Brenda Sánchez joined the Southeast Arizona Health Education Center in Nogales as an undergraduate intern. She went straight to work on a project that was close to her heart: helping community health workers support farmworkers in Arizona’s borderland communities.
That was 2018. Sánchez helped develop the Agua Limpia Health Curriculum, a training for community health workers to address water quality in a local Cochise County farmworker community. It not only addressed the systemic issues around clean drinking water, but also gave people tools like water filters to get access to cleaner water immediately.
Seven years later, Sánchez is still focused on healthcare access for farmworkers.
Now she’s doing that work as the executive director of the center, commonly known as SEAHEC. The organization serves rural communities in Pima, Santa Cruz, Cochise, Graham and Greenlee counties, with specialized outreach to Spanish- speaking populations.
As the Trump administration has launched a wide-net deportation crackdown, as well as unprecedented cuts to federal funding, many of the rural borderlands communities that Sánchez serves are facing devastating hardships.
Arizona Luminaria spoke with Sánchez to learn how the center’s work has changed under the new administration, the important role of community health workers in times of uncertainty and what continues to give her hope.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Q. What is the role community health workers, or promotoras, play in this environment of increased fear and distrust? (Promotoras are community members who receive specialized training to provide health education.)
A. Community health workers are and will continue to be the trusted messenger in the community. Because community health workers are embedded in the communities they serve, they understand the needs of that specific community at such a different level, and it’s more personal. At SEAHEC, our community health workers really are the ones who are coming to me to tell me: this is what our communities need.
In Greenlee counties, we’re finding that some folks weren’t accessing nutrition services like food banks because there was a fear. So we were talking with community members, the community health workers were able to pinpoint the fear, which was about immigration status, people hearing on the news that they’re now targeted. They’re staying in their homes.
So we started to provide constitutional rights trainings to anyone, doesn’t matter what your status is. Everyone in the US has constitutional rights.
We’ve had really good turnout. And it’s because community health workers are trusted members of the community. Even though there’s a fear, because it’s this community health worker who is inviting them, people trust them.
Q. What has changed since the new Trump administration took office?
A. There have been funding cuts, and that has drastically impacted the work that we are able to do. SEAHEC had a migrant program to address healthcare needs and health coordination for newly arrived asylum-seekers for four years. From one day to the other, we found out that that was closing. You can’t really run a program if there’s no space or people to serve.
So we had to shift. We still are providing services to our migrant population, either newly arrived or have been here for over 10, 15, 30 years, but it just looks different now. It’s more in the context of the migrants within our general population.
The other reality is that the words that we are allowed to use now are also censored and filtered. If there’s certain words or populations we say we’re serving, there’s a possibility we will be flagged, and then it could be that we stop getting funded. In a lot of public health agencies, we’re having to shift the way we talk about the work that we do, so that has directly impacted the amount of outreach that we’re able to do.
SEAHEC has been around for 40 years, so our collaborations are well rooted. Our communities are hurting right now, there’s a lot of fear and misinformation. Working together, there’s consensus: one agency can’t do it, but together, collaboratively, we can. We’re all in it together because we’re all serving the same population and trying to make our communities healthier.
Q. Can you talk about the mental health impacts of this moment on your team?
A. It’s definitely taken a toll on our team. The reality is that we don’t know what funding is going to get cut next. There’s this uncertainty of: what happens if my grant is cut? Am I now going to be unemployed? And if I’m unemployed, then where am I going to go look for a job If all the other agencies are also having budget cuts and they’re not hiring or they have hiring freezes?
Also, there is secondhand trauma from community members who are coming to them with all these real life experiences that they’ve had over the past few weeks. Community health workers are trying to connect them to resources that just don’t exist, and are having to break that news to them of ‘yes, you do need this, but I very much can’t connect you to that.’ That takes a toll on them: they’re burning out.
Q. What makes you feel hopeful as you continue to do your work?
A. Maybe a few months ago, we were able to serve 400 people a month, and right now we’re only able to serve 100 people a month. It could be worse. It could be that we’re not serving anyone because we had to close. So is 100 people a lot less than 400? Yes, but it’s still 100 people that are getting resources that otherwise they wouldn’t be getting.
I’m hopeful that this is just a bump, and that in the next few months, things will start to go to its new normal, and we are able to continue to expand our services and provide more resources to community members, and that these resources will continue to exist in some capacity.
That’s something that our communities teach us also: they teach us resilience, that they’re able to navigate so much uncertainty, and they still have a smile on their face, they’re still taking their kids to the park. They’re still having fun and just being human.
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