Federal, state and local officials are providing the public with almost daily communications about how the pandemic is progressing. But getting accurate and useful information out can be a challenge for communities where many people speak English as a second language. WGBH News' Morning Edition host Joe Mathieu spoke with Carolina Trujillo, the communications director for the Essex Media Group and the Spanish Newspaper La Voz, about how the Spanish-speaking community in Lynn has been impacted. The transcript below has been edited for clarity.
Joe Mathieu: How's life at home treating you?
Carolina Trujillo: Well, I'm not one of the ones adapting nicely. In media, we have to be outside. Part of my job is to build relationships with people [and] with our communities, and being inside is not facilitating the process.
Mathieu: We're getting old on Zoom here; we can certainly relate. I'm talking to you from my home office here, and it's a very strange experience. But you're in touch, obviously, with the community, and I'd love to ask you about some of the challenges that you're facing. There's been a lot of misconceptions [and] there's been a lot of fear surrounding this whole story.
Trujilo: Absolutely. We do have to take under consideration, obviously, the numbers and how this virus has attacked primarily minority communities. So I understand where there is a lot of fear. We are trying through La Voz — not only through the print newspaper, but also through our social media channels — to make sure that we have available information from reliable sources to keep updating the community with everything that is there.
We have a community in Lynn, which is one of the centralized areas that we cover through La Voz, [with] a lot of challenges. Why? Because these are frontline workers. These are essential workers, but not the ones that we're clapping every day — not the doctors and the nurses. We have a lot of people that work in kitchens. We have cleaning people who are everyday exposing their lives, and they're not the ones receiving the stimulus package, they're not the ones that we're putting signs up and saying "thank you for your services." These are the unsung heroes, I would say, that are exposing their lives and they're not really being recognized through financial stimulus or emotional stimulus. Yet they are the ones who need the most information because they're out there risking their lives everyday in order to support their families.
So we've been trying to keep the community updated with resources in Spanish, in their native tongue, just to make sure that the messages are clear, that we don't give mixed information and that we keep pushing forward with everything that we're fed. So I think that it's really critical more than ever that we have organizations that are promoting these types of communications to minority communities in their native tongue. It's critical, especially in centralized communities because we get a lot of information from the nation, but not so much information for the places where people are living and residing every day.
Mathieu: Carolina, what are the most common questions that you're getting these days?
Trujilo: So mostly [for] resources available for undocumented or people who are now receiving the stimulus check. That's one of the most common ones. Second, how it's affecting minority communities at a higher rate, especially Latinos, at a higher rate than other communities and why. We have a very interesting demographic here in Lynn where different families live in one place, so there's a high risk of infection, of course.
So we've stressed how to combat this and what are the safety precautions that you need to take. We started a campaign saying "quédate en casa" — "stay home," wash your hands with soap [and] all the safety measures in order to reduce the risk of infection. And I think the most common one is symptoms and testing. Testing sites is important.
The mayor of Lynn has been very proactive in identifying resources for people in these living conditions, so now they've joined the City of Revere and the City of Chelsea in order to have a designated place for people to quarantine because that was another issue here. What if you get sick and you're in a household with four other families [and] with children? Where do you send these people? People were not being admitted back home, in some cases, so they were basically homeless, but they don't fit the homeless description of the federal government. That's another challenge that this community has.
So just keeping those lines of information loud and clear in their language. If this is happening to you, these are the places where you can find all these resources. I think it's important.
Mathieu: You used the term "emotional stimulus" a little while ago. I like that. I haven't heard that yet, and I think I know what you mean by it.
Trujilo: Yeah, I'm supportive of our doctors [and] people in medical fields that they receive 100 percent of emotional support through these very challenging times. But I think that there are other essentials. Actually, The Daily Item recently had a first page talking about the other essentials — the mail carriers, the people in the front lines of our kitchens preparing our meals [and] people that are keeping our spaces clean. We don't have little cartels outside of our window saying "thank you for the services you do."
So, yeah, they're out there, they're exposing their lives as doctors are doing, yet we're not emotionally supporting them at the same rate. Also, some of these workers are not getting financially compensated anything else than they are while they're performing their job. So it's interesting how it's like the tale of two cities, basically.
