Promotoras bridge health gaps in Westwood community, one garden at a time
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DENVER — It takes a village to raise a garden, and Teresa Araoz is grateful for an extra hand in hers.
Sometimes, that garden helper is her 11-year-old son, checking that there aren’t any snakes hiding in the soil before she goes out to pull weeds. But when Araoz has a question about why her plants aren’t growing or what bug is eating the leaves, she calls Leticia Manquera, her friendly neighborhood promotora.
Re:Vision, a food equity nonprofit based in Westwood, employs a team of a dozen promotoras to support participants in the organization’s family garden program.
Promotoras, which literally translates to “promoters” in Spanish, are community health workers (CHWs). Mariana del Hierro, executive director of Re:Vision, said the “promotora” title is important because of the role’s cultural significance in Latino communities.
“Having been raised in an immigrant community myself, I know firsthand how the mothers in our community came together to learn how to navigate a new country and its new systems together, collectively sharing resources and knowledge to ensure the health and well-being of our community as a whole,” del Hierro said.
Westwood is a predominantly immigrant and Latino community in southwest Denver. It’s also considered a food desert, and the promotora-run family garden program aims to increase residents’ access to fresh, affordable produce.
“This model builds off of our community's inherent act of caring for each other. It fits our community, the people that make up our community, the culture of our community,” del Hierro said.
Video: Carly Rose, Rocky Mountain PBS
The promotora model became popular in rural Latin America in the 1950s and 60s as local organizations trained women in the community to provide critical health information to their neighbors. Communities in the United States adopted the model throughout the second half of the 20th century. Formal CHW training programs were established by the 1990s.
The promotora model has been the norm at Re:Vision since the organization started in 2007 because it’s the most effective way to reach families in the community, del Hierro said.
About half of Hispanic Americans reported having negative health care experiences and difficulty receiving adequate health care, according to a 2023 study. Another study from the same year citied a lack of cultural and linguistic understanding as two barriers to healthcare for Hispanic patients.
Only about half of Hispanic immigrants who came to the United States within the last 10 years reported visiting a health care provider in the last year. Citizenship status is another barrier for immigrant patients due to stigma and deportation concerns. These concerns have increased as the Trump administration continues with its mass deportation effort.
Promotoras bridge the gap between community members and the traditional health care system because they understand the language and culture of the people they serve.
While Re:Vision’s promotoras are focused on improving health outcomes through healthy food access, part of their role is to connect community members with resources beyond the organization, like Denver Health’s family care center in southwest Denver.
“[Families] start building those relationships and trust so that they are slowly more and more comfortable to ask us more questions or more information around resource navigation,” del Hierro said.
Manquera has worked as a promotora in Westwood for 11 years. This year, she’s working with 20 families in the family garden program. She makes regular home visits to check on gardens and answer questions.
Manquera started as a participant in the program, growing her own garden, until Re:Vision hired her as a promotora. She learned by shadowing experienced promotoras.
Before she became a promotora, Manquera worked in child care. Re:Vision hires from within the neighborhood as a way to invest in community wealth and make the most out of existing connections between promotoras and neighbors.
“It’s very gratifying to me that I can support families, just as others supported me when I had my garden. It’s very gratifying to know that we can do our part in the community,” Manquera said.
In a recent visit to Araoz’s house, Manquera fertilized the sprouting vegetables and explained why the fertilizer helps them grow. She helped Araoz pull weeds and plant more seeds.
Araoz lives in Westwood and started her family garden eight years ago. She’s worked with several promotoras over the years, and she said they have been very helpful in the success of her garden. One year, her garden suffered from a lot of pests and disease, so she worked closely with her promotora to solve it.
Araoz started her garden because it’s important to her to have healthy food from her own backyard. She said she comes from a family who has been growing food for generations, and she wants to pass that knowledge down to her children.
“I personally believe that women are the carriers of culture across generations,” del Hierro said. “We hire Latina women, immigrant women in the Westwood community as promotoras who not only deliver our food justice and food production curriculum with our family garden visits, but they also transmit our culture, our traditions, our ancestral agricultural practices that have been handed down for generations.”
Type of story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
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