Annotations for Places: Puerto Rico--bayamon

A bill introduced by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus seeks to remedy the lack of statistical information about Latino health. The Minority Health Opportunities Act would increase funding for the National Center on Health Statistics on whose information healthcare monies are largely allocated. Democratic Congress member Lucille Roybal-Allard says the measure will be especially beneficial for the health needs of Latinas.

Latina women are more likely to have diabetes than other groups of women, and there's a whole series of diseases that impact Latino women disproportionately from other population.

Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus say their bill is not meant to compete with the administration's healthcare plan, but to compliment it. This is news from Latino USA. The leaders of the nation's environmental justice movement, organizations representing African, Asian, and Native Americans along with Latino groups gathered in the nation's capital. It's the first time all these organizations have come together. According to Richard Moore, coordinator of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice based in Albuquerque.

One of the agenda items will very clearly be the relationships between our networks. We have been working together in the past on several issues. One of the primary pieces that will be on the agenda, for example, is a letter that was sent requesting an emergency environmental justice summit because of the urgency of the poisoning of communities of color, and in our case in the southwest Latino communities, that we called for a meeting with the president and vice president and also that a emergency, I say environmental summit take place, environmental justice summit.

The Southwest network coordinator says though many Latinos may not consciously make the environment a priority, Latinos have been involved in the movement for environmental justice for a long time.

We've been involved, for example, with pesticides issues with farm workers for many, many years. We didn't perceive that as an environmental issue, we perceived it as a labor issue. Housing and tenant organizing. Over 900,000 housing units today still have lead based pain in them with many children eating the chips off those walls and Latino housing projects and other communities in the southwest. Never perceived it as an environmental issue, we perceived it as a tenant's rights issue. And as we're all unfortunately very aware, our communities are located in and around slaughterhouses, dog food companies, industrial facilities, landfills, incinerators, whatever it may be, and that's not anything recent. Matter of fact, that's been for the last many, many years.

The environment and its impact on Latino communities from Bayamon Puerto Rico, to El Paso, to the South Bronx was one of the issues addressed in Washington recently during the Latino Issues Forum sponsored by members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. I'm Maria Martin, you're listening to Latino USA.