Indigenous immigrants in Coachella Valley face different challenges (fwd)

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Indigenous immigrants in Coachella Valley face different challenges

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11:58 PM PDT on Saturday, April 14, 2007

By DAVID OLSON
The Press-Enterprise
News for Southern Califonia
http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_D_indigenous15.3ea7d3e.html

Interactive: Photo slideshow and video of the Coachella Valley's Purépecha
community

Natividad González spent hours sewing brilliantly colored dresses that she
never wears outside.

Every day, thousands of women walk down the roads of González's native
Purépecha region of Mexico in similar clothes. But when González last year
moved from Mexico to a home near the Salton Sea, friends told her to keep
the traditional dresses inside or risk becoming a target of the same
anti-indigenous ridicule they had suffered.

"People would laugh at them and say, 'Why do you dress like that?' "
González said as she sat in her mobile-home living room with a traditional
black, blue and white rebozo -- or shawl -- wrapped around her shoulders.

González, 35, is one of hundreds of Purépecha (pronounced Poo-REH-peh-cha)
people who have settled in the rural eastern Coachella Valley, most in the
past decade. They arrive for the same reasons millions of other Mexican
immigrants do: to escape the destitution that mars the Mexican countryside
and to provide opportunities that their children could never hope to have
in their homeland.

Yet the Purépecha face different challenges. They endure insults and
snickering from some nonindigenous Mexican immigrants who view them as
primitive "dirty Indians." They strive to maintain a communal way of life
that clashes with a more individualistic U.S. culture. They struggle to
communicate with health care workers and teachers who may understand
Spanish but until recently may not have even heard of the pre-Hispanic
Purépecha language that many of them speak.

Government and social-service agencies are trying to overcome linguistic and
cultural barriers to better serve the Purépecha. A health clinic and school
are planning to hire Purépecha interpreters. Riverside County Child
Protective Services has been using one for three years. Some teachers who
have Purépecha students infuse lessons with references to indigenous
customs. A Catholic church in the farming community of Mecca hopes to add a
service in Purépecha.

[Photos By Amanda Lucidon / The Press-Enterprise
Adolfo Bacilio, 50, a traditional healer, is one of hundreds of Purépecha
immigrants who have settled in the rural eastern Coachella Valley.]

Meanwhile, the Purépecha straddle three cultures, trying to preserve their
indigenous traditions amid the mainstream Mexican culture that surrounds
them in their immigrant neighborhoods, and a U.S. culture that is
transforming their children.

History of Discrimination

The Purépecha homeland is a mountainous region of the central Mexican state
of Michoacán. More than 200,000 Purépecha live in Michoacán and other parts
of Mexico, according to Mexico's National Commission for the Development of
Indigenous Communities.

About 2,000 Purépecha are in Riverside County, local immigrants say. Many
live in cramped trailers surrounded by desert or the fruit and vegetable
fields in which hundreds of them work. Next to one heavily Purépecha
mobile-home park sits a dump that contains toxic waste.

In Mexico, indigenous people have faced a long history of discrimination.

During most of the 20th century, government policy was to encourage the
indigenous to subsume their culture into the larger mestizo -- or
mixed-race -- culture of Mexico's majority, said Warren Anderson, an
associate professor of anthropology at Southeast Missouri State University
who has extensively studied the Purépecha.

In the past 20 to 30 years, many Purépecha in Michoacán have asserted their
cultural identity. They pushed for bilingual education and insisted on
identifying themselves as "Purépecha" instead of "Tarasco," the term the
Spanish gave them, Anderson said.

Yet the bigotry and sense of superiority that many Mexicans have toward
indigenous people remains, even though most Mexicans have a mix of
indigenous and Spanish blood, local Purépecha immigrants said.

They don't directly insult Purépecha people, said Purépecha immigrant
Francisco Zamora. But if mestizo people overhear someone speaking Purépecha
in a store or on the job in the fields, they sometimes mock the way the
Purépecha talk or call them "Indians who just came down from the hills," he
said.

