2 minute read
Bit for a fortuneteller
LEFT: A Yolo County staff member vaccinates a resident at Madison Migrant Center.
BELOW LEFT: A mother waits with her daughter after being vaccinated at the Madison Migrant Center.
BOTTOM: A family of farmworkers display their COVID vaccination cards at Durst Farms.
antonio De loera-brust/ Courtesy pHotos
Antonio De Loera-Brust
FRIDAY, JULY 2, 2021PROGRESS: Anger driven by entitlement
From Page C8
county health workers were back in Davis to finish the tests.
“The county responded to that pressure and devoted resources,” De Loera-Brust said. “I don’t think we went back out to Knights Landing for another two weeks.”
The episode illustrated a self-perpetuating cycle, he said. “People who government serves get angry when they aren’t served because they feel entitled to it.” Meanwhile, for the people in Knights Landing, “no one had any expectation that the government would serve them because it never had.”
What he hoped to achieve working for the county, De Loera-Brust said, was to “create an expectation within government and within the Latino community that this was our government, too.” The pandemic provided plenty of opportunities, with much of the response falling to local government to deliver. “This was local government’s finest hour,” De Loera-Brust said. “The county invented a social safety net out of scratch.”
All of these efforts led up to the distribution of vaccines. Before long — and while farmworkers in many other counties continued to wait — Yolo County heeded the calls to prioritize vaccinating farmworkers. De Loera-Brust helped coordinate a campaign to overcome barriers — a digital divide, language barriers, limited transportation, long work hours — and get farmworkers vaccinated.
Day after day, the Yolo County team went out to fields around the county to vaccinate workers. “We were out there sometimes in the rain and mud,” De Loera-Brust said. He estimates that more than 80 percent of the county’s farmworkers are now vaccinated, enough to reach herd immunity. He’s sure that the effort prevented outbreaks.
“It’s the thing in my life that I’m most proud of,” he said. “I felt we owed it to them to have them go first for once. Because we did that, I think this year’s harvest will be less painful than last year’s.”
Yolo County should be proud of the vaccination campaign, De Loera-Brust said, but after the pandemic it shouldn’t settle back in to business as usual. “Do we go back to how it was or do we take the opportunity to build a society that works for everyone?”
The lessons learned in Yolo County about building an inclusive society can also be applied across the country. “Out of this national trauma comes a new narrative of who we can be,” De Loera-Brust said.
