Speakers urge cooperation for Latino health

Hopkins faculty and visiting experts from across the country came together at Mason Hall on Saturday as part of a Program of Latin American Studies conference titled Shifting Portrait: Latinos, Public Health, Inequality.

The conference, which was organized by Political Science Professor Michael Hanchard, focused on the issues of public health and health policy in Latino communities across the United States, as well as in the Baltimore community in particular.

One of Hanchard’s goals for the conference was to bring together specialists from different areas of policy, sociology, medicine and grassroots activism.

“One of the things about Hopkins as an institution is that you often have very talented people working in disparate areas of the university who often don’t talk to each other because they’re on a different campus or in a different department,” Hanchard said.

This conference featured a diverse set of speakers and topics. Discussion topics included the affects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on Latino communities, the varying legal and de facto classifications of Latino ethnicities, medical issues that are endemic to Latino populations, barriers to healthcare access for Latinos in poor communities and local and national efforts to combat these inequalities in both urban and rural settings.

The opening speaker was Edward Telles, a Sociology Professor from Princeton University. Telles’s research deals extensively with issues of race, immigration and inequality in both Latin America and the Latino community in the United States.

Other lecturers included professors from Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland, College Park, Lehman College in the City University of New York and the Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Francisco campuses of the University of California (UC). Organizers from local activist organizations also spoke at the conference.

Hopkins Professor Thomas Laveist spoke about the complications involved in racial self-identification and terminology for different Latino minority groups and related his quantitative research to his personal experience growing up in a mixed-race family. Laveist is the William C. and Nancy F. Richardson Professor in Health Policy, as well as the Director of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Another speaker, Liliana Osorio from UC Berkeley also spoke about the implications of the ACA on Latino communities. Osorio is the Border Region Coordinator for the Health Initiative of the Americas at the School of Public Health at Berkeley.

Osorio said although millions of Latinos across the nation have become eligible for health insurance under the new exchanges, there are still many barriers to healthcare access for the Latino community.

“One of the big issues is preventative care,” Osorio said. “Before the Affordable Care Act, it was ‘Wait until the people get sick and treat them at the hospitals.’”

According to Osorio, in addition to logistical challenges, such as language barriers, computer-based enrollment procedures and a lack of health insurance literacy, there is a five-year waiting period in most states before lawful immigrants are permitted to sign up for coverage.

Osorio also said that there are  still gaps in coverage for many Latinos, especially in states that declined to expand Medicaid under the ACA, a condition which the ACA assumed. In this Medicaid gap, many people find themselves above the income threshold for Medicaid in their state, but below the income threshold for federal marketplace subsidies.

Osorio also mentioned that some families are afraid to sign up for care and share their information with the government. in case it may be used in immigration proceedings. Undocumented immigrants, including families of mixed-immigration status in which one or more member is undocumented, are completely left out of the equation.

One of the local outreach organizations represented at the conference was Casa de Maryland, a nonprofit organization providing support and advocacy to immigrant populations in Maryland.

Elizabeth Alex, the Baltimore Lead Organizer for Casa de Maryland, spoke about the work that her organization does and its interaction with university researchers, including a recent project for which workers participated in a research study as co-authors while engaging in peer education about workplace hazards and occupational safety.

“Community members [are not] research subjects but rather active participants in a joint research process,” Alex said. “There have been a couple of good examples where we have worked with Hopkins faculty to do that kind of proactive research.”

Alex also said that the conference helped unite academics and social organizers working to improve the health and well-being of the Latino population.

“The overall tone of the conference was really helpful and positive,” Alex said. “The more we push our institutions to engage in real, meaningful community work, and particularly to engage in work that brings the Latino and African-American communities together, the better.”

Hanchard said that issues of racial categorization in relation to the term “Hispanic” inspired him to organize the conference.

“People often tend to think about these categories — the way that we or governments name people — as these sort of timeless, enduring things, and they’re often the product of  political or social struggle,” Hanchard said. “One of the dangers in identifying and using categorization is that we tend, then, to naturalize the categories and think that when we talk about Latinos or Hispanics were talking about some undifferentiated mass, and in fact were often talking about quite a diverse population.”