Take a walk in Los Angeles, from Highland Park to Brentwood, and you’ll hear Spanish everywhere, in markets, in restaurants, on the street. About a third of LA County residents speak Spanish at home. Many people speak little or no English. Spanish is part of what makes L.A. L.A. It’s been around since the city was founded as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciuncula.
Yet when the region’s most consequential decisions are made — where a new rail line runs, under which neighborhood to tunnel, who benefits from a major infrastructure project — Spanish-speaking residents are largely absent from the room.
This is the result of a design flaw.
Public agencies in California are required to conduct community outreach, and most take that obligation seriously. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or Metro, translates documents into Spanish, hosts bilingual workshops and funds community outreach. On paper, the effort is real, and it far exceeds all others. Many cities and transit agencies rely on website translation buttons and call it outreach. Metro, at least, is trying.
But translation is not communication. When a project notice arrives in someone’s mailbox, or more likely on a webpage they will never visit, announcing a “scoping meeting on options analysis”, it throws everyone off. This especially fails someone whose first language is Spanish and who has never heard the term “locally preferred option” in any language.
The problem is not Spanish. The problem is that planning documents are barely understandable in English. When translated word for word, they become parsable only by a bilingual transportation engineer, not by those who must service the projects. The jargon-coded language of planning is already a closed door to almost all English speakers. For Spanish speakers, there is a deadbolt on it.
Language barriers are only part of the story. The second part is infrastructure, not of the physical kind, but of the civic kind.
When English-speaking homeowners feel threatened by a project, the response is quick and organized. Websites appear. Social media groups are formed. Email lists broadcast talking points. People who know how to write comment letters, or can hire someone who does, come to board meetings in large numbers. They understand the process: when to comment, who to call, which votes really count.
This machinery is so familiar to many people that they rarely question it. But it is a form of civic infrastructure built over decades, and it is largely unavailable to Spanish-speaking communities.
Results are measurable. On the C Line extension to Torrance, a group of English-speaking homeowners in Lawndale organized to protest the proposed route through their neighborhood. They had a website, a Facebook page, op-eds in local newspapers, and comment letters from retired engineers and lawyers. His neighborhood also had a large Spanish-speaking population. Residents of that neighborhood left almost no trace in the Spanish public record, few comment letters in Spanish, no board testimony, no organized presence at hearings.
The Metro board ultimately voted to move the line away from the corridor the agency had acquired for rail use decades earlier, at significant additional cost. This decision was made in a process in which Spanish input was largely absent.
Consider a project explicitly designed with equality in mind. The Southeast Gateway project, a 14.5-mile rail extension in southeast L.A. County, is designed as a major investment in equity, serving communities where the majority of residents are Latino and many live below the poverty line. Metro documents show extensive outreach: tens of thousands of notices distributed, community meetings, bilingual materials, targeted engagement with residents with limited English-proficiency.
But the public record tells a different story. In the environmental review documents, it is difficult to determine how many, if any, comments were submitted in Spanish. Under the California Environmental Quality Act, agencies must document outreach. They are not required to document whether the efforts worked. When one community appears on record, and another is barely visible, the outcome is not neutral.
Metro is building a transit system that will shape the region for a century. Some of the people who are most dependent on that system are the least represented in the decisions that define it.
The solution is to build the civic infrastructure that makes participation possible in the first place: trusted messengers who can explain why a board vote matters to someone’s commute, their rent, their neighborhood; community organizations that educate people about the process in simple language and Spanish; and methods of participation that do not require attendance at a weekday meeting at a government building.
What is needed more than just translation? A process that invites participation.
Chris Corrao is a Los Angeles-based urban planning professional specializing in public communications and community engagement.
