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Uplifting Latina Voices Through LPPI, Telemundo Partnership Kassandra Hernández MPP '20 makes relevant research about the impacts of COVID-19 accessible to a Spanish-speaking community
By Zoe Day
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Latinas went from being one of the fastest-growing groups in the labor force to one that was hit hardest by unemployment, with 2.4 million Latinas out of work in April 2020.
This finding from the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative (LPPI) at UCLA Luskin is part of a broad body of research on the pandemic’s impact on Latino populations — research that is now being shared with a wider audience through a partnership with Spanish-language news station Telemundo 52.
LPPI research analyst Kassandra Hernández BA ’17, MPP ’20 sees the collaboration as an opportunity to uplift Latina voices and make relevant research more accessible to Latino populations.
“The reports we produce are nothing if no one reads them,” she explained. “We’re studying the impact [of the pandemic] on Latinas, and we would like to reach the people who are being impacted.”
A Telemundo newscast featuring Hernández focused on Latina participation in the labor market, which had been projected to experience substantial growth until the pandemic forced many Latinas to choose child-care duties over paid work. LPPI Director of Research Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas also appeared in the segment, underscoring that “Latinas are overrepresented in sectors hardest hit by the pandemic.”
As a native Spanish speaker, Hernández welcomed the chance to connect with the populations that her research focuses on, in their own language.
“Different media outlets are accessible in different languages, but English doesn’t reach Latinas in the same way,” she said.
Two other Telemundo reports featured LPPI-affiliated scholars who shared their expertise on COVID-19’s impact on Latino populations. In one segment, Melissa Chinchilla, a research scientist who studies the intersection of housing, health and community development, explained how unemployment caused by the pandemic led many to move in with friends and family, increasing the risk of COVID-19 transmission within households.
“Affordable housing and the capacity to accommodate multigenerational families are issues that will require long-term investment,” Chinchilla said.
In another report, Yohualli Balderas-Medina Anaya, a medical doctor on the faculty of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, discussed the long-term symptoms experienced by some COVID-19 patients even after the infection has passed. Anaya expressed concern that some side effects will continue to affect patients for years.
Telemundo reporter Enrique Chiabra, a UCLA alumnus, presented the three-part series aimed at making information about the COVID-19 pandemic accessible for Spanish-speaking populations. That is a key priority for Hernández, who has worked with LPPI faculty experts including Executive Director Sonja Diaz to interpret research and push it into the public sphere.
“Academic research is often not as accessible to the communities it focuses on,” she said. “I want to analyze inequities and share knowledge; I don’t want to stay in the ivory tower.”
Hernández is a double Bruin who earned her bachelor’s degree in philosophy and labor and workplace studies. After graduation, she worked with AmeriCorps on food insecurity before going back to school to develop her skills in quantitative analysis.
“As a Latina, I have lived what I find in numbers,” said Hernández, a first-generation college graduate and the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She spoke about her own mother’s challenges balancing responsibilities as a domestic worker and the demands of being a parent and caretaker.
“I realized not everyone has those same experiences, but I can use numbers as evidence to validate my own story.”
Hernández said she chose the master of public policy program at UCLA Luskin because of the supportive faculty and the opportunity to engage with real-world issues. The experience “opened up my eyes to what I could do and how to analyze policy,” she said.
Hernández’s research with LPPI has helped shed light on the gender norms and expectations that often push Latina women aside or confine them to the household. The partnership between LPPI and Telemundo, she said, helped break down stereotypes and recognize that Latinas should not be grouped together as a monolith.
As Hernández’s time with LPPI draws to a close, she is excited to meet the next cohort of fellows to continue advancing research and policy work to support Latinas. In the fall, she will pursue her Ph.D. in economics at UC Berkeley, building on her skills from UCLA Luskin to address inequality through policy research focusing on labor, income inequality, immigration, education, food access and environmental economics.
“Everything is connected,” Hernández said. “Inequality dictates access and quality of life.”
Storper on the Counterintuitive Truth About Global Investment
Urban Planning Distinguished Professor Michael Storper co-authored an article about the impact of international investment on domestic employment levels for the London School of Economics’ Global Investments and Local Development blog. “The world over, public policies for recovery from COVID-19 have cherished the idea of curbing foreign activities of domestic firms in order to boost domestic employment and wages. This represents a fundamental misconception about outward foreign direct investment,” Storper wrote with scholars Riccardo Crescenzi and Roberto Ganau. The authors conducted an in-depth analysis of U.S. local labor markets, detailed in a paper recently published in the Journal of Economic Geography. They found that firms with direct investment in other countries create jobs at home, a counterintuitive fact in an era of populism and calls for curbing global economic integration. The authors noted, however, that there is a downside in the form of increasing intra-regional inequalities between high-skilled and low-skilled workers.
Roy on Failed Promise of Project Roomkey
Ananya Roy, executive director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, spoke with KNX1070 about Project Roomkey, a program designed to provide temporary shelter in hotels and motels to Los Angeles’ homeless population. Critics of the program, launched in Los Angeles at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, cited draconian conditions, including early curfews, a lack of privacy and harassment by staff. To demand changes at Project Roomkey sites, as well as shelters across the region, several members of the unhoused community have organized under the banner United Tenants Against Carceral Housing. Roy said she was once an advocate of Project Roomkey but has become more critical after seeing the program in action. Elected officials are wasting public resources on a “shelter shuffle” and have “turned temporary housing like Project Roomkey into the most dehumanizing, prison-like housing,” Roy said. “People are not better off and they’re clearly not more safe.”
