Welcome to our next installment of focused conversations with community personalities as we approach the third decade of the 21st century. Here, we speak with Joe Hudson, who has served as the Hispanic liaison/post advisor with the City of Annapolis Police Department for 10 years.
What is your overall opinion of how the Latino community is fitting in with the rest of the city? Are enough connections being made for the Latino community to feel more comfortable being here?
Overall, I think they are [feeling more comfortable]. It’s a learning curve on how the community can get services and things of that nature. For a long time, we had a very transient population, but that same population is now actually seeming to settle down here in Annapolis. It’s started to take root. I think things are beginning to fall in line a lot better than they were in the past. I know that we have discussions in the schools and in different other areas about how to better serve the population, and how to get the population more involved. But it’s taking a while.
What challenges does the mayor face when working with the Latino community?
The community will not work with you unless they know and trust you. The largest hurdle [the Latino community has] is rooted in their countries, where the governments do not provide anything. Help comes from the churches. Government wanting to help is a new and strange concept to many of our families. This is a work in progress. The mayor is moving in the right direction. He has hired a Latino liaison for city hall. Adriana Lee is working in the community, but it takes time. They have made great strides in making the city government more accessible.
What changes have you seen in the national political climate, and how is that affecting the job you do?
The biggest change is the uncertainty of it all. Ten years ago, pretty much everybody understood what the political situation was and what the path to citizenship was. DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) was introduced and then it was taken away. Now, it might be back on the table. If you’re living here, and no one in your family has documentation, you live with that fear all the time. You live with that trauma of “what happens if my dad gets picked up?” Or “what happens if my husband gets picked up or I get picked up?”
A child may be born here but mom and dad weren’t, and they don’t have documents. So that child who was born here lives with the same trauma as the child who wasn’t born here. A lot of times we fail to realize that the child who was born here, who is a U.S. citizen, also bears the same baggage.
What experience have you had in dealing with the immigrant gangs in this area?
I knew every one of the children who were mentioned in the recent What’s Up? Annapolis article on MS13.
What was your involvement in dealing with the violent attacks?
I had no involvement in the investigation. I worked with a lot of the families and tried to help them deal with their loss.
Can anything be done to prevent those attacks from happening again?
I think the work that I do with my team—mostly bilingual facilitators for the schools—[including] our learning programs, working with our children, and reaching out to them—those are probably the most important things we can do. Uniting and reuniting families is critical to giving the kids a core set of values. That’s the only way they’re going to be stronger and not fall into a gang or a runaway situation. I’m just a small part of the puzzle. Every day I do the best I can and reach out to the people that I can. But I’m probably not the most important part of it. People higher up than me do a lot more than I do.
I’m blessed that I have a family who understands the work I do. And they’re great about allowing me the time to do it. I’ll take phone calls any time of the day or night and try to work through problems that arise. I have families that will say, “I’m having an issue, I don’t know what to do.” And we’ll kind of work through it for the short term and then we’ll meet with them in the long term. It’s not just the police departments’ work or the medical centers’ work or the schools’ jobs. Everybody’s got to be united and pull together in order to lay a solid foundation. And I’m just a small part of this machine. In the end, I think Hillary Clinton said it best, that it takes a village. And that’s really true.
How does that translate locally?
The city should work with the Latino community just as they work with any other minority group. The politics surrounding the Latino community should be decided in their home countries and in Washington D.C. Locally, we should see our Latino residents as humans and address their humanitarian needs. I believe the city is a partner but not the primary provider. The primary providers should be our local churches, nonprofits, and community groups.
Because of the high level of trauma experienced by many of the people who have immigrated to this country and the trauma that has been passed to the children born in this country, bilingual mental health is the most urgent need in the community. Other issues are reunification, parenting skills, language barriers, lack of formal education, and upward job mobility. These are the primary issues faced within our Latino community. Community partners are better equipped to mentor our families. City government’s role is to connect services and provide pathways.
What would you like to see City leaders specifically address?
An expansion of mental-health services. Frankly, it doesn’t matter where you come from. Mental health is a real issue in most of the country. Many of the kids I work with come from countries that are very violent. It’s a traumatic experience for them, and that may have made their journey to the United States even more difficult. In many instances, parents send them here alone. Other times, the parents are already here, and the child had been living with an aunt, uncle, brother, sister, or whatever family member it may be. And they make that journey for the most part alone, on foot. They cross the border, where they may or may not get picked up by immigration and customs. If they are, they’re detained.
All that adds to the trauma on these children, most of them only eight to 10 years old. Reunification often never really happens, because no one ever teaches a parent what to do to reconnect with their child. Some of them might have left a child when they were only three years old, and now they’re receiving that child when he or she is 13 years old. Any family bond is not there. The kids don’t know their parents, and the parents don’t really know their child. That reunification piece is so important.
All the while, the child is dealing with so much trauma—from violence, the journey itself, the detention. Services need to be provided for those children to relieve themselves of that baggage. I call it trauma baggage, because if you pack for a trip, your suitcases are so heavy that you can only carry them for so long.
Trauma is the same way. The longer we carry it, the heavier it becomes, to the point where we can’t carry it anymore. So, to me, mental health is the biggest area that we need improvement on. I could talk to you about the opioid crisis; a lot of our kids are addicted. Most of them started with a trauma that was never handled properly.
What’s the most important thing you do personally in your job as the Hispanic liaison?
I would say connecting with our kids in the community and working with their families as well. But primarily, the most important aspect is working with the kids. This morning I stopped by a school and talked to a young man who started off the school year with straight As. Now, he’s at the opposite end of the spectrum. So, we talked about what’s going on with his life, how we could change those things, how he can improve, where he needs help to navigate whatever’s troubling him.
In your emails, you include a quote: “When our children heal, we all heal.” Is that from you?
No. I’m actually also part of the National Compadres Network that originated in California. I oversee three different programs—one for boys 14 to 21, one for girls of the same age span, and we have a program called Cara y Corazon, which means Face and Heart, and that’s for the parents. The line you quote is actually one we use in our mentoring programs that came from the network.
The program is 30 years old. If you think back to what was happening in California in the 1980s, especially around Los Angeles, you remember there was a lot of gang violence and many problems with youth. Consequently, a group of men got together and essentially said, “What’s going on here? What’s going on with our youth?” They started outlining problems, and they realized that they, too, had some of the same issues. They developed a program with core values and from there started working with kids. That program stretches across the country, to Annapolis, now.
