Dispatches from the Community Engagement Taskforce
Story by Tomas Madrigal, Ph.D., Department of Health Equity Coordinator working in the COVID-19 Response Community Engagement Taskforce
I’m a 1.5 generation immigrant. Unlike my parents, I was born in the United States, but raised in one of Washington State’s first rural enclaves in the south-central corner of the state where all the residents were Mexican immigrants, spoke Spanish and were agricultural workers. I did not learn English until the first grade. Meanwhile, I would get in trouble for asking my bilingual neighbor what the teacher was saying. I remember my father coming home from work and wanting to hug him, even though he was drenched in agricultural chemicals used as pesticides or fungicides, the fungicides smelled the worst. I would ask how his day went as he sat on the stoop of our porch removing the layers of saturated clothing and he would respond in broken English, “Oh, pretty good con papas”.
I saw my mother plant the nursery of what would become Washington’s largest contiguous apple orchard, and I saw her work her way through the packing line, onto the computer system, and then into the administrative office of the same farm. As I grew up, I watched her move up into the position of Community Affairs and Housing Director where she still works as the small nursery she planted at the foot of the Snake River turned into one of Washington’s largest industrial farming company towns.
I remember meeting my mentor on the picket line, watching the grower charge the line with his blue pickup truck and then speed away, spraying everyone with dirt. I was fourteen. Five years later, I remember sitting across the table from five company executives, my mother not being allowed to join me, and having my scholarship revoked for bringing a union organizer onto their farm. I was studying pre-med. It was at that moment in my life that I moved to ethnic studies and never left.
Of course, I studied U.S. industrial agriculture. Of course, I studied social movements. Of course, I studied the history of migration. But my forte was as a tactician and strategist. It was from within the belly of social movements, many different social movements, that I learned that the work that is the most undesirable yet necessary, is the work that we must make irresistible. It is the grunt work, the tired, day to day work, reproductive work, chores, maintenance, administration, back end, backbone work that is essential to life. As a very thoughtful man once said to a young latchkey child of farmworkers in eastern Washington over the PBS screen, “Look for the helpers, we are everywhere”.
COVID-19 Community Engagement Taskforce
The COVID-19 Community Engagement Taskforce at DOH is an effort to provide timely, accurate, culturally and linguistically appropriate, and community-centric information and resources to vulnerable, marginalized, and most impacted communities statewide. We do this by using a racial equity and social justice lens and by collaborating with state and local communities, organizations, and partners to listen, engage, and respond to immediate and longer-term needs of the communities.
Our equity and social justice lens invites us to prioritize four areas:
- Needs of populations at higher risk
- Access, language and culture needs
- Environmental factors including employment, housing, and family situation
- Systemic and institutional inequities that perpetuate health inequities.
