WATSONVILLE, Calif. — Inside an evacuation center at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds, Maria Adolfo-Morales and a disaster service volunteer listened to a woman describe her concerns in the Mixteco language.
The woman and her three children had been staying at the center for a week, after a broken levee flooded the farming town of Pajaro and forced residents to flee.
Adolfo-Morales, a 22-year-old community health care worker, interpreted what the woman said into English, then rendered the volunteer’s responses into Mixteco, one of several Indigenous languages spoken in southern Mexico.
