Fighting AIDS--in Spanish

As an educator at a drug abuse prevention program, Alma Cervantes would visit Eastside classrooms and facilitate dialogue with a circle of Latina mothers. She spoke passionately about AIDS prevention in a way that addressed everyday issues facing them.

“I was concerned that Latinas were the last to be educated about AIDS,” said Cervantes, who grew up on the Eastside.

That was more than a year ago.

Today those same issues are being discussed in classrooms as far away as New York.

Using situations she witnessed working with Latinas, Cervantes wrote “En Nuestras Manos,” or “In Our Hands,” a bilingual AIDS prevention novela that teachers, high school students, parents and nonprofit groups have embraced as an educational tool.

The novela, a Spanish language narrative with illustrated adventures and soap opera plots, begins with statistics on AIDS in the Latino community followed by a fast-moving drama, with separate sections in English and Spanish.

“The characters were based entirely on parents, educators, and teens I worked with,” said Cervantes, a UC Berkeley graduate student in communications.

The free publication, illustrated by John Godges, is distributed by the Los Angeles Alliance for a Drug Free Community, a federally funded group that offers parenting skills workshops, mostly in the Eastside. About 10,000 copies of the comic book-style novela were published last year by the nonprofit group. Its press run was doubled to meet the requests of educators throughout Los Angeles County and from out of state.

“The novela addresses issues like premarital sex, bisexuality, having multiple partners [or] being married to a drug addict,” said Pedro Carrillo, community relations coordinator of the group.

In 1995, about 900 Latino men and about 100 Latinas were found to have AIDS, according to the Los Angeles County HIV Epidemiology Program. More than half this number of Latinas cited sex with their husbands or boyfriends as their only risk factor of AIDS. The remaining number with AIDS indicated intravenous drug use or unknown risk factors.

During the last five years, the number of reported cases of Latino men has remained stable while the number of Latinas is slowly increasing, said Amy Wohl, epidemiologist at the county program.

“Prevention efforts historically haven’t focused on minorities,” Wohl said. “Prevention messages haven’t been tailored specifically for cultural groups. That’s been changing in more recent years. I think the comic book is a great idea.”

The novela brings the statistics to life.

It deals with AIDS prevention issues in a format that is easy to read and known widely among Latinos, said Kristina Moreno, a parent educator with the nonprofit group. Moreno shared the comic book with 12 Latina mothers at a parenting skills workshop at Marianna Elementary School in City Terrace on Wednesday.

“It uses real-life situations that Latinas have experienced themselves or know someone who has,” Moreno said.

For example, one can read about Sylvia, who discovers her husband, Steve, is bisexual only after following him to a gay bar, or a submissive Julia who thinks she contracted HIV from her husband, John, a drug addict who beats her. Then there’s Alicia, the smart and headstrong one who rejects sex and educates her friends on AIDS/HIV prevention.

“We are at high risk for AIDS not because of our skin color or because we’re promiscuous,” Alicia says to her friends. “Those are just stereotypes. We are at high risk for AIDS because we don’t have control of our bodies or our lives.”

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The situations were all too familiar for one parent at the workshop, who said she had an extramarital affair with a bisexual Latino. The woman, who has two friends who have are HIV-positive, said she is waiting for her own test results.

“I didn’t have information on how to protect myself from AIDS,” the Spanish-speaking woman said. “I’m worried about the Latinas who aren’t educated on how to use condoms . . . risk factors in having unprotected sex. The comic book talks about these things. I like it because it has less pages and is less formal then a textbook.”