Food-focused nonprofits in Durango push for access to services in immigrants’ first languages

Arely Sanchez fashions a corn tortilla into a smooth round shape, her hands slapping in a steady, practiced rhythm. She daubs a spinach-onion-cheese mixture on the finished circle of dough, folds the tortilla over and slides it onto the hot grill at Manna Soup Kitchen in Durango. The pupusa immediately starts to sizzle alongside a dozen others.

Sanchez makes various pupusas, including bean and cheese, squash, and pork — all served with a relish of pickled carrots, cabbage, red onion and jalapeno peppers. The recipe for her Durango pupusas is the same one she used when she made the popular dish in her native country of El Salvador. There, pupusas could be sold from her house.

“It’s so easy,” Sanchez said of her prior business in El Salvador. Sanchez spoke Spanish through interpreter Lisa Rogers, who provides language services to several Durango nonprofits. “You don’t need permits or certifications. You don’t need to worry about sales tax or anything.”

However, in her new community, it’s a different story. Here, she added, “You need to follow all these rules and regulations.”

Key to Sanchez gaining a foothold in Durango’s thriving restaurant scene is that she chose to move to a community where an extensive network of food-related nonprofit organizations recently shifted its focus to providing the one thing that Sanchez — and other recent immigrants in similar situations — said they needed to improve their families’ incomes and quality of life: language justice. There is now a concerted effort to create spaces where everyone can communicate and participate without language barriers.

Rachel Landis, executive director of La Plata County’s The Good Food Collective (a Colorado Trust grantee), said nonprofits traditionally focused on providing direct services to residents in need, such as starting more food pantries, extending their hours and ensuring that the shelves in those locations are stocked with culturally appropriate food.

In 2020, The Good Food Collective formed the La Plata Food Equity Coalition, an initiative designed to address food insecurity differently. (The coalition is a past Colorado Trust grantee.) The alliance comprises decision-makers at health and human services agencies, nonprofits, businesses, government entities and community members. The coalition flips the script on standard approaches to food-access support and gives community members a seat at the table. And that’s how language justice became a priority.

Landis said shifting the group’s focus grew from conversations with the communities served. In meetings held in the summer of 2020, the coalition started those conversations with a fundamental question: What would it take for your family and household to have the food that supports your well-being?

What surfaced, said Landis, “were themes around power and belonging, and one of the key mechanisms for power and belonging is language.”

Landis said attendees noted that they struggled to apply for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP, because they couldn’t read the forms. Others could not participate in La Plata Board of County Commissioners meetings because the agendas and the dialogue were only in English.

The moment was transformative for Landis. “For me, it was an existential moment for the coalition,” she said.

The coalition began working on various initiatives to build the language-assistance ecosystem within the community. It provided interpreters to accompany newcomers as they pursued better housing or jobs, and it worked with local governments and businesses to change processes in ways that would make monolingual Spanish speakers feel welcome and supported.

Tommy Crosby, a coalition member and the economic opportunity manager for the City of Durango, said a prospective restaurateur needs to successfully pursue 70 different steps — including food safety processes, city planning permits, fire department inspections, city business and liquor licenses, registering with taxing authorities and so on — before being given the necessary permits to open to customers.

Crosby is a member of the coalition’s Food Business Workgroup, which promotes economic opportunity in the restaurant industry for immigrants, people of color and other historically underserved populations. It has fully embraced the challenge of advancing language equity. The group supports the work of the community’s first “bilingual food business navigator,” Priscila Newbold, who has helped guide 24 entrepreneurs like Sanchez to launch in the last year alone.

One key to the group’s success was receiving a City Inclusive Entrepreneurship Network grant from the National League of Cities. Specifically, Crosby said, the city focused on one of the grant tracks, the “ecosystem accelerator.”

The Food Business Workgroup became the “hub” for all the entrepreneurship efforts, and partners (for example, city agencies, the health department, the fire department, the small business development center and philanthropic organizations) became the “spokes.”

The first year of work “concentrated on ensuring we had the right entrepreneur and business support organizations at the table. … We would gather, we would learn about each other’s rules, we would ask a lot of questions,” Crosby said. “We tried to level the playing field and make the approach to food-business entrepreneurship inherently more equitable.”

Crosby said a perfect example of the Food Business Workgroup’s impact is that the players involved have learned “the art of the warm handoff.” For instance, instead of giving an entrepreneur a phone number or email address to the next city agency in line, people take the initiative and provide an in-person introduction and an overview of the work to date. The city, said Crosby, has developed a system to help prevent people from falling through the cracks and to assist startup business owners in feeling welcomed and supported.

From her perspective, Sanchez compared the greeting from the community to a hug of resources.

“I feel like the way the community is organized here, it doesn’t make you feel alone — it makes you feel welcome,” she said. Sanchez received her final piece of paper green-lighting her business in late October. Pupusería Torogoz (named after the national bird of El Salvador) opened in time for the last couple of farmers’ markets of the season.

Sanchez and her husband, José Luis Castro Serrano, worked in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, for 20 years at a bank in executive positions that supported their middle-class lifestyle. However, Sanchez said the couple felt they could provide better opportunities for their children by moving to the U.S.

“It was a sacrifice me and my husband made because we wanted our kids to have better lives,” she said. The couple has four children, two boys and two girls.

For three years after moving to America, the former bank executives cleaned rooms at Mercy Hospital in Durango. For several years in a row, Sanchez served the national dish of El Salvador on the Fourth of July — the most American of celebrations — at events in nearby Bayfield.

