Reaching Out to Rural Latino Communities Posted on July 7, 2008 Lynda Harrison (bio) describes her work with Latino immigrants in the South.

One challenge is that the community I'm working in is about an hour and a half from where I work and live. And so just, it takes time to go there, and I don't live in that particular community. So that has taken a lot of time to become established and develop the relationships.

I think another challenge in rural communities for families is much less accessibility to resources and particularly for undocumented Latino immigrant families. In the area where we are in Alabama, this is a new phenomenon, relatively new, it's not like we were on the Texas border community or in California or Arizona.

So dealing with racism, resistance in the community, backlash. The police in Alabama have now been prepared to be able to act as immigration officers. So there's, so a challenge. I think you'd see some of that in urban Birmingham, for example, but it's even more so in the rural areas where families don't have mental health centers to go to if they're having problems with their kids. There are relatively few clinics with sliding scales for people who don't have insurance, which most people don't.

Very few resources with bilingual health care providers. So even though there are federal laws that require health services that get federal money to provide interpreters if there are so few services and they don't have money to provide interpreters. Family members are interpreting, which is not a good thing. So all of those challenges, I think, get exacerbated in a rural area where the resources just aren't as available as in an urban area.

A key for the project we're working with has been our involvement with the Catholic Church there, which is kind of this, that has become the center for social connections, for social service delivery, informal social service delivery, and advocacy. And not every Latino family in this area is Catholic, so that's an area that I've been very cognizant of. We have become so closely aligned with this particular Catholic Church, which had a Latino center.

When we established the Latino Health Community Partnership, we deliberately reached out to other churches, to the Chamber of Commerce, which had a Latino Interest Committee.

People are really hungry and appreciative of others having interest and wanting to hear their voice. This has been my experience. So I think, I think establishing relationships with that Catholic Church has been key, but also making sure to reach out to other groups so that others who are not involved in that church are not alienated.

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