Tuesday, Oct. 15, was National Latinx AIDS Awareness Day (NLAAD). The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention ranks Bexar County third in Texas for the highest rates of HIV.
Black Efforts Against the Threat of AIDS (BEAT AIDS) is a nonprofit group in San Antonio that has tried to shine a spotlight on the needs of people living with HIV.
Jose Contreras, the HIV prevention director of BEAT AIDS, explained that “in Bexar County, males have the highest rates for HIV.” He added that “66.7 % [of] people living with HIV identify as Hispanic.”
He said his group is also focused on highlighting the enduring cultural factors that contribute to those numbers.
"A lot of people don't usually have conversations, especially in the Hispanic community," he explained. "We don't have conversations about sexual health, which prolongs people who may not be aware of the facts that are out there [or] the services that could be out there potentially for people who may want to get tested. They are held back because of the social barriers that our own communities put in place — for making a taboo, not making it normalized when we should be having conversations about our sexual health."
Violeta Mitchell, the house supervisor of Newly Empowered Women (NEW), a transitional home for women living with HIV, attributed the county's high statistics to the way some women were raised in the Latinx community.
"We grew up so secluded from hearing these things in our ... Latino homes," she said. "They don't really talk about sex. So you have to find a way how to answer to them. Because even if you have a good way of communication with them, they are going to lock themselves up and [then] they don't want to talk about it."
Mitchell added that the timing of the diagnosis is also a big problem. "So these women," she said, "often experience late stages of diagnosis, which will complicate the treatment for them ... and now they have to find the correct medication for you. So the barriers will complicate the treatment that you need to get."
Language barriers can only make the problems worse, Mitchell explained: "They don't feel comfortable if they cannot communicate in their own language. So most time they will not say anything to you because you can understand and they cannot understand you. And that is really big right now in the health care and with the females that are going through [life with] HIV.”
Contreras and Mitchell said conversations about HIV can be normalized through more education, by telling real stories of people living with HIV, and even by changing the language — using “HIV” instead of “AIDS,” for example.
The BEAT AIDS website explained that "Mel Johnson, an advocate and fighter in the HIV/AIDS epidemic," founded the group in 1987.
The organization is also part of a larger regional alliance focused on the same issues. "We have several partners throughout San Antonio," Contreras noted, "including the San Antonio AIDS Foundation (SAAF), Alamo Area Resource Center (AARC), Kind Clinic, Corazón Ministries, [and] Center for Health Care Services."
National Latinx AIDS Awareness Day has been observed across the U.S. since 2003.
