Transcript of interview with Nora Luna by Maribel Estrada Calderón, November 7, 2018

AN INTERVIEW WITH NORA LUNA An Oral History Conducted by Maribel Estrada Calderón Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2018 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV – University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Maribel Estrada Calderón, Nathalie Martinez, Rodrigo Vazquez Editors and Project Assistants: Laurents Bañuelos-Benitez, Maribel Estrada Calderón, Elsa Lopez, Nathalie Martinez, Marcela Rodriquez-Campo, Rodrigo Vazquez iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) Grant. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iv PREFACE Nora Luna (1971 - ), the daughter of Mexican immigrants, recalls her growing up experience in the Las Vegas Valley. During her childhood, she and her siblings frequently persuaded their father to take them out to eat to the Circus Circus buffet. She enjoyed playing the carnival games at the Circus Circus. She attended Las Vegas High School. In 1994, she graduated from UNLV with a degree in criminal justice. Her education inspired her to work with the community’s youth. She tutored children at the Y.M.C.A. of Southern Nevada. Luna also worked for a program, Anahuac, which sought to deconstruct some of the myths that often prevent Latinos from attending college. In Reno, Nevada she worked with non-profit organizations to implement evidence-based practices for youth development. Luna has worked for Nathan Adelson Hospice as the Director of Diversity and Grant Funding since 2008. She seeks to find culturally competent care for Latinos and ensures that the hospice provides informational resources in Spanish. Her goal is to create bilingual teams of caregivers to serve the Latinx community. She ensures that the nurses who work at the hospice have a basic Spanish vocabulary that includes end-of-life care terms. Luna seeks to persuade Latinos to seek hospice care by reaching out to senior centers and having conversations with families. She wants to overcome the cultural and systemic barriers that discourage Latinos from utilizing hospices. Luna’s family has always played an important role in her life. She enjoys spending Christmas Day with her family. She decorates her Christmas tree with her nieces and nephews. She describes how her mother prepares buñuelos for their Christmas dinner. She also enjoys visiting her family in Chihuahua, Mexico. She likes to visit museums and cultural centers in Chihuahua, Chihuahua. Some of the most valuable lessons that she learned from her parents are that she should work hard and spend time with her family. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Nora Luna November 7, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Maribel Estrada Calderón Preface…………………………………………………………………………………………..iv Talks about her family history; parents migrated from Durango, Mexico; describes her childhood; studied in Las Vegas’ Sunrise Acres Elementary School; enrolled in English Language Learner (ELL) classes; Attended Las Vegas High School; describes the neighborhood she grew up in………………………………..……………………………………………….1 – 2 Describes her high school experience; worked for Y.M.C.A. of Southern Nevada; attended UNLV and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice; describes her community outreach efforts to help students apply to college…………………......………………………3 – 5 Shares a story about how she began to work for Nathan Adelson Hospice; She is the Director of Diversity and Grant Funding; implemented a Spanish support group; discusses the barriers that keep Latinos from seeking hospice care; talks about hiring Spanish-speaking employees; talks about her goal to increase the Latinx community’s use of hospices………………………..…6 – 8 Discusses family traditions; watches Christmas movies with her nephews; her aunts make buñuelos; visits Chihuahua, Mexico every year; Museum of Miguel Hidalgo y Castillo…...9 – 11 Talks about her family; father worked in a landscaping company; sister, Elda Sidhu, is the general counsel for UNLV; discusses why some family members do not speak Spanish; talks about Anahuac, a youth program; taught students about Mesoamerican Indigenous culture through poetry and food…………………………………………………………….………12 – 15 Describes how she applied for college; Shares the lesson her father taught her about dependence; talks about her position as a board member for the Las Vegas PBS; described the creation of the State Public Charter School Authority; compares public schools to charter schools; talks about the Mujeres group in the Latin Chamber of Commerce……...……………………...……..16 – 18 Discusses her involvement in the program U.S.