Foreward

David Hayes-Bautista

In the fall of 1989, I was asked by Romeo\ Caballero, the Mexican Consul in Los Angeles, to attend a meeting he was organizing. He was deeply perplexed about a problem and had invited a number of Latino agencies to hear their advice on it. The problem was a result of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Thousands of previously undocumented residents in the Los Angeles area had applied for Amnesty, in order to legalize their status. As part of the Amnesty application process, they had to submit the results of blood tests for HIV positivity. Quite understandably, given the epidemiology of HIV-AIDS, a number of Amnesty applicants discovered that they were HIV positive.

Not knowing whom else to contact, many of these HIV positive Amnesty applicants began calling the Consulate with their anguished questions:

Will I be deported?

If I am deported, are there going to be services for me in Mexico? If I am deported, what will happen to my family?

Should just hide and stay in Los Angeles, forgoing the Amnesty process? Can I find my AIDS medications in Mexico?

Once I return to Mexico, can I ever come back to the US?

These and hundreds of other questions poured into the Consulate. Dr. Flores Caballero was very candid: he did not know what the situation was in Mexico with regards to AIDS. In fact, he did not know the AIDS situation in the Latino population of Los Angeles. He asked the group if it could enlighten him with some answers.

As the group began its discussion, it was clear that we, as service providers to the Latino community, knew virtually nothing about the AIDS situation in Mexico. We could not tell people what would happen once they had returned to Mexico, nor could we offer advice about what to do if they stayed in Los Angeles in the new limbo-status created by being an Amnesty Applicant. As the depth of our ignorance about AIDS in Mexico was revealed to us, we began to think that our counterparts in Mexico might share the same degree of ignorance about us as Mexican-origin Latino service providers in Los Angeles. We could just imagine the consternation of a physician in the Hospital Municipal in Guadalajara suddenly faced with an influx of persons in various stages of HIV infection and development of AIDS, with little or no knowledge of treatment protocols that the patient had followed, the medications being used and other clinical and psychological issues.

Being educators, we realized that if we knew very little we had a wonderful opportunity to learn. And the best way to learn about AIDS in Mexico would be to invite up some agencies from Mexico so that they could teach us. In return, if they were to desire, we could teach them about the Latino AIDS situation in Los Angeles.

Because of previous experience with AIDS in the Latino community in the US, we suspected that communication between different types of groups might not be as good as it should be: between Community Based Organizations ( CBOs) and governmental provider agencies in the US, the relationship is often testy and slightly antagonistic, although at times it can be cooperative. We surmised that the situation would be comparable in Mexico between the Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and governmental agencies.

More than anything else, we wanted to create a forum where sharply differing perspectives and opinions could come together on neutral territory. The intention was for mutual learning to take place, not to resolve differences between groups.

As the conference progressed, we heard some, quite frankly, very sharp exchanges of opinion between, on the one hand the CBOs and NGOs, and on the other, the various governmental agencies from both the US and Mexico. The fact of heated words did not surprise us: HIV-AIDS is an intensely emotional and very political issue. We felt that it would be important for the conference to provide a "safe zone" where emotions could be expressed, so that the underlying concrete issues and concerns could be dealt with.

The heat of emotions continued into the written papers prepared for this volume, and we feel that is a good sign. In order to explore the range of opinions and experience on the topic, we have chosen the papers that were most indicative of different bodies of opinion. Some of these papers may strike the reader as very opinionated, and in fact they are. There are some statements in some of the papers that we, as conference organizers, feel are not necessarily warranted.

However, we feel very strongly that each person be heard in his or her own words, so that the human and emotional element of the Binational AIDS situation can be more fully expressed. Therefore, the papers in this volume are presented in the spirit of fostering the full range of feelings and communication about an epidemiological peril that merits a significant portion of our attention, as Mexicans, as Latinos and as the future residents of the North American Common Market.