The food, she said, was popular. “You get so happy and really appreciate when people [are] enjoying your food … and I started seeing that I was pretty sure I could turn this into a business.”

But where to start? And how?

One day in early 2024, Castro Serrano was selling tamales from a cooler outside a Family Dollar store when a passerby mentioned the services available at Manna Soup Kitchen (also a Colorado Trust grantee). These included programs to help entrepreneurs take food-related businesses from ideas to fruition. The nonprofit Manna Soup Kitchen and its commissary kitchen are among the “spokes” of the Food Business Workgroup’s “hub.”

The Manna Soup Kitchen offers job-skills training for restaurant workers and a process for those wanting to enter the restaurant business. This includes a month-long boot camp and a six-week program to help entrepreneurs get a head start on organizing their businesses. Manna offers its kitchens for free to those who need a place to test recipes and practice their food production in a professional setting.

“Imagine not speaking English and trying to figure all these steps out,” said Megan Feuerbacher, culinary manager at Manna Soup Kitchen. “That’s why it’s so important to us in the coalition to make sure we’re giving these individuals support. We’re not giving them a handout and saying, ‘Good luck.’”

In addition to Pupusería Torogoz this year, Manna Soup Kitchen’s efforts also graduated two food trucks, Tacos La Carranza and Taqueria La Costa, into operating businesses.

The comprehensive effort headed by Good Food Collective extends to helping with language needs for housing and jobs. Recently, interpreter Rogers accompanied Colombia native Sandra Ortiz as the latter supplied the required pay stubs to complete her application for a new apartment in Three Springs, a neighborhood east of downtown Durango.

Rogers is an exuberant, high-visibility person in the community who provides language services for Good Food Collective, serves as bilingual coordinator for Manna Soup Kitchen and leads a group called Construyendo Poder (“Building Power” in English) that helps monolingual Spanish speakers and immigrants with support and training. (Rogers is not the only interpreter. Landis said the coalition has provided professional training to 38 interpreters.)

In the leasing office at Three Springs, Rogers helped Ortiz navigate the details of her rental application. The new apartment would save Ortiz $700 monthly in rent, freeing up money for better food and to help with her daughter’s expenses as she started at Metro State University in Denver. Ortiz and her husband, Milton, who had worked as a federal drug enforcement officer, left Colombia due to threats to their family’s safety. The couple has been working for a commercial cleaning company to make ends meet in Durango.

“We work a lot, and we might be making money, but the life, everything that you need to pay [for] here in Durango, is very expensive,” Sandra Ortiz said in Spanish. “There’s a lot of bills to cover for sure. So yes, a couple of times, we needed to go to Manna food market.”

Organizations like Good Food Collective and La Plata County Food Equity Coalition, she said, “are so important for everyone that comes here because all the people that move from another country don’t have anything, and they’re nobody. It’s like they’re newborns.”

Yaneth Reyes feels similarly. Reyes moved to the U.S. from Honduras in the summer of 2024 to look for work. She shares a mobile home with another person in downtown Durango and pays $400 monthly in rent. She immediately picked up work as a part-time housecleaner at a local hotel but was on her way to the offices of In The Weeds (a group that promotes healthier lifestyles among restaurant industry workers) to obtain leads for work in the restaurant business and maybe a full-time position via the nonprofit’s job board.

Reyes said she is optimistic about her future in the U.S. thanks to Rogers’ help, and she hopes to earn enough money to prepare better meals and avoid buying fast food.

“I feel secure because I know I’m going to find something,” said Reyes, “and because this person [Rogers] knows what she’s doing.” Reyes said her goals are to find stable housing first and then “maybe a job I can keep forever.”

Good Food Collective has worked to improve the availability of bilingual interpretation at public meetings, both at the Durango City Council and the La Plata Board of County Commissioners. In August, Spanish-speaking community members attended a county commission meeting and used the interpretation services.

They advocated for commissioners to refer a question to the ballot that would reallocate 70% of the county’s lodging tax from tourism marketing to affordable housing and child care services. On Nov. 5, that proposal was approved by more than 69% of La Plata County voters.

Landis said improvements are taking root in the food security ecosystem in La Plata County. Applications for the SNAP and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) programs are now available in multiple languages. Those offices have someone on call to help with interpretation. Signage is bilingual. Websites are being made translatable.

The work to improve family income overall helps reduce the burden on all county services, said La Plata County Commissioner Marsha Porter-Norton. Of La Plata County’s 56,000 residents, 29% are enrolled in Health First Colorado, the state’s Medicaid program (slightly higher than the 25% of Coloradans who receive Medicaid services).

“When I talk about this, I get nothing but claps,” Porter-Norton said. “And I always say, ‘thank you, but this isn’t just the commissioners who did this.’” She lauded Landis’ leadership.

According to a report from the Region 9 Economic Development District of Southwest Colorado, 44% of the county’s workforce is in the service industry. While that sector forms the backbone of the local labor force, workers earn an annual average income of $23,000—less than half of the county’s average yearly salary, according to the same report.

Numerous members of the Latino/a/x community work in the Durango-area service industry, “and they are what is allowing this beautiful life that people love,” said Landis.

“We are this community,” said Landis, “and this country has always been a place of immigration and assimilation and coming together, and from a functioning-society perspective, these are our citizens, these are our children. How do you not invest in their future?”

Freelance reporter Mark Stevens wrote this story for The Colorado Trust, a philanthropic foundation that works on health equity issues statewide and also funds a reporting position at The Colorado Sun. It appeared at coloradotrust.org on Dec. 17. 2024, and can be read in Spanish at collective.coloradotrust.org/es.