Latino community shares experiences, information through charlas

It might sound simple, but sometimes the best way to connect with people in another language is to focus on talking to them in a way they can understand easily and effortlessly, especially in emergency situations like the on going COVID-19 pandemic.

Essentially, this is the concept behind the Charlas Comunitarias in the Sonoma Valley.

These Spanish-language charlas, or chats, began the first year of the pandemic with the sole purpose of communicating to Spanish-speaking residents about COVID-19 and virus-related issues. The charlas have continued monthly on Zoom and Facebook since then.

The chats are the brainchild of Karina Garcia, a 40-year-old Sonoma Valley resident who grew up in Boyes Hot Springs and now serves as field representative for County Supervisor Susan Gorin. Garcia thought up the charlas as a way to connect more constituents with county government leaders. The result has been overwhelmingly positive: Residents have logged on by the hundreds and local agencies have lined up to participate.

“It’s important to me to (be a) liaison with the local Spanish-speaking community because that’s where I grew up,” said Garcia, who emigrated from Jalisco, Mexico when she was 6. “I know the struggle, first-hand.”

Seeing a problem, finding a solution

After graduating from Sonoma High School, Santa Rosa Junior College and Sonoma State University, being the first in her family to earn a degree, Garcia spent most of her career as a communicator of some kind.

Most recently, she worked at Azteca Channel 50, a Fremont-based Spanish-language television station that serves the Bay Area, for 10 years.

She described that opportunity as “a hugely rewarding job,” but noted that “it required me dedicating my entire life to it.”

She decided to return to Sonoma County to reconnect with her extended family and to slow down.

That’s when she took a job in Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin’s office, just days before the global pandemic began in 2020. In the first few weeks of the county’s shelter-in-place order, Garcia said she was frustrated that community briefings were only in English. She said friends and family members complained that they couldn’t get vital information in Spanish. She vowed to do something to help.

Thus, the Charlas Comunitarias was born.

From the very beginning, Garcia wanted the charlas to take a community-centered approach — a strategy to help build trust with a community that has experienced a history of systematic disenfranchisement.

Specifically, she aimed to dispel myths through open communication with the guidance of trusted messengers from the community. Her plan: To have primary sources from different local, regional, and state agencies present this information in real-time, with Spanish translation.

“Not everybody had access to (the) internet or a computer, and if they did, not everyone knew how to connect to Zoom or pop open a video on Facebook,” she said. “If they did that and they did it late, they had to listen to English first, which often discouraged them or intimidated them into shutting it off before they could get useful information.”

Garcia’s idea was simple: Make the Charlas interactive conversations, and broadcast them in Spanish the entire time on Zoom and Supervisor Gorin’s Facebook page.

To attract community members, she recruited Azteca 50 personality Juan Barragán to lead the show.

Anatomy of a charla

The first of the Charlas aired online in October 2020. After a few months of biweekly events, the meetings continued on a monthly basis with more people logging on every time. Initially, Garcia spent four to six hours a week recruiting expert participants. As word spread, experts started reaching out to her to give thanks, offer suggestions for future topics and volunteer to contribute.

By the summer of 2021, the charlas took off and the Spanish-speaking community of Sonoma Valley (and beyond) was more engaged than ever before.

“The (Charlas) series came out of the need to get timely information about the COVID-19 pandemic to our Latinx community, but it has become so much more,” Gorin wrote in a statement. “I am so grateful to have Karina on our team with her deep connections to both the Springs Community and the media world. There is no way we could have provided this important information to the Latinx community in the Springs and beyond without her.”

Over time Garcia developed a formula for the charlas. Each of the episode spotlighted a specific issue: farm work, fire safety, COVID-19 testing and so on.

First, presenting participants from local agencies would deliver information in a one-way format — no more than three to five minutes apiece. Next, listeners and community members would have the opportunity to ask live questions, either via video or via chat. Participants also would reserve time to answer questions submitted offline.

Often, these questions became very raw, with listeners asking how specific laws or policies would impact their jobs, their families and their citizenship status.

“There was a lot of fear in the community we wanted to address,” said Garcia, who herself came to the United States as an undocumented child. “We knew if we couldn’t be real and give people a chance to ask what was really on their mind, none of it would be worthwhile.”

Communication builds trust

The charlas model certainly has turned heads among participants at the county and state levels.

Fernando Torres, community worker for California Rural Legal Assistance, said his participation enabled his organization to reach out to community members that speak Spanish, Triqui and Mixteco.

“Language justice is important,” he said. “Community members have the right to access health care and government-funded services in a language they understand. It is not just a right, but it ultimately builds trust in the community and makes folks more comfortable in taking the next step to reach out to providers and receive services they may be entitled to receive.”

Dana Bravo, outreach coordinator of the Map Your Neighborhood project at the Sonoma Ecology Center, said the charlas represent an opportunity for “empowering and encouraging folks to organize amongst themselves in the name of safety.”

And Stephen Akre, fire chief of the Sonoma Valley Fire District, said two-way communication has made the charlas powerful.

“It brings us a chance to engage with the community and for the community to get to know us a little better, to put names and faces on the people that are providing service,” he said. “We learned from the 2017 Nuns Fire experiences that there was a gap with being able to effectively communicate with and provide information to the Spanish speaking community.  We are taking many steps to improve this and (the charlas) is an important one.”

After two years of Charlas, the program will conclude in October.

Garcia said the county may continue charlas on a quarterly basis, but she noted that Gorin’s involvement will end as the supervisor’s term expires, and that Gorin is not expected to seek reelection.

Topics for the last few meetings will include civic education, emergency preparedness and binational health. In the last meeting, she will ask participants to talk about where the community stands in its ongoing battle against COVID-19, and how the new variants could impact harvest and beyond.

Though Garcia doesn’t know what she’ll do next, for now she’ll oversee the charlas until the end.

“Our whole team has tried to do good one step at a time, and it ultimately has made a huge difference in a lot of lives,” she said. “These Charlas have kept people informed. That fills me with great pride.”