Whether starting a new business, looking for work or just getting around town, it can be hard to make one’s way in a community where the principal language is not one’s own.

The La Plata Food Equity Coalition is addressing language barriers in Durango and La Plata County by making a network of interpreters available for hire by people, businesses and organizations with 19 interpreters already listed, listening and speaking for clients.

The Coalition’s Community Language Research Group has been working over the past year to find up-and-coming community members, train them and get them established as bona fide interpreters.

La Plata Food Equity Coalition Language Justice Coordinator Olivia de Pablo said language justice is a fundamental human right.

Anybody is welcome to join the group.

Coalition volunteer Tomas German-Palacios said training for 31 interpreters kicked off in 2023 with help from Denver-based Community Language Cooperative founders Indira Guzman and Rosa Guzman-Snyder, and more training sessions followed.

This year, interpretation training will continue in addition to professional coaching for the interpreters so they can help their burgeoning businesses thrive.

“There’s no entity that really houses interpreters to do that work – in other words as employees – so each and every single one of them are independent contractors,” German-Palacios said.

He described the training for interpreters as focused on “acute and community interpretation.” The interpreters can attend a wide variety of community meetings and situations where non-English speakers need access to resources.

Resident Lisa Rogers is a member of the Community Language Research Group’s steering committee, an interpreter for Manna soup kitchen and an independent interpreter on the side.

She said training emphasized the opportunities for interpretation work and the opportunities for non-English speakers who receive interpreter services.

She said when people don’t speak the principal language, their voices can’t be heard. Interpreter services give non-English speakers a voice in Durango and La Plata County and “they can be a part of everything we’re doing here.”

Rogers has helped a recent client, Iris De La Cruz, attend immigration appointments and several dentist appointments, including for her son.

Cruz, who spoke in Spanish to The Durango Herald with the help of Rogers’ interpretation, met with Rogers on Thursday. She said her son has a bad infection in his mouth, and Rogers was translating a document the dentist gave her after her son’s last appointment.

“They’re gonna go pull two teeth out,” she said. “So this document is in English and I needed somebody to translate that to me in Spanish and say all the procedures that I need to follow to prepare my son for the surgery.”

Cruz said people who enter the country and don’t speak English can feel alone. They have needs, but they don’t know how to find them, who to ask or how to ask for help.

Speaking to Rogers, Cruz said, “When I found you and you started helping me I was like, I feel like God sent me people like you and he’s gonna send other people like you to be there.”

Rogers, smiling, said, “That’s why I feel so good and so energetic every day. Because all these people send me like the best vibes ever.”

Heleny Zacamolpa Vazquez is another interpreter who graduated from the language justice group’s training and certificate program. She provides part-time interpreter services for In the Weeds, a workers advocacy group for the hospitality industry, and occasionally for other nonprofits as needed.

She has spoken English and Spanish since she was about 3 years old and has always interpreted for her family and friends.

The Community Language Research Group “opened a lot of doors” for her. The training and certificate program was free of charge and the group lends out interpretation equipment such as microphones and bluetooth headphones for free, making the services equitably accessible to everyone.

Access to medical care is what comes to mind when Vazquez thinks of language justice barriers in the greater Durango area. She said Spanish speakers aren’t always taken seriously when they are struggling to explain their symptoms to medical professionals.

That makes it intimidating for a Spanish speaker to ask a doctor follow-up questions because they feel like they aren’t being understood. That’s concerning to Vasquez, whose own family member needs a lot of medical care, she said.

She’s a 22-year-old college student, and in situations where she’s trying to interpret for her family, she sometimes feels like she isn’t taken seriously because of her age, she said. But with interpreter training, she feels more confident in her speaking abilities and that she is taken seriously.

“It’s been very empowering,” she said. “It’s opened a lot of opportunities for me. And it’s made the community feel more empowered to have people that speak your language and look like you. It’s made a big difference.”

She said interpreter services may have been around before now, but the language justice group’s work has made it more prevalent and has made the community more inclusive toward Spanish speakers. She often hears relief from clients who tell her, “Finally, somebody that can understand my worries.”

“At the end of the day, it’s about that impact and that relief on somebody’s face” that someone is able to get help when before, they wouldn’t have even bothered, Vasquez said.

German-Palacio said the Community Language Research Group aims to put together a case study or studies to prove interpreter training is worth funding in La Plata County. It identified the Durango Public Library as one organization to work with, and the Adult Education Center could be another.

Library Director Luke Alvey-Henderson said he joined the language justice group several months after he started his job at the library in 2022. The library hosted an interpreter training session and several language justice workshops last year that were attended by some library staff members.

The library also formed a four-member language justice team that meets monthly to discuss technical details such as language software and hardware and changes to library programs so “we can help quickly operationalize any of the things that come from the language justice work group or other things we see out in the community,” he said.

Last year, the library purchased two headsets which will soon be cataloged for checkout when a group checks out a meeting room for use, ensuring hardware is in place for events requiring simultaneous interpretation services.

Furthering language justice awareness and how to adopt language justice into operations is a goal in the library’s strategic plan, which lays out goals and objectives for the next three years. The overall theme of the three-year plan is to better serve the underserved, of which monolingual, non-English speakers are a large group.

The Coalition’s language justice group and Durango Public Library are considering a collaboration on a complete language justice audit of the library. The audit would examine the library building’s signage and access points to determine if they are welcoming and informative to the Spanish language community.

“People being able to speak the language of their heart, you can literally see the difference it makes,” Alvey-Henderson said.

Being able to talk to a library staff member who speaks Spanish can make a difference in someone’s decision to return to the library or not, he said.

“They’re going to have more full offerings of our collection, our reference services, our technology services and our programming because of that one positive experience,” he said.

It’s important to promote multilingual spaces where people “be able to speak the language of the heart and eliminate the barriers so everybody can feel welcome,” de Pablo said.

“Together we can build healthier communities,” she said.

The full resource list of interpreters is available at goodfoodcollective.org/interpreter-list

cburney@durangoherald.com