-Mexico Border Communities Alliance; talked about the Cinco de Mayo con Orgullo Campaign; talks about the changes within the Las Vegas Latinx Community; talks about leisure activities in Las Vegas……………………………19 – 21 vi 1 1 Today is November seventh, 2018. My name is Maribel Estrada Calderón. I am at the UNLV Lied Library in the Oral History Research Center and I am going to interview Ms. Nora Luna. [Barbara Tabach is also present.] Ms. Luna, can you please spell your name and tell me how you identify? N-O-R-A, Nora. And then Luna, L-U-N-A. I identify as Mexican American, Latina, Chicana. Let's begin with your family history. Tell me where your family is from and where you grew up. My mom and dad are both from Durango, Mexico, but that's really more right on the border of Chihuahua, Mexico, so most of my family now is in Chihuahua. They got married and they moved here to Las Vegas in 1971 and I was born in December of 1971 here in Las Vegas and I grew up here. I've lived here all my life except for five years that I lived in Reno, Nevada. But still in the state of Nevada, so I've been here all my life. What was it like growing up here in Las Vegas? It was nice. I went to Sunrise Acres Elementary School for the first couple of years, for kindergarten and first grade. I was—they called it ELL student back then, so I had ELL classes. I remember one time—I don't know if my mom forgot to pick me up or we got out early or whatever, and so one of my friend's mom drove me home, and they were African American. I had to give her directions and I didn't quite know how, so I had to go by trial and error. I remember she said, "Left or right," and I didn't know which one meant, so I said one and it was wrong. So as soon as she started to turn, I said, "Oh, no, no, left." It was like, I don't know what that is, but I'll try fifty-fifty. Then I went to Fay Herron Elementary School as well and I went to Oran Gragson Elementary School. Then for seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth grade, I went to a Christian school; it was called Cavalry Chapel back then. Then I graduated from Las Vegas High School. It's hard to compare to another city. I know people always think, oh, Las Vegas; it's crazy and all that. My parents didn't even work in the casinos. My dad worked in landscaping. When I was young my mom just worked part-time cleaning houses, so she was usually home. We went to church. We had friends. We lived on the east side, Stewart and Lamb area, so it was pretty calm. We would go to the casinos sometimes, on Sundays after church we'd go to the buffets. Our favorite as kids was going to the Circus Circus, so we'd always have to fight with my dad because he would say, "That food is disgusting. I don't want to go there." We said, "No," because we'd get to play games and all that. When he would win out, we would go to the Tropicana buffet, and when we would win out, we would go to the Circus Circus buffet. It was probably like four ninety-nine lunch or something like that for lunch. So it was nice. My mom always took 2 2 care of most of our school and lunch and getting us prepared for our clothes; all that kind of stuff. My dad, he took care of the income earning and worked. It was a nice life. They were both really family oriented. Every year we would travel to Mexico to visit our family, so that was always a big highlight preparing for that. My dad had a truck and then they had a camper. It was in the summer, so that was really hard. I remember that was horrible in the heat until we got there. It seemed like an eternity. It was thirteen hours from here to El Paso and then from Juarez to—up until I was ten, my grandparents lived on a farm, so that was another ten hours. Then when I was ten, they sold all that and moved to the city, to Chihuahua, Chihuahua, and so that's where we would go and visit them. They lived up until a few years ago and we would still go visit them. I still go every year. I'm going next week to visit my family there. Yes, we still like to do that and we're still close to our family there. The best part when we visited there was running around in the cornfields and just the animals. Everything was freedom. It was nice. Why did your family choose Las Vegas? They had a relative here. I mean, I think that's how most people when they move somewhere, it's like there is someone there. My dad's sister was here, but she right away went back to Mexico. She didn't stay here. They must have been working here just temporarily. And so that's why they came here. We actually didn't have too much family here. In terms of close family, all my mom and dad's brothers and sisters and cousins, they all lived in Mexico. We had a few family members, a couple of my dad's cousins lived here, but they were more distant, so we might see them once or twice a year. Then later on a few of my mom's aunts moved here, and so we would see them. Now we have a little bit more because the family grows, so with them and their kids and now their kids. That's why they chose Las Vegas. BARBARA: I'm going to ask a follow-up question. The ELL classes, was that obviously because you were only speaking Spanish at home? Yes. How about the neighborhood you grew up in, how would you describe that? In that neighborhood I do remember there being other Latinos. My mom had friends on the same street. They were pretty new immigrants, so I was five or six, so they had only been here five or six years. My mom didn't speak English either. I do remember being friends with other kids on the street that all were Hispanic, too, probably Mexican ancestry. But we only lived there when I was in kindergarten and first grade. Then when I was in third grade, we moved to North Las Vegas, and there I don't remember there being any other Hispanic people. They were mainly African-American people. I remember I was friends with—they were more Anglo and African American on my street. 