WATSONVILLE—Watsonville Mayor Rebecca Garcia had a request during a conference call with Santa Cruz County leaders: don’t forget our Spanish speaking population.
The longtime outspoken community activist now in charge of the county’s most densely populated city and largest Latino community pushed leaders to add Spanish entries on its landing page for information on the coronavirus.
A simple tab labeled “Información en Español” now guides monolingual Spanish speakers to vital information about the virus and the shelter-in-place order.
“[County officials] greatly responded to making sure that information in Spanish, particularly for South County, will be there,” she said during the April 14 Watsonville City Council meeting.
Several small actions such as those, advocates and nonprofit leaders said, have helped save “vulnerable” lives in Watsonville and the greater Pajaro Valley, which includes small towns in the northern reaches of Monterey County such as Pajaro and Las Lomas.
According to data from the county health department, there were 29 known COVID-19 cases in South County as of Wednesday, compared to 33 in North County and 45 in Mid-County. North Monterey County, meanwhile, had eight only as of Wednesday. It is not publicly known which towns those cases are from.
“You look at those numbers, not just in South County but throughout, and I think it’s an indicator that the stuff we’ve been told to do and what we are doing is working,” said Salud Para La Gente CEO Dori Rose Inda.
About 82 percent of Watsonville’s roughly 55,000 residents are Hispanic or Latino and though many speak English, a significant portion does not. Salud, for instance, serves 28,000 patients and roughly three-fourths of them do not speak English.
That has left Watsonville’s leaders with the Herculean task of reaching a community that for various reasons mostly lives in the shadows.
“Those numbers,” Community Bridges CEO Raymon Cancino said, “I don’t think you can point to one thing and say, ‘this is why they’re low.’ I think it’s been a lot of factors. It’s been a team effort, and I think Watsonville has been at the forefront of the county.”
Following the lead of the Pajaro Valley Unified School District, the City of Watsonville was one of the first large agencies in the Monterey Bay to close, choosing to do so a few days before the county ordered its residents to shelter-in-place. That meant their message and implementation of the closure and subsequent order had to be crystal clear.
It also had to be bilingual, according to City Manager Matt Huffaker.
“There is no one-size-fits-all approach to ensuring all members of the community are informed,” he wrote in an email. “When it comes to connecting with our Spanish speaking population, we have to be very intentional in utilizing a variety of approaches, including social media, radio and local news media.”
That meant every social media post in English had to be recreated in Spanish—something very few cities and counties around the state have done. When Huffaker appeared in a public service announcement on the city’s social media accounts, a Spanish version of the same PSA featuring Deputy City Manager Tamara Vides followed quickly behind it.
All of their emails and fliers to businesses and homeowners were, too, in English and Spanish.
“We recognized early on that if our regional efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19 were going to be successful, all members of our community needed to understand what is at risk, why these unprecedented measures are necessary, and what they can do to protect themselves and their loved ones,” Huffaker wrote.
The City has also received help from various nonprofits in reaching pockets of the community that could have otherwise been ignored.
Salud, for example, partnered with Digital Nest to produce a PSA in both Spanish and Mixtec, a dialect spoken by natives from Mexican states Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero.
Garcia said the Center for Farmworker Families is also working closely with City leadership to keep their clients, who are predominantly immigrants from Oaxaca, informed.
At the San Andreas housing project run by MidPen Housing in Watsonville’s outskirts, several residents through an interpreter told The Pajaronian on April 14 that they felt safe, informed and that no one had reported contracting the virus at the 43-unit farm labor facility.
A group of them took the time to stroll out to San Andreas Road for fresh air. They said many of the laborers there were continuing to work in the fields and their spirits seemed upbeat.
Emails into MidPen seeking comment for this story were not returned.
