LAMONT, Calif. — When it comes to the immigration process among the Hispanic community, Spanish is the language that comes to mind for how best to communicate.
In parts of the rural Central Valley, where an estimated one-quarter of farmworkers and day laborers in the area are of Mexican Indigenous descent, a community that includes many languages and dialects.
In recent years, Indigenous advocacy organizations have found that it’s becoming more difficult to communicate necessary information to their community members.
In Lamont, California, the organization Centro de Unidad Popular Benito Juarez, named for the first Indigenous Mexican president, sees firsthand the struggles that the COVID-19 pandemic and fear of immigration enforcement have created for different indigenous groups across the state.
“When there’s programs available, anything that’s in the community, our Indigenous community are the last ones to find out,” Hector Hernandez, the organization’s CEO, said.
The organization has worked to do outreach and interpretation for Mexican Indigenous populations across the state — from up north near Napa to southern communities in San Diego — for about 25 years.
Hernandez said while there are many agencies in California and across the Central Valley that are working to provide services for migrants, he noted they often are available in English or Spanish because of the large Hispanic population in the area.
Even if the services do reach the Indigenous communities, support workers often don’t speak the native language. And it makes it even more difficult to reach people when each community has its own language.
Hernandez, seated next to his wife, Gladys Flores, who is the organization’s program director, noted that his community’s dialect is different from his wife’s.
Both Hernandez and Flores speak English and Spanish, and each of their native communities are from the Mexican state of Oaxaca. They both speak Mixteco, but their native dialect differs and the same words may have different meanings.
“There’s variants, there’s differences, there’s so many things,” Flores said. “And working with Indigenous communities, it’s not an easy community to understand, to work with, because we have different cultures.”
Native languages largely stopped being reproduced around the time when the Spaniards conquered America, meaning there are no words to describe modern things, Hernandez said. For example, “computer” is translated to Indigenous communities as “devil machine,” because of how it was perceived early on.
When it came to alerting Indigenous communities about how to protect themselves from the COVID-19 virus, Hernandez found they had more success communicating in pictures, with images of masks, hand sanitizers and social distancing guidelines.
Hernandez said even if someone who spoke a native language went to receive medical care, they were unable to find proper translation or interpretation services. It often deters people from seeking necessary medical and mental health help, he said.
Now, they’re facing a new challenge: How to properly inform Indigenous communities, and those who are living in the country illegally, about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement concerns under the Trump administration.
“The fear is there,” Hernandez said, later adding, “The fear is there regardless of if you’ve been here for 10 years, regardless if you’ve been here for 30 years.”
One of the area’s largest ICE raids came in the beginning of January, before President Donald Trump was inaugurated. The early January raid caused confusion in the community and sent widespread fear through the area.
Hernandez said there were Indigenous farmworkers, who were in the country illegally, still in the fields until late at night, fearful they would be pulled over, detained or deported on their drive home. Organizers had to speak different dialects and languages into bullhorns until the early morning hours to encourage people that it was safe to come out of hiding, he said.
As active community organizers, Flores said they are looking to harness the fear in communities due to immigration enforcement and use it as empowerment, not only to keep doing the work they do, but to educate and inform individuals about their rights, the immigration processes and what they can do if federal enforcement is in the area.
Translation required for immigrants
If immigration officials fail to provide adequate translation or interpretation, they could be in violation of the Civil Rights Act. Under the due process clause, which was reaffirmed by former President Bill Clinton, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin for federally funded programs.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency says it is committed to providing translation and interpretation services “regardless of country of citizenship or language.” However, under ICE’s Language Access Program, it offers oral or written translation in just 15 languages.
Zefitret Abera Molla authored a 2023 article for the Center for American Progress, where she examined the challenges to expanding language access in the asylum process.
“I think language access gets kind of sidelined. But without language access, we can’t guarantee a fair and efficient and humane immigration system,” she said in an interview.
Under the Biden administration, there were some efforts to standardize language access and recruit interpreters across agencies, but even then, the issue isn’t receiving the attention it deserves, Molla said.
“Ensuring language access would obviously ensure a much more fair and humane immigration system, but we’re talking about a backlog of millions of cases in the immigration courts,” she said. “So, this is just one part of the problem.”
The largest problem, Molla said, is that there are not enough interpreters willing to step in at any point in the immigration process.
Hernandez and Flores say they’re facing a similar problem.
There is a “network of community leaders” across the state of California that is trying to make plans for if large raids were to hit the rural Indigenous communities, Flores said.
“That conversation we’re having, it’s ‘How do we go about dealing with this? How do we get interpreters? How do we get attorneys?’” Flores said.
“We do have agencies, they’re big organizations, but none of them have reached out to the Indigenous communities. None of them have asked how they can support us,” she added. “It’s only Latino farmworkers, but nobody’s talking about the Indigenous farmworkers.”