3 3 Tell me about your high school experience and how that influenced your college career. In high school the first two years I went to that Christian school. It was really small. I don't remember them talking too much about careers or anything yet, maybe because I was only ninth and tenth grade. It was really conservative. All the political science and social studies classes and all that were very much about the issues of the day, the conservative side of things, like what's the right way. I remember praying for Ronald Reagan to be elected or re-elected. But the school actually closed and that's why we left. I don't know if it was financial issues. Then I went to Las Vegas High School and it was the old Las Vegas High School downtown. I really loved it. Before they always tried to scare you that, oh, public school is so scary and there's gang members and drugs, and all this stuff. I'm sure there were, but I didn't see any of that. It was totally fine. I made lots of friends and it was a lot of fun. In terms of career-wise, the only thing I really remember counselors talking to me about was—apparently there was some kind of scholarship at the time for Hispanic students that wanted to go into teaching, and so I remember my counselor called me in and said, "Hey, there's a scholarship available if you wanted to go into teaching." I was like, "No, I don't want to be a teacher." "Okay." So that was it. I think, oh, I should have studied that. I could have gotten that and done another major or something like that. I didn't really think too much about the money or I didn't know. But at the time, just like now there's different trends, everybody wanted to be a FBI profiler. I think this was the time of Silence of the Lambs. I wanted to be in the FBI or something in that area. I ended up studying criminal justice. I did apply to the FBI and I did make it up to a certain level. Once I studied criminal justice, most of the classes were really more like sociology and prevention and youth development, at least that's what I took. I think now they have more administration of justice, which is policing, but really back then when I studied it, it was more sociology. I ended up really thinking more of prevention and what could I do instead of arresting people? What could we do to make society better to prevent crime? Up until this position I worked more in youth development. My first job was at the YMCA of Southern Nevada and I did tutoring programs in the schools for life skills. That was popular back then, doing life skills for kids. There was an intervention program where kids that were arrested for the first time, they would be referred to our program. There was also a parenting program. Parents whose kids had been arrested, they would have to go through our program, so delivering, for parents and youth, skills to help prevent reoffending. I did that for a few years. Then I worked for UNR for thirteen years. There we had a federal contract to do substance abuse prevention and youth development-type training and technical assistance to nonprofits and to state agencies that worked with youth and did stuff around substance abuse prevention, college access; that kind of stuff. 4 4 Is that where you attended college, was at UNR? I went to UNLV for my bachelor's. I graduated in '94 with criminal justice. Then when I moved to Reno to work for UNR, I got my master's in education. I should have gotten my Ph.D., but didn't. It's never too late. I know, I know, because I would tell the kids the same thing, like time is going to pass anyway. Actually you all have a new degree, the public policy doctorate. That looks interesting. You'll have to check it out. Yes, yes. What drew you to working with kids and youth in the community? From studying criminal justice and also one of my favorite professors was...Dr. Sheldon? I should know his name. It's been that long. I think he still works. We talked a couple of years ago. He really focused on prevention and the effectiveness of prevention, like even having preschool and those programs, how they really help protect youth from going into crime. Doing that I realized, well, that would be more effective and more what I would want to do. We had a couple of guest speakers from the DEA and they made it sound all exciting. But I thought, what? "Oh, we really need women. Everyone sells drugs to women. So we could help catch drug dealers." I was like, I don't know if I want to lie to people and act like I'm trying to buy drugs to arrest them. It just didn't seem like something I would really want to do, so that was it. I really only worked with the youth at the YMCA. Then when I went to UNR, it was really more working with organizations that worked with youth on implementing evidence based practices for youth development, substance abuse prevention, college graduation; that kind of stuff. I worked there for ten years in that area. Still at UNR, but through the cooperative extension, I worked in college access programs and that's when I went back to working with the high school students on helping them graduate and looking at how to pay for college and how to access