Interpreters Give Voice to the Indigenous

For nearly two months, strawberry picker Pablo Cruz stewed in a Santa Barbara County jail, accused of felony drunk driving but unable to have his day in court because no one could speak his language.

The 20-year-old laborer, a Zapotec Indian from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, speaks an obscure, pre-Columbian tongue foreign to most other Mexicans. The language is so obscure, in fact, that it took court officials weeks just to track down an interpreter who could adequately explain the charges against him.

“It can be very difficult at times,” said Virginia Martinez, assistant coordinator for interpreter services at the Santa Maria courthouse. Several times a month, she arranges translation for immigrants who speak any of the more than 60 Indian languages rooted in rural Mexico.

“When I started back in 1987, there was never a need for anything other than Spanish,” she said. “We’re definitely seeing an increase in these cases.”

Santa Maria is not alone. Across California, courts are scrambling to keep pace with the rising number of native peoples from Mexico and farther south who are finding their way into the criminal justice system as defendants, victims and witnesses.

The need is evident from urban courthouses in Los Angeles to rural outposts in the Central Valley, places that have absorbed waves of Mexican Indians fluent in neither English nor Spanish. Over the last decade, costs have increased tenfold for providing court interpreters who speak such indigenous tongues as Mixteco, Trique and Nahuatl, according to the Judicial Council of California.

The migration has spurred efforts to find and train new interpreters, including an ongoing push by the Judicial Council to boost recruitment of those who speak indigenous languages.

And it has forged a small, loose-knit corps of indigenous-language interpreters who travel throughout the state, plugging the translation gaps.

Mixteco interpreter Jose Gonzalez, 37, drives regularly from his home in Oceanside, in San Diego County, to criminal and civil courts in Los Angeles and Santa Ana. He got his start more than a decade ago, volunteering to translate for his countrymen at the Internal Revenue Service. Now he goes wherever he’s called, having received training from a Fresno-based indigenous support group.

“Wherever you see large numbers of indigenous people, you will see a growing need for these services,” he said.

Although hard numbers are difficult to come by, social scientists estimate that California now has at least 200,000 Mexican Indians, driven north by poverty in their country’s southern states, such as Oaxaca and Chiapas.

An undetermined number wind up in the court system each year, advocates say, where judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys too often assume they speak Spanish and assign Spanish-language interpreters.

In fact, many speak little or no Spanish. And their principal tongues, which predate the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, bear little resemblance to that language.

Making matters worse is that most are poor, lack education and have no understanding of the court system, making it difficult for them to comprehend court proceedings or mount a defense.

“When these indigenous migrants come and they get into trouble, the whole system set up for bilingual people fails them,” said Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, a former USC professor who recently co-wrote a book on the indigenous in the United States.

“They don’t even have terms like ‘trial’ or know what posting bail means,” he said. “That’s why it’s critical to have someone who can explain those concepts.”

Responding to the need, groups including California Rural Legal Assistance and the Indigenous Oaxacan Binational Front have launched campaigns to provide interpretation in words that the indigenous can understand. The groups have helped hold training, and the binational front maintains a Web page listing interpreters who speak various indigenous languages.

Jeff Ponting, director of California Rural Legal Assistance’s Indigenous Farm Worker Project, said government agencies also have a responsibility to provide translation services.

“They should be looking at high school graduates, community college graduates or even on state college and UC campuses for candidates,” he said. “There’s an existing need, and it’s only going to become greater.”

Mixteco interpreter Teresa Ramos can attest to that. Since becoming a full-time interpreter in 1996, the 37-year-old mother of three has regularly traveled hundreds of miles a week from Fresno to meet the demand. In a recent two-week period, she drove to Sacramento for a manslaughter case, to Santa Cruz for a domestic violence case and to Madera for a case alleging attempted murder.

Like others, she got her start by volunteering to translate for people having difficulty maneuvering through the court system.

Ramos said she is aware that some people grumble about the expense of providing translation services to immigrants, many of whom could be here illegally. But she is quick to point out that the concept of interpreter service in the courts is constitutionally guaranteed.

“Everybody has a right to a fair hearing and a right to have an interpreter in his or her own language,” she said. “People have a right to defend themselves.”

Ramos is among a dozen indigenous-language interpreters who work steadily at the courthouse in Santa Maria, one of the primary destination points in California for Mexican Indians. More than 10,000 of the immigrants are now thought to live and work in and around the agricultural community, drawn by a booming strawberry harvest and other farm work.

The migration has produced a natural flow to all public agencies. For years, court officials have been building a small network of interpreters for some of the more common languages, such as Mixteco and Zapoteco, and some rarer ones, such as Chatino and Amuzgo.

But when it came to Pablo Cruz, court officials were faced with a puzzle they could not easily solve.

Jailed Aug. 22 on suspicion of felony drunk driving and a hit and run causing injury, Cruz was initially mistaken for a Mixtec Indian until further investigation revealed that he spoke a variation of Zapoteco common in the central valleys of his home state of Oaxaca.

Court officials used Cruz’s brother to help translate once and postponed hearings in his case three times as California Rural Legal Assistance, the Mexican consulate’s office in Oxnard and others tried to track down an interpreter who could help.

One was finally found in Westminster a few weeks ago and on Friday the case had a full hearing. In a plea deal, Cruz pleaded no contest to two misdemeanor charges and received a 90-day sentence. With time served and credit for good behavior, that left about three weeks of time still to serve.

Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Sidney Weiser said afterward that delays in the proceeding did not result in Cruz spending “one extra minute” behind bars, given the gravity of the charges. He said the case demonstrates the language issues now facing the Santa Maria courts -- and the lengths to which court officials will go to ensure due process.

“Some of these languages are very obscure,” he said. “But they are trying really hard to make sure that people who speak these languages have the same rights afforded to them as everyone else.”