Lack of Information Contributes to Disproportionate COVID-19 Rates Among Oregon Latino Population
“It’s just really overwhelming,” said Anakaren Gutierrez Sandoval, a community health worker with the non-profit group Oregon Latino Health Coalition. “That’s the best way I can describe it. Everyone is just at max capacity.”
Sandoval is talking about the disproportionate affect that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on Hispanic and Latino communities in Oregon. While these groups make up about 12% of the population of Oregon, they account for over 39% of coronavirus infections in the state. Several factors contribute to this – such as crowded housing, an overrepresentation of Latinos as essential workers, and lack of access to healthcare – but a leading consideration is the lack of information available to the Hispanic community. While information on social distancing and mask-wearing seems to abound for English-speakers, resources in Spanish can be scarce.
“We have a 211 number where they could call to request assistance,” said Sandoval, “but a lot of times that was in English or they had technical difficulties being able to get that information.” Not only are Spanish-language resources hard to come by, misinformation on Spanish-language radio stations is plentiful. This lack of communication appears to have exacerbated or at least contributed to the disproportionate infection of the Hispanic community in Oregon.
“We’re in the middle of a pandemic,” said Mexican-American winemaker Cristina Gonzales, “But we’re also in a pandemic of misinformation. And that goes down the pipeline, down to our most disadvantaged and underrepresented groups. [They’re] not getting information or the correct information at all.”
In the below graph, the blue bars represent positive tests of people who marked their ethnicity as Hispanic. While it is clear that these represent much more than 12% of the population, the data has been obscured in some ways by the differentiation between race and ethnicity.
In this second graph, the “LatinX” community appears to have suffered zero cases – this is because most people mark “white” (or another race) as their race, and identify themselves using the Hispanic ethnicity box. This data could lead to an inaccurate analysis of the pandemic’s affect on the Latino community in Oregon.
This data shows the reality that Oregon’s Hispanic community, especially in the agricultural sector, has suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19. Most of Oregon’s agricultural workers – especially in industries such as the wineries and Christmas tree farming in the Willamette Valley – are Latino, many of them migrant workers. Since low-income housing can be hard to find, families crowd into small apartments, sometimes with two or three families in one two-bedroom apartment in the Portland area. This makes social distancing near impossible, and without reliable access to the internet or accurate Spanish-language media, sometimes families don’t even know how they should be properly distancing and quarantining, even if they could. For agricultural workers, losing two weeks of pay can be disastrous financially, and many employers aren’t doing enough to allow workers to take enough time off, or even let them know if those opportunities exist.
Gonzales, whose vineyard, Gonzales Wine Company, is located just outside of Portland in the Willamette Valley, said sometimes even when employers and are well-intentioned, overwhelm and the financial stresses of the pandemic can affect how resources are distributed. “You see the public health care signs of, you know, let’s be safe during COVID,” she said, “And they have them that are bilingual and in different languages. But some of it is that the employers themselves might not know how to get it. Or it’s just not being posted to where workers are able to see it. And then there’s illiteracy, where workers are potentially not able to read if it’s in English or if it’s in Spanish.”
Gonzales, in addition to being very active in the Latino wine-making community, is on the board of the non-profit AHIVOY, (Asociación Hispana de la Industria del Vino en Oregon y Comunidad). AHIVOY provides education to vineyard workers (called “vineyard stewards”) in order to help them overcome socioeconomic barriers and access other careers within the wine industry, such as sales, working in tasting rooms, marketing, and even becoming winemakers themselves. Through partnerships with local community colleges, AHIVOY has helped vineyard stewards, who might have started out as migrant workers, gain an immersive English-language experience as well as knowledge and resources to start fulfilling careers. However, Gonzales said the pandemic has put a halt to all of that. When the community college closed their campus and moved classes online in the spring, AHIVOY had to temporarily cancel its program.
“Vineyard stewards don’t have access to the internet all the time,” said Gonzales, “So that would make if very difficult to run classes.” In-person resources are a necessary part of catering to lower-income students. Gonzales said she hoped the program would be revamped in 2021, with smaller class sizes. This is another example of how lack of internet access has harmed the Latino community’s ability to access resources that might help them navigate the pandemic, and even life after it.
Sandoval said this information blackout has meant that getting the help her organization offers to Latino workers has been difficult. The Oregon Latino Health Coalition aims to help the Hispanic community in Multnomah County, especially those in the agricultural industries surrounding Portland, access otherwise hard-to-reach resources. They provide Spanish-language help with filling out applications for aid and healthcare. But Sandoval said that even in 2020, when much of life seems to have moved online, the group relies most heavily on word of mouth to get information to their clients. For a recent drive-through COVID testing event, Sandoval said, “Most of the patients that signed up for it, it was through word of mouth. When we would try to do it on social media, it wasn’t effective.”
Without adequate resources and information available to the Latino community, Sandoval also said that migrant workers fear giving the necessary personal information for contact tracing to county and state officials. They are afraid it might be given to ICE and lead to deportation.
“We saw a lot of clients hesitant to accept any sort of financial aid or resources, because they felt like it could affect their immigration status,” she said. Even though the county does not report any of the information it collects to ICE, Sandoval said people are hesitant to trust officials, and don’t want to disclose information such as the other members of their household. This has led to hesitance in the community to get tested, as a positive test is associated with having to disclose this vital information to the authorities.
Both Sandoval and Gonzales said the situation has led to extreme overwhelm among those trying to help. “Everyone is like a deer in the headlights right now,” said Gonzales. “We’ve been in the pandemic for a little while, but still, it’s so much to take in and process. And, you know, to try to survive.”
“We’re all feeling like there just need to be more resources available,” said Sandoval. “Because until people can feel like they can stay home, and take care of themselves, protect themselves, without losing their jobs or their homes, the numbers are still going to continue to increase.”