FAFSA, working with their parents to help them understand, what does a GPA mean? It was mainly Latino parents. The U.S. education system and how they could be involved. How did the Latino parents react when they knew that people were helping their community? Were you also involved with the parents? Yes. It was actually really interesting because people would always say, "Oh, Latino parents are not involved," or, "It's hard to get parents to go to these things." But I don't know. Those years that we had those programs—that was called Juntos, was the program for the parents and the youth to come, it was for high schools. We did it at thirteen high schools, what would be 5 5 considered high schools in high-risk areas, like Rancho, Chaparral, Canyon Springs, Western, Bonanza; all those. Some of those schools, like Rancho, there were eighty families in there. It would be full. It was a six-week program in the afternoon. We would bring food and that way they didn't have to worry about dinner. It was all experiential. There was even the College Journey Game and the FAFSA and the GPA. They'd look at report cards and you would explain everything. It was interactive. I think it worked really well. I think part of the success, it was a lot of the relationships with the school people. I'm not even going to say it was us. I think the curriculum was good and they were interested in it, but all those parents wanted their kids to go to college and they wanted to understand what they needed to do and how they could do things. It was really well received. We did an evaluation of it—some of the results were published—in terms of the content, the learning and things like that. It was really well received. I think there were one or two schools where maybe there were less parents, like maybe only ten. It also had to do with the relationship with the school people to the families because they were the ones who were really doing the invitation. We would try to “sell” it to the school counselors or principals. Then if they agreed they would invite families to come. Some of them went all-out to invite the families. They would have their mariachi do a concert and once they were there they would say, "Oh, if you want to sign up for this program that will help you understand how to help your kids get to college, this is what you do." We'd be there to sign them up, give them all the information. It took a lot of effort on their part, but it was worth it because then we'd get all those parents there. What years were you doing that? I've been at Nathan Adelson eight years. The three years before I came to Nathan Adelson, so 2009, 2010, 2011; something like that. When you were growing up, were there any groups that were helping the Latino youth get through school and college? Gosh, not that I can remember. I know that there was a Hispanic Club and I was a member of the Hispanic Club at school, but I don't really remember what we did. I don't remember anything for parents per se or workshops on college or anything like that. Now I know there's TRiO and all these other things. They could have existed, but I didn't know about them. How did you transfer from that environment, from helping kids and people succeed in education, to Nathan Adelson? You know we had the recession and all state employees had furloughs at that time, so we had five percent furlough. Then UNR, I think they just had to cut and the president chose to cut extension across the board. All the faculty were going to be cut to 75 percent FTE and that was on top of the five percent furlough that we already had. At the same time—he had been my boss at the previous position at UNR. His wife is Carole Fisher. His name is Gary Fisher and his wife 6 6 is the president and CEO of Nathan Adelson Hospice. He said that they wanted to do a Latino outreach program and maybe I'd be interested. I said, "I don't know anything about hospice." He said, "No, no, you can learn that. It's the same thing that you've been doing in terms of doing needs assessment, developing a program, implementing, all of that, just finding out what hospice is." I applied and they offered me the job. I remember I probably took two or three weeks or more to decide because I thought, I don't want to leave UNR. I love what I'm doing. But then I was like, oh my gosh. That was a thirty-thousand-dollar pay cut and this was going to be a thirty-thousand-dollar pay raise. I kept on thinking, okay, it's not just the money; it's quality of life and what I'm doing and my mission. But I thought, well, healthcare, they're still growing. I had just bought a new house. I'm not married; I'm single, so it's not like I can supplement my income with a husband or partner. Obviously, I chose to go to Nathan Adelson Hospice. It really has been amazing. I learned a whole new field. What they do there as a nonprofit is amazing. I've gotten to help people. Also, I'm in the foundation now and so we go to so many events. They have been fun. Friends are like, "Do you ever need a date for stuff?" We go to a lot of the galas and we do a lot of events. We put on concerts. We go to other organizational events. It's fun. It's interesting. I get to meet new people. It's very nice. What's your position there? My position