Mission to Save The Mission

When COVID hit, longtime activist Valerie Tulier-Laiwa knew her neighborhood would be greatly affected. With the help of several childhood friends, she jumped into action to meet the needs of the Latino community and beyond.

Transcript:

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: What you see here are like I said, the manifestations of about three or four of our committees. The Latino Task Force has a range of services that we provide. 

C. Yulin Cruz: T his is Valerie Tulier Laiwa, one of the leaders of the Latino Task Force. During the early days of Covid 19 pandemic, the group came together to provide their community with essential services like testing, vaccines and food. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Everything we see here is related to a hub, so that testing and vaccine hub, food hub, resource hub, which we'll see upstairs.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: That's chef Julio.

C. Yulin Cruz: Valerie took us through the group's headquarters on Alabama Street, in the Mission District of San Francisco. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Here they sort the food. So I wanna be very clear about this. We call this a Mission Food hub. We don't call it a food pantry. We don't call it a food bank, but bless the food pantry and bless the food bank. Nothing's wrong with that, but there's a stigma attached to those words. 

C. Yulin Cruz: Valerie has been serving the Latino community in the Mission for decades. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Go ahead, pick that up. Up. Pick this up. See? 

C. Yulin Cruz: She loves her people and she knows them inside and out. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So we give people culturally appropriate food. We give them arroz, we give them beans and they have a choice too.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: We give three types of beans. Cause not everybody's, not everybody who's Latino is Mexican and eat pinto beans, right? So we offer black beans, red beans, and pinto beans and rice. 

C. Yulin Cruz: She also knows how to get the best out of each one of them. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So the women, it's really funny cuz you have volunteers, they have tables set up and they're, we buy these huge bags of beans and rice and they would bag them.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: And if you try to help them, they'll tell you no, this is my area I'm bagging. And so we say okay. So they take it very serious and many of the people who volunteer at the food hub are actually people who were in our food line for so they became that. So let's come on over here and that's why I say again, is food up.

C. Yulin Cruz: I'm Yulin Cruz. In this episode of Sheroics we are talking with Valerie Tulier Laiwa about what it takes to preserve and protect a community besieged by sickness and hardship. Valerie and the Latino Task Force are showing how deep community roots, organized leadership and love can transform lives and create a platform for support that is more potent and more capable than any governmental agency.

News Clip: The breaking news, stay at home. That is the order tonight from four state governors as the Coronavirus Pandemic spreads. New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut, all ordering non-essential employees to stay home. Those orders cover 75 million people across the United States,

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So I remember March 20. I remember that we had a very abrupt shelter in place order from the mayor of San Francisco. She said, beginning tomorrow, everything shut down. Completely shut down. And I remember where I work at, there was a huge event that was supposed to happen. I'm like, oh my God, can't we just shut down on Monday?

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Can't we just get through this Saturday event? But it was like no.

C. Yulin Cruz: It was soon clear to Valerie and other leaders in San Francisco's mission district that the citywide shutdown was just the beginning. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: The Mission is very strong in terms of, of movements in terms of community organizing around different issues. So we all knew each other. We were all oh, okay, you're handling that, you're handling housing, you're doing this.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: But we all grew up so we all knew each other. What the pandemic did, the shelter in place it immediately, completely like a magnet. We all came together, all of us, and I was on the phone, the very first week of shelter in place with two or three people saying, what are we gonna do?

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: What are we gonna do? We've gotta do something. And we knew instinctively. Intuitively that it was gonna hit Latinos very hard. We just knew it without any data. 

News Clip: New numbers from the State Health Department show Covid 19 is taking a far greater toll on California's Latino population than on any other group. 

C. Yulin Cruz: Across San Francisco, hospitals were filling up with people sick with the coronavirus. The overwhelming majority of them were Latino. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: There is a pattern that happens in poor communities. So you know when something bad happens, it really happens bad to poor communities. Like when 2008, when there was that housing crisis and everything was falling apart who was stuck with all those prime loans or those balloon payment loans?

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: It was Latinos who lost their house. So we just know that. 

C. Yulin Cruz: The city of San Francisco released Valerie from her job at the Public's Utilities Commission and assigned her to be a disaster service worker. She quickly went to work. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So with that permission, I was able to actually coordinate the Latino Task Force, meet with these folks, start these committees, start those committees.

