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 Courtesy of the Kaiser Family Foundation and Univision.

 This commercial features a Latino mother and daughter living in Miami who are affected by HIV/AIDS.


End the Silencio: New Campaign Targets HIV Awareness in Latino Communities

by Breeanna Hare
Oct 15, 2008


Related Links

For More Information on HIV/AIDS in Chicago

Luis, a slim Latino male with a faint goatee and a desire to learn the guitar, is HIV-positive.

“When I found out I had HIV, I was so sad, I thought my life was over,” he said, looking straight into the video camera with an open frankness.  “I knew nothing about HIV,” he continued. “I was afraid I’d lose my family, the most important part of my life.”

Luis’ story is just one of the half dozen filmed so far by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Univision in a new campaign called Soy (I Am). Soy is the first national HIV/AIDS awareness campaign targeted to a Spanish-speaking population, and premiered nationwide on Spanish-language media Wednesday.

The lack of awareness and the fear of not being accepted that Luis speaks of are two of the biggest challenges Chicago’s HIV/AIDS outreach workers confront every day.

As with most Americans, the Latino community is the same in that HIV/AIDS is not something that is openly discussed, said Olivia Sanchez, an HIV/AIDS outreach worker with Project VIDA, a non-profit focused on HIV/AIDS prevention and education on Chicago’s West Side.

“In the black and Latino communities, we’re less tolerant of difference – for example, men who identify themselves as gay or bisexual or transgender - and as a result we don’t discuss certain things. And we should, because by silencing them we continue to allow [HIV/AIDS] to keep happening,” Sanchez said.

One in five people living with HIV in the U.S. are Latino, with AIDS being the fourth leading cause of death for Latinos aged 35-44 in 2005. In Cook County, the rate of infection for a Latino is 2.5 times that of a white person, according to the Cook County Department of Public Health.

Eugene Park, an HIV/AIDS outreach worker in South Lawndale, said there’s “an immediate defensive and a lack of willingness to talk about [HIV].”

“I never introduce myself as an HIV/AIDS outreach worker unless I have to…There’s a huge stigma, no matter what the age group is, a big hesitation to want to come and get tested,” Park said.

In 2006, nearly two-thirds of Latinos 18 and older said they had never been tested for HIV/AIDS, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tina Hoff, the vice president and director for the Entertainment Media Partnerships with the Kaiser Family Foundation, said that she hopes the Soy campaign will change that.

“When you look at people under 25, they have only ever known a time of AIDS. It’s become so integrated into life that there’s sometimes a little bit of complacency and a little bit of disconnect with it,” Hoff said.Most people assume they can tell what a person with HIV looks like, she added.

Park agreed. “The average person doesn’t know the difference between HIV and AIDS, nor does it really matter, they just know that once you get it you’re dirty,” he said.

These are the ideas that Soy hopes to contradict, Hoff said, “the idea that HIV happens to someone else, but not me or people like me.”

The humanizing effect Hoff hopes Soy will bring to HIV/AIDS is exactly what Sanchez said is missing in the Latino community.

“Our ignorance is keeping us from being able to realize that a person with HIV is still human,” Sanchez said. “They’re not aliens. They don’t become aliens just because they have HIV. This ignorance, this is what propels this disease.

“If we have it, we’re not willing to share that," Sanchez said, "if we don’t have it, we’re not willing to get that information because we assume that we are above or beyond someone who would get HIV. “