is director of diversity and grant funding, so they kind of mixed two separate things. I was doing the Latino outreach, so I'm doing some of that, relationships with some of the diversity organizations, such as the Latin Chamber, and then making sure that we have all our stuff in Spanish and we have culturally competent care for Latinos and then writing grants. Latino outreach, how did you help form it and shape it into what it is today? Just looking at what I had done before in terms of program development, first I did a whole literature review on Latinos in hospice care. I did a readiness assessment; it's this protocol from the University of Fort Collins where you ask stakeholders certain questions and you can do an assessment of what stage we're at. I did interviews with stakeholders in the community. I also did focus groups with Latinos around hospice care. Then I did interviews of past patient families. Normally that should take a year or before in terms of the needs assessment, but I probably did that in six months and then used that to develop a plan, like, okay, this is what we need to do; we need to make sure we have all of our stuff in Spanish; we need either a bilingual team of hospice care providers or a certain percentage of bilingual staff in every department; and we need to make sure we ask people's language. Of course, it's required by law to ask ethnicity. It probably was language, too, but we weren't really doing that too much. Especially after the Affordable Health Care Act, you do have to ask language. Asking for a person's language, that way you can decide who is going to be the care provider because most patients go to their home and that way 7 7 you can create the team that's going to be going to their home. Then making sure, if I didn't already say this, all our materials were in Spanish. We didn't have a Spanish support group, so we implemented a Spanish support group; that was me at first. I had to go to a training on providing grief support because I didn't know anything about that either. We had that. I developed several trainings on working with Latinos in hospice and end-of-life care that we would do with a lot of the hospice social workers and case managers and physicians when that was possible. We'd give you a CEU and then you'd learn about working with Latinos and the culture and then also it would keep us at the top of their mind whenever they had Latino hospice patients. Oh, make sure to refer them to Nathan Adelson Hospice; they'll take good care of them. Those were some of the things. Media. There's definitely more things that I would want to do that we're still working on that we haven't always done, like it would be great to get community health workers. That's what I'm actually working on right now, to do a proposal for community health workers around end-of-life care. Do you receive a lot of Latino patients there at hospice? No, and that's why there's a need. Latinos, as you know, are about 30 percent of the population here, but they're only nine percent of our patients. But also because we do tend to take care of older people, obviously, for it being hospice. It definitely should be more. It's still not representative. I think it should be 15 percent. It probably should be close to double the opportunity in terms of Latinos who are at that age who are at that terminal diagnosis that would benefit from hospice that pass away without hospice. Are there cultural differences that affect that? There's a variety. According to the literature, one of them is hospice is a newer concept in Latin American. There are hospices, but they're not called that, so that is one thing. There isn't a word for hospice in Spanish. There's the word hospicio, which sometimes people translate it to, but that word means orphanage or homeless shelter. That's a barrier. That's a disconnect. The misperceptions about hospice or hospicio is for people that have heard of it, they think it's somewhere you would abandon someone or for someone without family; it's for someone that has no resources; that's totally poor; and they think it's a place. In general, people think it's a place for a type of care. They think that you would go leave someone there, not that hospice providers can go help support you at your house. Physicians are a little less likely to refer Latinos thinking that they wouldn't want it or that they would be opposed to. There's a bunch of barriers to it, so some cultural, some more systemic-type things. So you have to work against that. Yes, there's so many things, yes. 8 8 Are there other hospices around the country that you work together to try to overcome these challenges? I haven't worked really closely with them, but especially at the beginning I did reach out to many who are doing some really good things. There's a hospice in Santa Cruz who developed this Fotonovela around hospice. There's a hospice in Arizona that has a Hispanic nurse practitioner who heads up their Latino education program. There's another hospice back east that I've worked with. The person there, her name is Deborah and she's a grief counselor. There's not one hospice that has all of those things. There are some hospices in Florida that do a lot because all of their