¿Cómo se dice ‘healing’ en español?
Leticia De los Rios, MSPH | CHC Manager
I’ve always been interested in languages and the power they hold to connect people from different cultures. In 2021, I began work as a Program Manager at IWES for Puentes Para Invitados, a project focused on both the healing and psychosocial well-being of migrant individuals — or guests/invitados — crossing the U.S. southern border, as well as providers serving migrants and newcomers in border state New Mexico. I had been deeply interested in serving Latino and other cultural and racial diasporas for years and I was excited to finally be able to focus my career on this. Not to mention, I was also happy to be able to utilize my Spanish and travel to New Mexico multiple times a year. However, little did I know, managing this program would uncover a deep-rooted issue, both personally and professionally.
As I initially began to lead and manage the project, I would always come across the word healing. A large component of the project involved narrative change, where we spoke with and documented migrant service providers in New Mexico and heard about their work, their experiences, and learned how they would define “healing.” In preparation of our first New Mexico trip with the team in October 2021, I was attempting to translate the questions we created to guide conversations with folks. “How would you define healing?” was one of them. Translating this seemingly straightforward question posed a challenge for me. I quickly realized I was unaware of the direct equivalent for it in Spanish. I felt a sense of frustration as I battled between “curación” and “sanación,” but neither felt truly right because I had no previous experience talking about mental health or healing with family members, colleagues, or bilingual health professionals.
I grew up in a Peruvian household where conversations about mental health were seldom heard. As in many households growing up in the 90s or early 2000s, it was often believed that mental health struggles were a sign of weakness, and even worse, complaining about it could be seen as a sign of selfishness. This stigma surrounding mental health is not something new among the Latino community, or various other communities for that matter. This stigma, however, creates a barrier for individuals to seek help or talk openly about their emotional and mental well-being, leaving it to manifest within the body.
Determined to find the correct term, I decided to ask other Spanish-speaking colleagues of mine at IWES. They were also unsure. In one particular conversation with a colleague, we ended up discussing how, to this day, mental health rarely gets spoken about in her Dominican family. We shared similar stories of our own struggles around this topic within our families and how many of our family members choose to bear their burdens silently, as they would consider it “a part of life.” This silence includes (but is not limited to) the range of traumatic experiences that may lead to mental health conditions in the Latino community such as immigration, acculturation, familial obligations and duties, belonging, language barriers, poverty, and generational conflicts. Physically, we know traumatic stress manifests in the body by weakening and compromising the immune system, causing fatigue and creating stress-related illness and disease. While these struggles are indeed not unique to an immigrant navigating life in the United States, my colleague and I noted that this silence was adopted by most in our communities, especially our elders. My search to find the correct term was not solely about translation for my job – it was systemic and opened up a deeper discussion.
The goal of Puentes Para Invitados is to support the creation of an asylee ecosystem in New Mexico that builds on local assets and expands the infrastructure for Trauma-Responsive (TR) services to migrant individuals, students, and families. IWES helped to increase the organizational capacity of TR care, as well as support narrative change by creating media pieces to amplify and humanize the untold stories of community members and migrant newcomers crossing into the United States. As Puentes Para Invitados evolves, we shift our focus now on students in Albuquerque, where a large number of newcomer and refugee families resettle and begin new lives. My time spent in New Mexico continues to give me the privilege of learning and understanding how key and irrefutable it is that services need to be culturally-affirming in order to create meaningful growth and healing, as well as sustainable impact.
While widely adopted, Western mental health concepts and practices may not resonate with diverse cultural perspectives. Mental well-being is culturally nuanced and it is crucial to recognize this when working in public health - especially on a global scale. We must embrace more inclusive approaches when doing this work, allowing the community to lead in order to tailor and appropriate effective support. Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo — only the people save the people. Our communities hold the ability and know what is best in order to heal!
Navigating systemic barriers, particularly in the United States with its historical nativist agendas, can make accessing services or practicing traditional medicine extremely challenging, especially for immigrants. Recognizing that seeking emotional support may not be a priority when basic needs are not being met, I feel a deep sense of motivation and compassion for my community. I long to find ways to create culturally-affirming bridges between healing, connection, and belonging, and dismantling the social barriers that prevent these. La cultura cura.
My hope is that interventions aim to:
Empower healing within the Latino community through culturally- and linguistically-affirming initiatives;
dismantle the taboo of discussing mental health;
respect and honor the cultural nuances of the Latino experience and embrace the importance of interconnectedness;
advocate for greater access to these services regardless of birthplace, citizenship status, language, sexuality, age, gender, etc.; and lastly,
allow for knowledge-sharing and space for people to understand the systems that impact their livelihoods and well-being — policies, laws, practices, and history — to promote self- and collective advocacy.