Adventures in Cultural Competence

After the birth of her baby, Cruz gave a statement to a hospital translator. The translator couldn’t understand her, since Cruz only speaks Chatino, an indigenous language from the state of Oaxaca. So Cruz brought in a relative who speaks Chatino, but the hospital turned down his offer to translate.

The Puerto Rican translator concluded from a statement she could not understand that Chatino was a prostitute (aren’t all immigrant mothers, y’know?) and was planning to give the baby up for adoption. Chatino, meanwhile, was trying to explain that she actually worked at a Chinese restaurant, lived in an apartment, and wanted to keep the baby. The translator’s interpretation gave the MDHS what they needed to take the baby. Allegedly, they colluded with the Tynes and a judge to deny Cruz custody and give the child to the white couple.

It took Cruz a year to regain custody of her daughter, via a lawsuit filed with the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance. She and her daughter are now living in Mexico.

I’d like to see this as one horrific, isolated incident of the state’s supposed “protection” of children gone madly awry, but instead I think the flagrant violation of immigrants’ rights is more of the norm, or is at least a constant threat. TIME documents two more cases of children being taken from indigenous parents who could not speak English or Spanish and were therefore deemed “unfit” to care for their infants. Despairingly, it seems institutionalized racism and the suppression of women’s rights are the default, and more and more immigrant women like Cruz are forced to wage battles like this one to change that.