Los Angeles Police officers are training to understand that many of the Mexican and Guatemalan migrants who live there do not even speak Spanish: they speak their native languages. Indigenous leaders of these communities in the city are leading this training.
The LAPD police officers, almost half of whom are Latinos, will begin to carry pocket cards written in the indigenous languages spoken in those migrants communities in Los Angeles, so that in any incident they can communicate with those involved and determine if they need an interpreter.
The Inter-American Development Bank published this month a survey of migrants from the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador). The survey, carried out with 2,000 people, found that most of the migrants going to the United States from those countries are “young, single and with a high incidence of indigenous population.
In many cases, the only languages these indigenous migrants speak are the native indigenous ones: in addition to not speaking English, they barely understand Spanish.
” “Unfortunately, we always made the assumption that they were all Mexican, they were all Spanish-speaking and we could get the message to them about building trust, about working with us, in Spanish,” Al Labrada, commander of the South Los Angeles Police Office, told Leila Miller for a LA Times story.
An incident marked a shift in the LAPD perspective about this matter. The change, however, has been progressive.
In September 2010, a LAPD officer shot Guatemalan laborer Manuel Jaminez Xum, 37 years old, who only spoke K’iche’. As Miller recalls in the LA Times report, Jaminez was supposedly drunk and holding a knife. The authorities say the cops repeatedly ordered him to put the knife down, in English and Spanish. Jaminez raised the knife over his head and approached one of the cops, who shot him and killed him. The incident was followed by protests in areas of the city that have a majority of immigrants.
“The fact that Jaminez spoke K’iche’ underscored that there are those in L.A.’s Mexican and Central American immigrant communities who may not be fluent in Spanish,” Miller writes.
A report by Guadalupe Venegas for Telemundo Noticias shows that Guatemalan migrants in the United States speak some 21 indigenous languages, the same languages estimated to be spoken in Guatemala. Mexican migrants, on the other hand, speak most of the nation’s 68 indigenous languages. The sources Venegas uses for this data are the University of Florida and the Mexican Ministry of Culture.
After the shooting of Jaminez, according to the LA Times reporter, activists from Mexico’s indigenous communities in Los Angeles began organizing trainings for the city’s police. They are called cultural awareness trainings.
Odilia Romero, a Oaxacan from the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations, is one of these leaders. She praises that the police will use these cards nine years after the incident.
“If the first responders — like the LAPD, the Fire Department — don’t know that there’s language diversity, that there’s this group of people, then a lot of things get lost. If someone is a victim of domestic violence, of a rape, [the perpetrator] can go free if they don’t have an interpreter,” Romero, also a Zapotec translator, told Leila Miller.
Cultural awareness trainings seek to close that gap in communication and acceptance of the diversity of languages spoken by Central American and Mexican migrants.
” We hadn’t taken the time to identify the key leaders in the community that could help us bridge that gap,” said Al Labrada, commander of the South Los Angeles Police Office, in the LA Times article.
A spokesperson for the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations added in a post on their official Facebook page: “For us it is important to recognize the migration of indigenous peoples as such and stop thinking that we all speak Spanish because we are from Mexico and Guatemala; it is our contribution to the struggle for the defense of the rights of indigenous peoples.”
Guadalupe Venegas interviewed other activists for Telemundo Noticias, who are also interpreters. They told him that government agencies of different kinds are requiring them more and more.
“Inside the hospitals, the courts, because yes, many people speak Spanish, but limitedly,” Janet Martínez, of the organization Indigenous Communities in Leadership, said.
“There is a very strong presence of children and families who speak only one Mayan language in detention centers,” Luis López Reséndiz, another member of the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations, added.
Leila Miller reports that more than 20% of Mexico’s population considers themselves to be indigenous, and that more than 40% of the population in Guatemala is is Mayan. She does not quote the source of these data.
Only the Yucatecans in Mexico, who also speak Mayan languages, cross the border with the United States at a rate of more than a thousand each year. As Guadalupe Sosa and Thelmo Zapata reported for Armando.info in 2017, California is the most frequented destination for these migrants; in many cases the only language they speak is their indigenous language.
Leila Miller consulted Danny Law, a University of Texas linguist who has participated in cultural awareness trainings. Law told Miller that there are 32 variants of Mayan languages, which aren’t are all similar to Spanish. If a police officer doesn’t know this, the gap remains. “Just being aware of that possibility goes a long way,” Law said. “A police officer might get the impression the person they are talking to is being uncooperative intentionally.”
According to the two news reports, Los Angeles police officers will begin carrying the indigenous languages pocket cards later this month. They already use sign language cards.