Plan B: Recruiting Latino Immigrants for a Qualitative Study… From Home

by Fabiola Perez-Lua, Public Health Doctoral Student, UC Merced

I joined the COVID-19 and Latino Immigrants in Rural California (CLIMA) Study in the summer of 2020 and I was ready to leverage my background as a young, Latina student, born and raised in the Central Valley, to recruit Latino immigrants living in Tulare and Merced Counties for this important study. I had been away from the community for seven years, but people knew me, and I knew where to go to find them. I imagined myself posting CLIMA Study flyers in laundromats as children ran around behind me, or being greeted by the sweet smell of pan as I entered the panadería with a recruitment flyer for the señora in the apron behind the glass counter that housed colorful arrays of pan dulce. I made lists of the places I would go – Orosi, Lindsey, Exeter, Selma – the places where I had spent my weekends as a teenager working with my dad, sipping a warm cup of coffee, and conversing with the vendor next door. My dad, excited to have me back in town, would offer to visit farmworker friends and tell them about our study. Nostalgia and excitement filled me as I imagined the conversations in my head:

“Haven’t seen you around?”

“Just moved back… working on this study…”

Solo dame el número para llamar, mija. Nosotros te ayudamos con tus entrevistas...” (“Just give me the number to call, sweetheart. We will help you with your interviews…”)

Then, Governor Newsom announced the stay-at-home order. Flea markets closed. Grocery stores flooded with panicked people. Breaking news headlined every channel on TV. Schools closed, one after another, like falling dominos. In-person contact suddenly became a near-death experience.

“Novel virus!”

“Six feet apart!”

“Wear a mask!”

“Work from home if you can!”

Work from home. Suddenly I had to work from my small apartment in Merced, where the only social interaction I was allowed to participate in was through a screen. It was in this virtual space where our CLIMA research team began to design a “Plan B Recruitment Plan.” It was a recruitment plan that did not involve posting flyers in laundromats, going to the panadería to advertise the study, stopping by vineyards, or recruiting old vendor-friends at the flea market. Plan B was outlined as follows:

  • Step 1: Identify local and national organizations that serve your study population

Google search local and national immigrant-serving organizations. Create an Excel sheet that lists the names and information of these immigrant-serving organizations and any others you know of or have worked with in the past.

  • Step 2: Contact organizations

Decorate your excel sheets with bright colors that keep track of who needs to be contacted (red), who has been contacted but hasn’t responded (yellow), and who has provided numbers of individuals who are interested in becoming participants (green). Make a total of three attempts to reach each organization: the first attempt should introduce the study and ask for their assistance with the recruitment process. The two follow-up emails (or calls) should be sent a few days apart as reminders. Don’t worry if organizations don’t get back to you – it’s a pandemic!

  • Step 3: Contact individuals

Compile a second excel sheet that includes the names and numbers of individuals who are referred to you by the organizations who are assisting with the remote recruitment process. Decorate this sheet with colors indicating who needs to be contacted (red), who has been contacted but hasn’t responded (yellow), and who is scheduled for an interview (green).

  • Step 4: Snowball sampling

Before the interview ends, ask the participant to refer you to other individuals they may know who may also be interested in participating in the study. They may distribute your name and number to friends and family.

The plan was simple enough. But the execution? That was a whole different story. Immigrant-serving organizations were busy functioning above capacity to support their communities during these difficult times. Reaching Latino immigrants by phone was challenging; folks worked long hours, many were taking care of children at home, and phone numbers changed often. On top of that, voicemails weren’t always set up and calls dropped in the middle of conversations. These were just a few of the issues we were experiencing with “remote recruitment.” I so badly wanted to drive down to Lindsay and stand outside of the Mercado Sol del Valle and talk to people. I wanted them to see my face, to trust that I was a young student, an aspiring researcher, born-and-raised in the community and interested in supporting Latino immigrant health. But instead, I was a “researcher at the university who will give you a call with information about the study.”

So, how did we adapt? With patience, outreach, and trust. We made peace with the fact that the recruitment process was going to be slower than expected. Rather than occupy our minds with worries about the project timeline, we used the time to reach out to community leaders in our region and develop trusting relationships. These new relationships led to the creation of a Community Advisory Board that brought diverse perspectives about the various issues that faced immigrants in the community as we conducted interviews and gathered qualitative data. Together, we produced a policy brief with our findings and disseminated it to a far wider audience than we could have reached alone. The need to adapt to a new research environment under COVID-19 highlighted the importance of community engagement and collaborative approaches to research that acknowledge and employ the expertise of community leaders. We are continuing to stay connected with, and expand, our new network of advocates to support Latino immigrant health. While it was unfortunate that my first year as a graduate student researcher experience did not unfold as I had imagined it, I have learned to adapt quickly, build community in the face of disaster, and reach rural Latino immigrants in innovative ways that will only enhance my ability to conduct Latino immigrant health research in the future.

