Fighting For Recognition: How New Billboards Seek Visibility For LA’s Indigenous Migrants
- lchcit
- Aug 22, 2024
- 1 min read
March 1, 2024
The billboard campaign coincides with the recent re-introduction of a California bill that seeks to collect disaggregated Latin American Indigenous health data. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a similar bill last year.
“Currently, there is no option to recognize this demographic that is often lumped with … Latino data, but who do not identify as Latino ,” said Mar Velez, policy director with the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California, which backs the proposal.
Janet Martinez with CIELO said she’s seen more of a willingness at the local level to include Indigenous migrant communities, but that there is much more work to do, especially in
terms of language equity.
“I think we definitely need to kind of bridge that education gap and have hospitals or different services understand the communities that they serve, in order to provide interpretation services that they need,” said Martinez, who identifies as Zapotec and is the daughter of Mexican-born parents from Oaxaca.
To that end, the billboards are placed strategically, she said; each is in a neighborhood where the Indigenous language and identity on that particular billboard represents residents in the surrounding community.
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