Manville on Improving Communities by Pricing Roads
Urban Planning Associate Professor Michael Manville spoke to Innovation Hub about the dim chances that traffic congestion will improve post-pandemic. Empty roads invite more drivers to use them, he said. And even if more employees work from home, they’ll still use the roadways to satisfy the craving for human connection after a year of quarantine. Offering a one-sentence summary of congestion — “because we’re all in a hurry, we all slow each other down” — Manville argued that the best strategy for managing traffic is charging drivers to use the roads, just as governments charge for utilities. Higher prices during peak traffic hours would help keep traffic moving at a consistent speed, and revenue could be used to keep the system equitable for people who must drive but cannot afford the fees. Manville also noted that reducing congestion would benefit the often low-income neighborhoods that line highways, which are currently inundated with pollutants from nearby traffic.
Roy on the Roots of L.A.’s Housing ‘Disaster’
Ananya Roy, director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, appeared in an Al Jazeera English documentary about Los Angeles’ crisis levels of housing insecurity, which grew starker during the COVID-19 pandemic. “With stay-at-home orders came a public realization about who could stay at home,” Roy said. “And I think one of the things that’s become very evident in the United States is the failure at all scales of government to protect communities and households that are vulnerable.” The film follows homeless families who take great risks by moving into vacant houses and highlights the work of advocacy groups including the Reclaimers, Moms 4 Housing and the Los Angeles Community Action Network. A fast-growing rent-wage gap has deepened the crisis, Roy said. “Housing has become a commodity, by which I mean that what matters is not whether people are housed or not. What matters is the profits to be made on housing that is traded in the marketplace.”
Yaroslavsky on COVID-19’s Stark Lines of Inequity
Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke to Spectrum News’ “Inside the Issues” about this year’s UCLA Quality of Life Index, which offered a deep dive into the impacts of COVID-19 on Los Angeles County’s residents. “There are two Los Angeleses,” Yaroslavsky said. “There are the people who are doing well, who are making it. … And then there are those who are struggling, who are living on the margins of the economy and are always feeling one step away from oblivion.” The index included the surprising finding that Latino residents were more positive about their overall quality of life than white residents. Yaroslavsky said this may be because white people on average had higher incomes and more to lose during this pandemic, despite their greater privilege overall. Latinos faced tough challenges but “they worked their way through it, and they are much more optimistic about getting ahead in Los Angeles,” he said.
Akee Highlights Need for Better Data on Experiences of Racism
Associate Professor of Public Policy Planning Randall Akee co-authored a Brookings article with KJ Ward about the lack of available data on experiences of racism in the COVID-19 era. While the media acknowledges instances of hate crimes and racial violence that have been exacerbated by the pandemic, they are often dismissed as outliers and fail to be the subject of meaningful research. “In the absence of systematic data on this topic, we are left to these anecdotal instances, and that makes it much more difficult to identify pervasive patterns and behaviors in society,” Akee wrote. Furthermore, smaller race groups are often excluded in national surveys or are clustered in a general “other” category. A new survey explicitly oversampled for small race and ethnic groups and illustrated the pervasiveness of racism toward all non-white groups. Akee argued that collecting data by race and ethnicity is the first step to identifying, diagnosing and dismantling systemic racism in society.
Yaroslavsky on COVID-19 and the Price of Saving Lives
Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke to USA Today about California’s roller-coaster recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Months of shifting restrictions about lockdowns and stay-at-home orders took a significant toll on California residents. Yaroslavsky pointed out that when you ask the question “Were all the strict mandates worth it?” you are ultimately asking whether saving even one additional life was worth it. “Losing your business is an existential event; it’s a brutal price to pay,” he said. “But you can rebuild your business. You can’t do that with your life.” Yaroslavsky also said that accusations of inconsistency and hypocrisy surrounding Gov. Gavin Newsom’s management of the crisis “hurt public trust at a moment when it was sorely needed. … Any politician today has taken a hit politically because this has been an unprecedented societal disaster, but there have definitely been some who are paying a bigger price than others.”
Study Identifies Regional Patterns in COVID-Related Food Insecurity
During the COVID-19 pandemic, disadvantaged households in the San Francisco Bay Area were at higher risk of food insufficiency compared with similar households in the Los Angeles and Inland Empire regions, according to new UCLA research published in the journal Public Health Nutrition. The study was conducted by Professor Evelyn Blumenberg, director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies at UCLA Luskin; Professor May Wang of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health; and doctoral students Miriam Pinski and Lilly Nhan. The researchers evaluated U.S. Census Bureau survey data to understand regional differences in the determinants of food insufficiency, defined simply as not having enough food to eat. The team focused on three metropolitan areas: San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley; Los Angeles, Long Beach and Anaheim; and Riverside, San Bernardino and Ontario. Overall, the rate of food insufficiency was lowest in the Bay Area, one of the state’s most affluent regions. However, the Bay Area’s disadvantaged households fared worse than their counterparts in Southern California. “Income and educational levels are higher, but income inequality and cost of living are also higher” in the Bay Area, the researchers explained. The study pointed to Los Angeles as a region where an active food distribution network was already in place, enabling governments, schools and community organizations to respond more effectively to the sudden increases in food insecurity brought about by the pandemic. The study was designed to guide the development of economic relief programs and increase the reach of federal assistance programs to address widening health disparities.