Ripe for Change: Adaptation, Care, and Environmental Studies

By Shiloh Green Soto, Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Student at UC Merced                                                 

I’ve experienced a deep bout of imposter syndrome since the first day of graduate school, and this largely has to do with the fact that I’m a first-generation college student from a working-class family attempting to exist in the academy’s definitively not-first-generation, affluent environment. Unlike many in the academy, I don’t have relatives to teach me the etiquette for how to speak or do academe, so I’ve largely relied on generous intel from other working-class graduate students who have paved the way. Yet, my anxiety about being found out as a fraud led me to overcompensate in my efforts to be the graduate student I thought I was expected to be. I applied to too many conferences and overtheorized my project which led to a state of early burn out because I didn’t know enough about the academy to be able to gauge what level of effort was enough. As a result, I spent too much time trying to form my project into something I thought would be impressive to colleagues, faculty members, and future hiring committees. My personal goals collided and conflated with objectives I thought I was expected to own.

Then 2020 happened. My students suddenly experienced loss of family members, and other students had to single-handedly financially support their chronically ill parents. Some students dropped out of school entirely because it was all too much to handle. Cities, near and far, urban and rural, erupted in agony over the murders of George Floyd and numerous Black and Brown folks. People took to the streets in a stand against white supremacy, racial capitalism, and police brutality, with Black women and femmes largely at the helm. The West Coast was on fire for several months, producing the most expansive wildfires in multiple state’s histories. At the same time, folks campaigned to turn out the vote for a renewed chance at democracy. 2020, in sum, was a chaotic, anxiety-inducing, never-ending rollercoaster.

I spent quite a few feeble months struggling to cope with what felt like a crumbling society. At the same time, I knew deep down this moment shouldn’t be wasted—that these months of “down time” could be put to good use. In addition, I possess a certain amount of privilege (as a white person, someone with relatively decent health, someone with university support, someone with stable-enough income, and so on) that allows a silver lining in this crisis. Through this recognition, I decided that feeling helpless was no longer an option. If I wanted meaningful change like I claimed, I needed to get to work. Motivated by newfound energy, my outlook was suddenly ripe for change. Inspired by efforts people all over the country made to remedy our collective situations, I harkened back to the environmental justice work of my past.

My undergraduate years were filled with action, care, and community; and fulfillment was a regular reality—one need not search for it. My past activist work and Environmental Studies training enables me to think through the parallels of a larger system that overpowers the environment, People of Color/Indigenous people, poor and working-class people, non-human animals, and so many Others for purposes of capital accumulation. Initially, my dissertation was planned to be a postwar development story of Southern California’s Irvine Ranch region through an examination of immigration law, environmental movement, and policing. Yet to uncover this history, I would need access to Orange County’s archives, most of which remain closed into 2021.

In the wake of the pandemic, as schools, businesses, and archives closed, I reorganized my methods to craft an original project through oral histories, personal archival collections, and digital sources. My dissertation project has also taken on an even greater interdisciplinary approach than previously planned. With creative adjustment in mind due to myriad limitations on traditional historical work, I am punctuating the interdisciplinarity of my project through cultural analysis, political and legal analysis, media analysis, spatial analysis, and oral history methods.

I also expanded the geography of my research to include Northern Orange County as a means to not only compensate for dissertation length, but also because I cannot tell a development story without thinking about its regional costs. To supplement this work, I began volunteering in 2020 with Orange County Environmental Justice (OCEJ), an organization that addresses pollution in Santa Ana’s predominantly low-income Latinx communities. As a member of OCEJ’s Soil Lead Committee, I am working beside local residents, community activists, and UC Irvine researchers to locate sources of soil lead pollution, develop community outreach and education about OCEJ’s findings, and highlight possible routes for remediation. We’re also contextualizing the history of the city’s soil lead pollution through a review of greater Orange County historic development. Predicated on participatory-action research, I get to work alongside OCEJ to better understand environmental pollution in Santa Ana. My work with communities in Santa Ana informs a major portion of my research, especially as it relates to understanding the costs of development in Southern Orange County (Irvine) and its impact on Northern Orange County (Santa Ana).

At this point, as I descend upon exams, I can confidently say I’m glad to be where I am. I’m thankful to get to work with inspiring people and to do a project that means something to both me personally and to other working-class people. It also feels good to have returned to my first true passion: environmental justice. Things have come full circle for me and, though it is unfortunate that it took a crisis to force reflection, I’ve adapted my research plans, cultivated a project of care, and focused on what matters most. This last year was debilitating, but if there’s anything it taught me, it’s that once we do the work that matters, the sooner those echoes of imposter anxiety start to fade. They’ll never fully disappear, but we can learn to turn the volume down, if even for a little.