Zamora, 42, said in Spanish that the brothers of his wife, Elvia -- who is
not Purépecha -- opposed his marriage to her because they believed that
Zamora's indigenous background meant that he was dumb.

Zamora said some Spanish-speaking Purépecha lie about their ethnic
background to avoid being made fun of. Purépecha students at Desert Mirage
High School in Thermal said some Purépecha classmates avoid speaking their
native language in public.

"They feel ashamed that they're Tarasco," said Purépecha immigrant María
Rafael, 14. "They don't want anyone to know. I think it's ugly to reject
who you are."

Shared Roots

Maria's cousin Verónica Rafael, 15, said that, when she was in elementary
school, some students pushed her, pulled her hair and called her names.

Other nonindigenous Mexicans accept their Purépecha classmates and treat
them as equals, she said.

Almost all of the Purépecha in the Coachella Valley are from Ocumicho, a
town of more than 3,800 people about 270 miles west of Mexico City
surrounded by pine and oak forests, and corn, bean and wheat fields.

The first Inland residents from Ocumicho were two men who arrived decades
ago, several Purépecha immigrants said, although they offer different
stories as to precisely when, where and why they came. The two men later
returned to Ocumicho and spread the word about the area.

By the time Antonio Marcelo arrived in Mecca in 1980, about a dozen
Purépecha immigrants had already settled in the Coachella Valley. Like many
Purépecha, Marcelo crossed the border illegally. He later gained residency.
Others remain undocumented.

Marcelo, 44, had never left Ocumicho before his journey to the United
States, and he spoke little Spanish when he arrived. He learned the
language through Sunday basketball games with Spanish-speaking Mexican
immigrants.

At the time, the Purépecha community was still largely invisible to
outsiders. When teacher Mike Rosenfeld first had Purépecha students in his
Coachella Valley High School bilingual history class more than 15 years
ago, he didn't realize they were indigenous.

"It was probably five or six years before anyone figured out they didn't
speak Spanish," he said. "They'd act like they understood."

Rosenfeld said he and other teachers assumed the Purépecha kids did poorly
on tests and barely spoke in class because they were not motivated to
learn.

Looking back, Rosenfeld said, "it must have been excruciating for them. The
early kids overwhelmingly did not graduate. It's pretty pathetic when I
look at it now. I was terrible with those kids."

Today, some teachers go out of their way to make Purépecha students feel
accepted by sprinkling a few Purépecha words in lessons or displaying
photos of the Purépecha region on bulletin boards.

At Desert Mirage, students in an after-school video class are creating
cartoons with voices in all three languages, said Roy Garza, a
digital-imaging instructor at the school.

"This is saying: It's OK to have pride in your language and culture," Garza
said.

Alfonso Taboada, who teaches Mexican-American history at Desert Mirage, has
added more small-group activities. He said they motivate Purépecha students
to try harder.

"U.S. education is very individualistic and centered on individual success,"
Taboada said. "Their values are very communal and they want the whole to
succeed, not just the individual."

Many Purépecha students juggle learning three languages: the Purépecha they
hear at home, the Spanish they speak on the streets, and the English they
learn in school. Their English is often more formal and grammatically
correct than the slang-infused Spanish they learn from friends, teachers
said.

Although many Purépecha students speak fluent Spanish when they arrive in
the Coachella Valley, others struggle to simultaneously learn Spanish and
English.

Salvador Zacarías, 16, said he spoke little Spanish or English when he
arrived at elementary school six years ago. A Spanish-speaking Purépecha
student who sat next to him helped translate material from the classes,
which were taught in English and Spanish.

Salvador's mother speaks only Purépecha. His father speaks Purépecha and
Spanish. Adult Purépecha women are less likely to speak fluent Spanish than
men, who in Mexico must often travel outside the Purépecha region to find
work or sell their crops, Anderson said.

