Hispanic Heritage of Promotoras Continues to be Strength of Cooperative Extension
Felicita Franco offered wraparound services before the label was popularized.
Community health workers, known as promotoras, have been an important part of The University of Arizona and Cooperative Extension since the 1960s. The promotora model was imported from Latin America, where it originated in the 1950s.
We sat down with Betty Villegas, current Executive Director of South Tucson Housing Authority and former District 5 Supervisor on the Pima County Board of Supervisors, to talk about her aunt, Felicita Olguin, who worked as a promotora in Tucson who worked as a promotora in Tucson in the 1970s.
Felicita Olguin, also known as Felicita or Alicia Franco, was a rebel and a trailblazer in her own way, according to Villegas. After her divorce in the late 1960s, she found herself a single mother of two with no previous professional experience. Her case worker at the Arizona Department of Economic Security helped her connect with Cooperative Extension, where she applied for a job as a promotora--her first and last paid position.
As a promotora, Felicita traveled from household to household, meeting people where they are--at home, and speaking their language; in this case, Spanish--to help low-income families improve their nutrition. “She would talk to them about nutrition and about healthy eating and why it was so important to eat all the food groups in a balanced way, the pyramid and the whole thing,” Villegas recalls.
Villegas remembers her aunt Felicita’s story with fondness, and credits her as a major force in inspiring her to become one of Pima County’s most recognized public servants, “She really made an impact on people's lives, and I look back and I think well, maybe that's where I got it, my community-mindedness.”
Felicita often worked with families who lived in La Reforma, a 160-unit federal low-income housing project which once stood where Drachman Elementary School and Santa Rosa Park are now. While she started visiting households by bus, her boss soon required her to use a car to get around more efficiently. There was only one problem; Felicita did not know how to drive. But that did not stop her. She embarked on a journey to learn how to drive and kept her job.
“Some of the stories about her driving are hilarious,” Villegas confides.
Felicita taught many people how to adjust their recipes for more healthful nutrition. Helping people with healthy eating was her passion, but in the process, Felicita would also discover that people urgently needed help with other aspects of their lives, such as overcoming language barriers with medical professionals. She often accompanied people to their doctor’s appointments before hospital and clinic interpreters were more commonly available. At times she learned about other family struggles, such as domestic violence, and helped connect people with life-saving resources. “When she helped people with so much more than nutrition, that’s when I started to become aware of the importance of wraparound services,” Villegas recounts.
Today, Cooperative Extension continues to explore wraparound initiatives, such as the existing 4-H Healthy Living Ambassadors and the new Juntos 4-H program, expected to launch in Arizona this coming Spring. In other states, Juntos 4-H has already proven to be a very successful Latinx-specific program for developing young leaders. The program helps the entire family get more involved with their students’ academic success.
Assistant Extension Specialist and Director of University of Arizona Cooperative Extension’s Diabetes Prevention Program, Vanessa da Silva, describes how Cooperative Extension continues to meet people where they are to help improve their health and nutrition education.
“Today we call people who work in the promotora role Community Health Workers,” says Da Silva--who coincidentally is from the same state in Brazil (Pernambuco) as Paulo Freire--whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed helped launch the model in Latin America in the 1960s. Da Silva asserts, “I still follow this model when we hire people to teach our programs out in the communities today.”
She goes on to say, “We look for people who are part of that community themselves and have walked in those shoes, and struggled with the same challenges--challenges with diabetes and healthy eating, and therefore have that empathy. Because you can train somebody in health and wellness and in how to facilitate groups, but it’s hard to teach empathy.”
Da Silva states that the promotora model is in line with how many Cooperative Extension programs came to be--built on the foundational idea of who we trust. Da Silva explains, “We trust people who are local, who are a part of our community. People from the community can say ‘I know that there’s this school that has a track that’s available and I can meet with participants there to go for a walk.’ Whereas someone who’s not from the community might say ‘Just join a gym,’ not understanding that the community doesn’t have a gym. We’re intentionally looking for people who are themselves underserved and who might have had that background, so that they can go and really, really speak from a place of a place of understanding.”
For more Cooperative Extension resources in Spanish, click here.