materials were produced and distributed at workshops and public events, and assistance in filling out the Census form was provided in indigenous languages including Mixtec, Zapotec, and Triqui for those who could not fill it out in Spanish—the Census Bureau provides the questionnaire in that language and sixty others.
In some counties in California, including Fresno where a large part of the migrant indigenous community working in the agricultural fields is located, the Census Bureau sends in a team specializing in building community alliances to visit the fields, to establish trust and encourage people to fill in the questionnaire regardless of their immigration status. And of course, one of the most strategic community alliances was with the members of FIOB and CBDIO and their interpreter program, through the Census campaign they had launched independently.
As always, a major challenge was finding the right word, because although “census” translates to censo in Spanish, no such word exists in indigenous languages. They decided to use kavi in Mixtec and walab in Zapotec; both words mean “count” or “recount.” In its campaign, FIOB stressed the importance of answering questions 8 and 9 on the Census questionnaire: the first, on country of origin—Mexico—and the second, on belonging to a Native American ethnic group—Mixtec, Triqui, Zapotec, Purépecha.
“For years we have been ignored by the Census, by institutions; they commit statistical genocide with indigenous communities both here and in Mexico,” Odilia told me at the time.8
“Federal money sometimes doesn’t get to us because we don’t have the documentation to get the resources they talk about. Now our biggest challenge is people who can’t read or write. It’s going to be impossible for us to count all the indigenous people because we are completely dependent on volunteers, but we’ll do the best we can. We have a huge challenge ahead of us.”
Talking in the café during a break from her work, Odilia and I remember how over all these years her organization has worked to forge connections with US authorities—the Census is a good example, but there are dozens more. FIOB has built bridges and created alliances with police departments including the LAPD, which has a cultural-sensitivity program for officers working in communities with large numbers of Latinos and/or indigenous peoples. FIOB also works with authorities in small cities such as Greenfield, in California’s Central Valley, where the Triqui community has been settled for over ten years.
Over the past few decades, FIOB has also tried to work with authorities in Mexico, although it has not always gotten a positive response due to a lack of will to assign human or economic resources for their communities abroad. Nonetheless, FIOB has received calls from the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles asking if FIOB could provide interpreters for the office or in the courts.
Odilia grows indignant when we get to this last subject. It amazes her that years have gone by and Mexican congressional representatives and governors cannot make even a minimal effort to support the indigenous community, which keeps Mexican states’ economies afloat with the remittances they send back. She is even more offended by these politicians’ self-righteous, hollow statements following Trump’s election about how it’s time to protect the migrants.
“Tell me, how is it that I can sit down with Charlie Beck [chief of the Los Angeles Police Department] at a forum on indigenous communities, and Mexican politicians, senators, deputies come to say they want to open a dialogue with us, as if we were stupid or defenseless?” says Odilia. “We already have a dialogue with [Eric] Garcetti [mayor of Los Angeles], with councilmen, and we’ve gotten much more help from them than from these people who come promoting some help that doesn’t exist, that’s good for nothing. It bothers me that these politicians come here to wash themselves clean with Trump. Of course we don’t support him, but don’t blame him for your faults: you passed policies that caused the migration of indigenous people, so you’re more to blame than he is. We have defended ourselves on our own—my people have been here for thirty years and we’ve never asked for anything. We have financially supported ourselves here, and we’ve sent remittances home to improve our communities. We have done it, not the governments.”
Odilia believes that in spite of the extremist policies Trump promotes, the actual situation for indigenous migrants is not going to change much: the politics of exclusion, the discrimination, harassment, and abuse have always been there.
“For indigenous peoples, it doesn’t matter who’s in the government; we will still be indigenous. The Mexicans are not going to change because Trump is the president; to them, we’re still ‘el indígena.’ Here in the United States, even Mexicans discriminate against you because they see you wearing a huipil; the racism is very internalized. And I have said to them flat out, ‘Now you’re feeling bad about racist comments against Mexicans, but we hear them every day from you. You’re getting a taste of your own medicine.’”