Impact on Schools

Officially, the Coachella Valley Unified School District -- which includes
Desert Mirage -- has 88 students who speak Purépecha. But the real number
is probably much higher, said Anastacio De La Cruz, who compiles language
statistics for the district. Many Purépecha parents list Spanish as the
child's home language even if it is really Purépecha, largely because of
anti-indigenous bigotry, he said.

Desert Mirage recently hired a trilingual woman to interpret at
parent-teacher conferences and other school events and translate materials
sent to Purépecha homes, said Principal Joe Ceja. At Oasis School,
Spanish-speaking Purépecha parents have volunteered to interpret for
several years, said Principal Elizabeth Clipper Ramirez.

Clipper Ramirez and several other Coachella Valley Unified teachers and
administrators plan to one day travel to Ocumicho to try to better
understand their students' hometown.

Administrators and a teacher trainer in the Reynolds School District outside
Portland, Ore., have twice visited schools and other sites in several
Purépecha towns where some of that district's 240-plus Purépecha students
come from. The Reynolds district is considering a teacher exchange next
year with schools in the Purépecha towns.

"If we know our kids better, we can develop a learning environment to make
them feel more accepted and supported," said Mark Crossman, who heads the
district's English- language program and traveled to Michoacán in February.

In California, several organizations have targeted meetings and programs at
Mexican indigenous communities.

A group in Ventura County trains indigenous Mixtec immigrants from Oaxaca to
conduct health outreach with fellow Mixtec. A health official there said the
program has led more indigenous patients to seek care.

The Fresno-based Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations educates
nonindigenous doctors and nurses to respect the natural medicines that many
indigenous people use. The group wants to open an office in the Coachella
Valley to serve the Purépecha, said Rufino Domínguez, the group's general
coordinator.

Coachella Valley clinics see a similar reliance on traditional medicine.
Sergio Ruiz, manager of the Borrego Community Health Foundation clinic in
Oasis, said some Purépecha shun his clinic and instead consult with folk
healers or use home remedies. They also avoid the clinic because they are
nervous about communicating in Spanish, he said.

At the Clinicas de Salud del Pueblo clinic in Mecca, some Purépecha patients
have missed appointments because of language misunderstandings, said nursing
supervisor Eva Romero. Nearly 10 percent of the 400 clients the clinic
serves in a typical week are Purépecha, she said.

Hilda Mora said in Purépecha through a Spanish interpreter that when she
goes to the clinic without a Spanish-speaking family member, she asks
patients in the waiting room for help until she finds a Spanish-speaking
Purépecha person.

Verónica Marcelo recalled that, before her mother learned to speak fluent
Spanish, she pretended to comprehend what the Clinicas staff was telling
her.

"They're embarrassed to say they don't understand," she said of monolingual
Purépecha speakers.

Clinicas plans to hire a Purépecha interpreter. The county's temporary
assistance and Medi-Cal program began using one last month.

Yet social-service agencies say the barriers to serving the Purépecha are
more than linguistic. California Rural Legal Assistance has tried to reach
out to Purépecha immigrants but has faced widespread distrust, said Arturo
Rodriguez, a lawyer in the group's Coachella office.

"It's a very tight-knit community," Rodriguez said. "We're kind of seen as
part of the establishment."

About two years ago, outreach workers attempted to conduct a door-to-door
survey in Desert Mobile Home Park, where many Purépecha live. They received
little cooperation, either because residents did not want to talk to them or
spoke little or no Spanish, Rodriguez said.

The group hopes to eventually hire a Purépecha outreach worker for its
Coachella office, said Jeff Ponting, who heads the San Francisco-based
organization's indigenous farmworker project.

"You're talking about a community that survived by keeping apart from the
government and the majority community," Ponting said. "If you're not from
the indigenous community, it's very difficult to break through."

Reach David Olson at 951-368-9462 or dolson at PE.com