C. Yulin Cruz: The Latino Task Force on Covid 19 was a massive undertaking and it required a special kind of leadership. Luckily the Mission District already had several leaders like Valerie, whose entire lives had prepared them to meet the challenges of that moment.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: My mom, she's Mexican and Apache. She was born in Tejas. But she was such a non-traditional Latina. She was in the Army. She went and she served two terms in the army and and that's where she met my father, Puerto Rican side cuz he was also in the army. So that's how they met and connected.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Otherwise how back in those days, how do you get a Mexican and Puerto Rican together? And I was born in Houston and there's maybe two Puerto Ricans while I was growing up. Maybe, or maybe just one, my dad. So I think that type of upbringing, like having a non-traditional Latina Mexican as a mother really just set me in a different pathway of life.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: What bubbles up in me is really what our ancestors went through. And to be honest with you, I carry an anguish inside of me. But that anguish gets translated into doing good things for the community, advocating for the community, organizing the community. And so that's what moves me. 

C. Yulin Cruz: I often say that I carry with me this incredible need to ease people's pain. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Yes. My mother was a drinker and because she was an alcoholic, it turned me into a caretaker, which is a positive thing it's, to me it's a beautiful thing. 

C. Yulin Cruz: Tell me, When you encountered that need within you, when you realized, you know what I feel alive when I help others feel alive. When I help others to strive and not only survive. When was the first time you noticed that? 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: When I was young, in my twenties, I had a dream and I dreamt that I was going upwards. And in there it was like an arrow. And in that arrow there were people. I didn't know at that time, but that was my future that I would, anytime I would achieve to bring people along, to share, to be about community, to be about others, to understand. And having an alcoholic mother, being that caretaker, it just translated. So I've always been that way. I think even since I was young, I raised my little brother, so it, it's always been there in me. 

C. Yulin Cruz: And that caretaker quality has earned Valerie a fitting nickname in the Mission: Mama Bear. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Before I started working for the city, I worked for nonprofits and I would run youth programs and I would growl I would growl at the staff. Really. And they loved it. They loved it because a lot of them were at risk and they loved the boundaries. And then in addition to that, I would also protect them with a viciousness. I'd advocate for them.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: They were like all my babies, and they felt that. 

C. Yulin Cruz: It's also a mama bear growls to make sure that the cubs move along. It's also an inspiring growl, right? It can be a growl of pay attention. A growl of attention, things must be noticed. Don't do this. But it's also mostly a growl of love.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

C. Yulin Cruz: Valerie moved to San Francisco's Mission District from Texas when she was very young. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: The Mission in San Francisco is a neighborhood. It is a barrio. And the reason why it received that mission is because the Spaniards built a huge church, Mission Dolores, right there on 16th and Dolores. And it was a time when they were colonizing The Ramaytush Ohlone, and I wanna pay respects to the spirits of that land.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: And so it was naturally called the Mission. And also in that particular area, there are several Catholic churches, in that Mission. And the Mission, the barrio is relatively small in terms of geographical size, but it's huge in culture and people and richness. And with the Latino Task Force we have two hubs in the Mission, but we know that not all Latinos live in the Mission anymore. They're pretty much citywide in, in San Francisco. However, they know that the Mission is the home where they can buy their platanos, where they can buy their tortillas, their masa for tamales. They can go there to get services and they can go there to be amongst their culture.

C. Yulin Cruz: After Covid 19 hit, the Mission became the beating heart of an effort to save as many lives as possible.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: The information that was coming from the city at the time was only in English. The information about shelter in place was only on websites, so we're already at a deficit. So one, we're not receiving the messages in Spanish, which the Latino Task Force took it upon themselves to have a communication and outreach committee, so we were trying to educate them.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Stay home, please. Social distance. But the problem with staying home is many of them live in crowded housing or they live in multi-generational housing. So it was a catch 22. We don't want you on the streets. We want you to isolate and stay home. But we also know that maybe home is not the safest place or the place where you can socially distance.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So we were trying to figure out how can we support the Latino community around this. 

C. Yulin Cruz: The Task Force communications team quickly created a user-friendly trilingual website to make sure everyone in the community could get the information they needed. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: There was a one-stop shop where they didn't have to go to this site, that site gathered everything.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: The icons were user-friendly, and it was trilingual. It was in Spanish, Maya, and English, and it wasn't necessarily written material for our Maya population. They're not necessarily literate in Maya, so we would do the videos. And then on top of that, over time when talk about vaccines, we were also combating the misinformation. 

C. Yulin Cruz: And it didn't stop with better communication.

C. Yulin Cruz: The Latino Task Force came up with a strategy and an outreach plan that allowed for widespread covid testing and vaccine shots to be given within the community. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Task Force administered more than 230,000 tests and more than 90,000 vaccine doses. Another key focus of the Task Force's efforts was education. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So all of a sudden, all the schools were shut down. You can't go to school. Okay. In the majority of Latino households, one, they probably don't have wifi cuz they can't afford it. And number two, they most certainly don't have a laptop. And then number three, they most certainly don't have a space that they can call their own, like their own study room or their own bedroom.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So we knew that was gonna impact our kids tremendously. 