population—or even El Paso—most of their population would be Hispanic, but then in those cases, they're not doing anything special because that is just their population. I have tried to get bits and pieces from different people about what they're doing and how they're doing it. We've borrowed some materials and that kind of stuff, language things. Once you educate a family or a group of people, are they less adverse to using the services? Yes, they are. It's just sometimes it's a little bit of a process. That's where I feel like making sure we have a good person that's culturally competent and bilingual in the admissions because that conversation can take longer than it does with someone else. It might take two hours today and then I have to come back tomorrow and then I have to talk to the whole family. Then, "Oh, this person is working. Can you come back again and talk to this person?" The other thing that came out in the focus group and interviews is that the time for people to really understand hospice is not necessarily when they need it, but beforehand. At that time there's already stress and there could be a suspicion, like, oh, they just don't want to treat me; they just want to kill me. As hospice, we provide care. But if they understand we're not doing curative, then it could be like, why don't they want to treat me? Versus just do comfort measures. I think if people knew more what it was in general before they needed it, then they would be more open to it. That's why we do a lot of actual training on advance care planning, so we have a program on that. We have beautiful materials. We have a website. We try to do workshops all the time. We go to senior centers. Again, it's hard to get people to go to that. Who wants to go to that? It's a lot of effort to get people to go to those. But it's important. Obviously we see people who have their directives in place and how much smoother, conversations with their families and directives and all that. I'm interested in the people you hire who speak Spanish and who know about the different Latino cultures. How do you select them? Do you teach them about other Latinx cultures? I work with HR a little bit. Oftentimes they just need people, and so sometimes I do try to say to them, "Let me talk to them before you hire them. If they speak Spanish, I want to make sure that they really speak Spanish or how much they know." Sometimes I do, but most of the time they're 9 9 going to hire them anyway because we need people. They're just getting the people. Right now we probably have the most bilingual nurses that we've had; we have about four or five. What I do is, every couple of months or about twice a year I'll do a training on medical Spanish and interpreting for all the bilingual staff, and so they'll attand that. Then that will give me a chance to assess their Spanish and if they really can communicate or interpret with people. It's our policy. We make a list of bilingual staff that can interpret; that have had that training. In that training we talk a little bit about using universal or broadcast Spanish terms or the proper terms and a little bit about different subcultures within the Latino population and understanding that. But the certified medical interpreters that I know here are really good about that; they really understand the different classes and different countries and vocabulary. Our staff is not going to have that level of knowledge. They'll get to know it as they do it or they might have a little bit. If they have the basic Spanish vocabulary, I try to teach them our medical terms for end-of-life care, advanced directive, palliative, and blah, blah, blah. Then that's how they communicate. What have been some of the biggest obstacles that you've encountered while working here in Nathan Adelson Hospice? The goal is to try to increase Latinos to use hospice, and so I think initially there was a lot of support, everybody was onboard, but it feels like it has died down, the enthusiasm died down, and so I think that's an obstacle, like now let's focus on something else. So I see that as an obstacle. Now I'm given other tasks and I do other things. You just give them other tasks to encourage them? I mean, I'm given other tasks, so I don't have all the time to do on that Latino program. Since you were talking about culture, tell me about your favorite traditions and cultural celebrations. Probably Christmas Eve would be mine. My mom gets really frazzled and nervous and doesn't like big groups, so it's been about at least ten years that I took over Christmas Eve because she only wanted to invite us and we're really boring. There's three of us; she has three kids and their kids. You need a big, big thing for Christmas. We do Christmas Eve at my house and I invite all the extended family. Obviously, we cook. We have music. Last year I hired live music. I actually have to look into that for this year. My dad will do a fire in the back. After everybody is done eating and everything, the kids dance, so they look forward to that. Yes, I like that. Actually something similar was asked of my nephews the other day and the eight-year-old nephew wrote out a little essay and my sister sent it to me. I never know with boys and kids. She sent