California Advocates Continue the Fight for Better Health Data on Indigenous Communities
- lchcit
- Aug 22, 2024
- 1 min read
October 18, 2023
Pedro, the coordinator of the Indigenous interpreters program at Comunidades Indígenas en liderazgo (CIELO), began her speech in Akateko, one of the thousands of indigenous languages spoken in California. The room was quiet after she spoke.
“Did anyone understand me?” she asked in English. Most of the people in the audience said “no.”
The point Pedro made appeared to resonate with the other panelists: Indigenous people with roots in Latin America are often considered Latinos in government surveys, erasing their identities and, in turn, ignoring that they may have different health needs.
“Indigenous people are constantly being lumped into a category that we ourselves don’t identify with, for instance like Latinx,”
Pedro said. “If we don’t exist in data, our human rights are violated.”
The panel was at the summit to discuss SB435, a bill that was recently vetoed by California Governor Gavin Newsom but would have required two California government agencies—the CalFresh program, within the California Department of Social Services, and the California Department of Public Health—to collect specific demographic and health data on Latino and Indigenous groups anonymously. After a year of lobbying by the LCHC and other health equity advocates, the future of SB435 is uncertain, but LCHC staff say they will continue to try to build on the momentum of the past year to push for health equity for California’s Latinos and Indigenous Mesoamericans.
Comments