C. Yulin Cruz: They also knew that food was going to become a huge problem for many. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So people were losing their jobs, they weren't gonna have access to food or money to buy food. So we started setting up food giveaway. So those were the first three that we saw the immediate need, and then we began to expand up to 13 different committees.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So that's how we did it. 

C. Yulin Cruz: By late April in 2020, the Latino Task Force was handing out more than 7,000 boxes of food each week through efforts of more than 100 volunteers.

C. Yulin Cruz: You know what is amazing? At that same time, I was the mayor of San Juan, and you have described precisely what we did in the city of San Juan. Food was a major thing. The other thing is that for many communities and many families, when children go to public school, they have breakfast and lunch and potentially can take home an additional lunch, which then they will call dinner.

C. Yulin Cruz: Then it's also the issue of domestic violence. It's the young man that is coming out as gay and now has to live in a home with parents that do not love him for who he is. So abuse starts setting in. So it's interesting. I think the one great lesson from Covid is that policies cannot be put in place, divorced from the reality of the way people live, which is what you're describing right now, and it looks like that's exactly what you did.

C. Yulin Cruz: You took into consideration all of the factors that were going to infringe on people's as a ripple. I call them crisis ripple effects, right? There's the initial crisis, which is Covid, and then there's the ripple effects of the crisis, which are health and education and work and housing, and they keep on expanding until it's the perfect storm.

C. Yulin Cruz: You mentioned that you were working with the people that you had grown up with. They knew you. They respected you. You know them. You respect them. How much of that was integral in terms of creating community engagement as a powerful tool for combating the really difficult times that came with Covid.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: It was just, it was synergy and it was a natural fit because people who work in the community, we have shared values of love and so it was not difficult at all to find so many sheroes and heroes that exist and work in our community. It was so easy. It was really a beautiful thing to work with all these people that I grew up with.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: But also the beauty of it is this, because I grew up with them, because I worked in youth development, because I worked many years in nonprofit, they had a respect for me because I had earned that by the way I walked and moved through the community. And because I had that respect, they allowed me to basically boss them around, mama, bear them around.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Organize them, coordinate them, get them together, get them to meetings, get organized. 

C. Yulin Cruz: How did all of that help you? Because community engagement is not easy. There's gotta be trust, there's gotta be common goals, and sometimes you have to make sure that the common goals are there to allow the trust to develop.

C. Yulin Cruz: But you mentioned the word that for us, that Sheroics is really important: love. This is really an act of love. Taking care of each other is an act of love. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: What we did is not just love, it is love for our people. But what I call it is spiritual, not religious, but it's spiritual.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: And I also like to share with people that how we behaved, is very indigenous. So Puerto Ricans who came together to respond to this Covid and to this shelter in place, as you mentioned, the food and all, that is indigenous to Puerto Rico. That is who Puerto Ricans truly are, and I think in your leadership, that is what you were trying to get at, is to honor how Puerto Ricans love each other and care for each other.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: I remember my cousin was telling me that in Caguas that there was a, an extension cord that went out from only one house that had electricity and they had 10 other extension cords connected to that and how they would all cook together. Somebody would bring something here, somebody would bring something there.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: That's in our dna. And that's what happened here. And I wanna say it's indigenous because it's very circular, it's very communal, it's very spiritual. And the most of all is the key word that you said is love. And so I think that there is something that's in our DNA that wants us to behave the way we're supposed to behave before these other systems and bureaucracies are imposed upon our daily lives.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: The generic term or the play out term is colonization, but it is really systems and institutions that are not responsive. And so we had to respond because they're so slow to respond. They're so what I call burro-cratic. 

C. Yulin Cruz: I love that. Burro in Spanish means donkey. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Exactly. That's why I call 'em Burro-crats.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So please, yes. Steal that one. Yes. Take it. Yes, take it and use it. 

C. Yulin Cruz: I'm gonna, I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonna use it. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Please do. They just got in the way, they got in the way of delivering resources to us. And we were just demanding of them, look, just give us what we need.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: We will take care of ourselves. I think that what came out of the pandemic was tragedy. Absolute tragedy. But there was also absolute beauty. Absolute beauty from the community. The love for humanity comes out each in, each and every way. And we have young people, we have monolingual, older ladies, señoras, that work with us, we have everybody in between.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So I just wanna acknowledge the beauty that came out of it. The community wanted to come together. We, I can't tell you how many people wanna volunteer with us. Because the, it, it's pure love, like you said, it's pure love, and that's all they feel. They feel the respect, they feel the dignity, and they feel the humanity that we deliver when we give services.

