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This California Nonprofit Empowers Half Moon Bay Farmworkers With Healing, Resources

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Ayudando Latinos A Soñar (ALAS) founder Dr. Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga poses for a portrait at the ALAS office in Half Moon Bay, California, on Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. Hernandez-Arriaga founded ALAS in 2011 to support the Latino community in Half Moon Bay. (Juliana Yamada/KQED)

This story was reported for K Onda KQED, a monthly newsletter focused on the Bay Area’s Latinx community. Click here to subscribe.

On a rainy morning a few weeks before Christmas, Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga arrived at California Terra Garden, a mushroom farm in Half Moon Bay, with about two dozen staff and volunteers from the nonprofit Ayudando Latinos a Soñar.

The group emerged from the Farmworker Equity Express Bus, a double-decker coach, carrying bags filled with handmade tamales, Christmas gifts and groceries to give out to farmworkers. A priest and a musician played Christmas carols in Spanish.

Hernandez-Arriaga donned a green Santa hat to match her green hoodie, which read, “Our veggies are Moon Raised.” The 53-year-old, with bright pink lipstick, imparted the cheerful vibe of the event, a welcome contrast to the history of this farm as the site of a mass shooting in January of 2023. 

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ALAS brought aid to workers at California Terra Garden for years before the shooting and has continued, undeterred, since. Hernandez-Arriaga founded the organization in 2011 with the mantra “cultura cura,” which means “culture cures.”

Everything ALAS does — from distributing basic necessities, putting on events and offering immigration services, music classes for kids and adults and mental health counseling — is infused with Latinx culture to empower the community.

Ayudando Latinos A Soñar (ALAS) founder Dr. Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga greets seniors of the Corazones de Oro program during a lunch at the ALAS Community Arts Center in Half Moon Bay, California, on Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. (Juliana Yamada/KQED)

Hernandez-Arriaga never imagined how vital the healing part of the group’s mission would be after a mass shooting, which thrust Half Moon Bay’s farmworker community into the national spotlight and exposed the decrepit living conditions hundreds of farmworkers are forced to live in.

For far too long, Hernandez-Arriaga said, farmworkers in Half Moon Bay have contributed to the region’s economy with their labor but were largely left out of the broader community.

“[Latinos] are present in the economic workforce. We’re present in the job industry,” she said. “Farmworkers here are putting food on the tables for our community. Mothers are caring for the children of the community here. We’re not present in the way of cultural citizenship. When traditions are really alive in the community and there are spaces to bring us together, that creates healing and that centers healing and pride and joy and visibility in a collective way.”

I met Hernandez-Arriaga in the fall of 2023 when I reported on a program ALAS created to bring accordion classes to farmworkers as a form of music therapy. The arts are often treated as just a “tradition or custom,” she said, but it really is what’s known in psychology as “cultural sensory intervention.”

“Cultura is our medicine,” she said. “This is not something that I’m developing or that we’re seeing as new.”

Hernandez-Arriaga’s background is in social work and counseling. She earned her master’s in social work at Our Lady of the Lake University before moving to the Bay Area nearly 25 years ago to work as a social worker for incarcerated youth in Santa Clara County. She has since earned a doctorate in education from the University of San Francisco.

She moved to Half Moon Bay in 2002 with her husband and three daughters — one now 20-year-old college student and 18-year-old twins.

She volunteered as a counselor for young people and began to notice a familiar condition — kids feeling embarrassed about their heritage and like outsiders in their community, similar to what she felt growing up in rural Texas.

Both of her grandfathers were lifelong farmworkers. Her mother picked cotton and went to segregated schools, Hernandez-Arriaga recalled. Even though she was an award-winning high school student, she felt that she had to be ashamed of her Mexican roots.

Ayudando Latinos A Soñar (ALAS) founder Dr. Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga, right, embraces Lorena Acosta, left, of the Corazones de Oro senior program during a lunch at the ALAS Community Arts Center in Half Moon Bay, California, on Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. (Juliana Yamada/KQED)

“I felt the slow death of the loss of my culture, the loss of being proud of who I was,” she said. “I grew up with a lack of connection to cultura. Although I felt it burning inside of me, on the outside, I had to be very assimilated.”

Before moving to Half Moon Bay, Hernandez-Arriaga lived in San Jose, where Latine culture permeates.

“I realized after several years that this community of Half Moon Bay was, in many ways, suffering the same experiences that I had growing up in Texas: a lot of racism, discrimination, othering, not being valued for speaking Spanish, looking down upon,” she said. “And, I thought, this cannot be happening.”

Hernandez-Arriaga’s comments made me think about what representation really means. BIPOC communities talk about wanting to feel seen, but true representation goes further than that. We want to feel validated, celebrated and respected as integral members of the community.

Her response was to start a nonprofit that would address the needs of the community from food to cultural pride. ALAS’s operating budget grew to $5.3 million in 2024, up from $232,652 in 2018.

“When the shooting happened, the community came together and said, ‘We need to change living conditions,’” she said.

As it turned out, ALAS was already working on a housing development. The group partnered with Mercy Housing, a nonprofit developer, in 2022 to build senior housing on a city-owned lot in downtown Half Moon Bay. The project, known as 555 Kelly, calls for 40 apartments in a five-story building with a community center on the ground floor.

Hernandez-Arriaga thought that the outpouring of outrage and concern over farmworker housing would translate into urgency for 555 Kelly, but instead, the project was delayed by community opposition.

“All of a sudden, we were a year or more into the project, and it came to a really surprising halt when the planning commission and so many in our community said, ‘We do not want this here. We do not want 555 Kelly. We do not want farmworker housing — or we do want it, but not here in our downtown space where you’re proposing,’” she said. “Why are farm workers always hidden in the fields? Why can’t we have them downtown walking to their medical appointments, walking to church, walking to the mercado, walking to the parks?”

Criticism of the project included boilerplate opposition to development — the building is too tall and doesn’t have enough parking — but there was also significant pushback against the community center and communal kitchen on the ground floor. However, that space is crucial, Hernandez-Arriaga said, to create a sense of community for the building’s residents.

After a stern warning from Gov. Gavin Newsom, Half Moon Bay’s planning commission and city council approved the project last June. It could break ground in 2026 and finally welcome residents in 2028, six years after planning began.

“We are not done,” Hernandez-Arriaga said. “ALAS is going to fight this through because our farmworker community deserves that and more.”

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