C. Yulin Cruz: I, I'm just curious as to who is your shero? 

 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: I think that the sheros are the folks that came from the community that willingly stepped up and there's too many to mention. But I will tell you this and I wanna acknowledge this. I wanna acknowledge really where my training came from. And I wanna acknowledge the black community. I wanna acknowledge the Black Panthers. They were a huge influence here on the West Coast. I wanna acknowledge Malcolm X. I wanna acknowledge black leadership because I think that's really important. That's where I get my organizing, that's my way of doing things.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: And there are Latina heroes and sheroes and I'm not going to not acknowledge that. But for me, Valerie, personally, that's where it came from was the black movement. 

C. Yulin Cruz: It means that we can all learn from each other because we share the same struggles. And it is those that do not want us to prosper in our struggles, that want to divide us.

C. Yulin Cruz: Yes. When we unite in an act of love, not only in sharing the struggles, but in sharing the way out of the struggles, love conquers all. And if you look at the black movements and the African American movements, they're also very spiritually based. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: And we're very close with the black community in San Francisco.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So I say that I, I learned from black leadership and I put it into practice. And then because we were so organized in the Mission with the Latino Task Force, we shared our best practices with the black community, with the Pacific Islander community. We shared with other communities of color, said, look, here's our model.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Here's how we organize. Take what you want, leave what you don't need. 

C. Yulin Cruz: Valerie and the Latino Task Force have overcome so much and they continue to face new challenges every single day. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: What I'm afraid of is that the city is gonna go back to business as usual. What I'm concerned about is that there is a surge going right now.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: And I think that there's gonna be variants coming in and I think that businesses, the economy, the people the economy, let me just say people who are running the economy are tired of covid. They're tired of the imposition on them being able to make money. So we're trying to really ramp up and get back into recovery.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: I understand. Like for example, I understand tourism is absolutely crucial to San Francisco as it is to Puerto Rico. It is crucial and I understand that, but I don't want us to think that Covid is in the past. We still have to be in response and recovery and not just cut off the resources that were allocated to, to response and just redirect them only to recovery.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: I think moving forward, it has to be a dual pathway and I don't see that happening, and I'm very concerned. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: All of 

C. Yulin Cruz: the inequalities, inequities, discrimination disparities that somehow the system has been able to sweep under the rug or to smooth out. So all of those things have been brought out by Covid. You're seeing them in a very particular way in the Mission in San Francisco, all over the world, these phenomenon, people all of a sudden are seeing the poverty in their own neighborhoods, which they had not seen before. Poverty is not only people living without a home or being displaced, but people being poor within a structure within a home.

C. Yulin Cruz: So I agree totally with you. I think not only, not only is this not over, but it has given us a renewed opportunity to not turn a blind eye on what needs to structurally change. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: I respect people who are nice. I respect people who wanna work within the system to change things, but that's not me.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: I want people who are gonna change the system, who are gonna challenge the system, who are gonna challenge the status quo at all cost. There are lots of sheroes who are doing the right thing, but they're trying to do it within the system and I think if you do it within the system, then what are you trying to really majorly transform?

C. Yulin Cruz: I'm sure you would say, what I often say, is we do it because it had to be done. 

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. We're obligated. That's our responsibility, not only to our community, but to those who came before us. There are other people who have struggled, but there were times when it was a lot harder for them that they would be jailed, they would be imprisoned or they would be mistreated in a bad way.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So we do it for those. The indigenous way, what you do today impacts seven generations ahead. So our move was for our children and our children's children, and our nieces and nephews. All of the children are nieces and nephews. And it's also to honor those who sacrificed before us, who came before us. And that's why we, like you, we can't close our eyes.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: We can't not do something. I wanna just say that we have a mantra with the Latino Task Force, and that is community led, community driven and community implemented. So that has been our mantra and we will continue to use that and fight the city. And believe me, we have some new fights coming up with the city.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: It has not always been easy. We fought with the Department of Health, we fought with our Covid Command Center. We fought with all the structures that be, and we demanded to be recognized and to do things our way, to give our community what they needed. Now they're trying to act like okay, you're done, COVID is done.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: We 're gonna go back to normal. And so we have some more future fights. It is not over. It's not over.

C. Yulin Cruz: We find sheroes in every community. And I'm sure everyone listening knows one that they can talk about. We want to hear from you. We want you to tell us about those sheroes that change your community every day. Maybe they're not on the six o'clock news, but they should be because they do extraordinary things.

C. Yulin Cruz:: So email us at sheroes at Ozy dot com with your story. Who knows? Maybe their sheroics will be featured on an upcoming episode.

C. Yulin Cruz: Sheroics is an Ozy production. I'm your host, Yulin Cruz. This episode was produced and engineered by Pamela Lorence and written by Sean Braswell. Make sure to follow Sheroics on Apple podcasts and subscribe on Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Resources:

The Latino Task Force Website