This is Latino USA, the radio journal of News and Kurturre Latino USA.
Latin Latino USA. I'm Maria Inojosa.
We bring you stories that are underreported but that mattered to you, overlooked by the rest of the media, and while the country is struggling to deal with these, we listen to the stories of Black and Latino Studios United, Latino Front, a cultural renaissance organizing at the forefront of the movement. I'm Maria Inojosa, ge Paso Latino USA. Listener Gostas. Today we continue our look at thirty years of impactful journalism made right here on Latino USA. This time it's
an award winning episode from our archives. Here's Alzheimer's in color.
Hello, So this is my life. Every week I have a skype call into my mom's nursing home in the Bronx. Hi, Mommy, it's Yvonne ybond Eha. Each call starts more or less the same. I reintroduced myself to my mother and remind her that this is her daughter, Yvonne speaking. How are you feeling? This is Margo.
Margita Dunieta, my younger daughter Margot is on this call and we are trying to get my mom to recognize us.
She's got Alzheimer's disease and it's been hell, and COVID nineteen has made it worse. The last time I saw her in person was in March. She knew who I was. Then it was a week before the coronavirus shut down in New York City, where she lives.
We wants to inform you that we have the senior confirmation that an individual at Best Abraham's Center has been diagnosed with COVID nineteen.
And now I get endless robo calls telling me that the virus is in her nursing home. People are dying there. I know I am losing her every second of every day if COVID doesn't take her Alzheimer's will.
While we understand the inconvenience this may cause, it is crucial that we restrict visitations to reduce the spread of this virus.
And it sucks, and the sky calls her hard. She is distant, unfocused. She can barely speak a few words and they rarely make sense. I was told to use music to reach her, Mama. She loves Latin music, she loves to dance, and so I try my Mom's name is Ramona Laddie or Ramanita Mota Laddie or Ramona Novelli Amota Haemo send Laddie if I want to tease.
Her, noamnt.
Nova Nova Nova Oi Oi, Novelia Oi a very ugly name. You used to tell me when I was a kid. You hated your middle name. She's eighty seven and it's been four years now since she was diagnosed. Four years of the lonely journey, which in the end, I walk alone because my mom has no idea what day it is, what year it is, how old she is, or where she is.
You don't know who I am.
You promised me you were never gonna forget me, and look at you not forgetting me. Thanks a lot.
From Fudro Media and PRX. It's Latino USA. I'm Maria Nojosa Today. An intimate an intergenerational portrait of one woman's journey with Alzheimer's and her family's commitment to remembering her life. For many aging Latinos, Latinas and African Americans, Alzheimer's disease has become one of the leading health crises. Access to healthcare, pre existing conditions, the quality of institutions that help aging people of color. All of these disparities become amplified by
a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. As more people live longer, the challenges around Alzheimer's keep growing. Experts predict that by twenty sixty there could be an over eight hundred percent growth of Latinos with this incurable degenerative form of dementia. For journalist Ivon Latin, this story is personal. Her mother, Ramona Latti,
was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in twenty sixteen. Yvonne has been documenting her mother's illness and brings us this intimate portrait of her mom's life before and after Alzheimer's.
Hello, Ola, I love my mom, I really really do. I can't say I have understood her or the decisions she's made. I can't say she understood me either. I can't say we belong on a latinx American experienced Hallmark card, or that our mother daughter bond is unique. She pissed me off and could be a pain in the ass. I know she would say that about me too. You know, the teen that likes to wear black and locks herself in her messy room with her headphones on. All the
time that was me. We had some epic battles, for sure. In some ways, I think we were the same person, living different extremes, each wanting so much more than what is expected of women like us. My mom faced dirt, poor poverty in the Dominican Republic where she was born. She joined a wave of immigration to the US at nineteen, and she surpassed every challenge thrown her way. I'm not ashamed to say I am desperate to connect with her, to understand her story and make it mine. Until the
world Ramona Laddie, my mom matters. My name is, said Ramona Latti. That was just four years ago, whilst going happens, going to happen. I'm mad. I watch you though, might sort of thing any see, don't worry, don't march. This was right after her diagnosis, when we could still talk to each other, and we were going on endless doctors visits looking for some hope, a treatment, way to slow the disease down. Some before scared of bit, but you're not scared now.
I'm how scared of that I've Paiduto's society.
Since my mother said those words, her life went on a rapid decline. The threat that holds us together gets thinner, The conversation's more difficult, and my profound sadness over losing her harder to manage.
My first impressions were that she she was able to propel her wheelchair with her feet, not her hands.
These days, my lifeline is the staff at the Beth Abraham Nursing Home in the Bronx where my mom lives. This is her nurse practitioner, Iris Nagan. She has supported me on countless occasions. Iris started working with my mom in January of twenty nineteen.
She seemed to communicate a little better in Spanish than in English. The impoverishment of speech and often the inability to walk are connected to having had dementia for a while.
Theever that's a song that I wrote that don't.
Alzheimer's is a brain disease. It slowly destroys your memories, Your ability to think, speak, walk, talk, Even the simplest tasks become impossible. It's a wicked form of dementia and it will slowly kill you. The type of Alzheimer's my mom has is not genetic, but my odds of getting the disease are slightly higher because she has it. Visiting my mom is always hard, and when I don't see her, I worry and feel guilty, and I don't even know if my skype calls help her at all.
At this point, I guess really is one of the things that happens with dementia is the world gets very, very small.
And always tells me that these visits and calls are hard on my mother as well.
Hi, and I think when people come from the outside world, they bring with them expectations, and I think the expectations can be hard.
On someone who has advanced dementia. But that has been the challenge of the disease, understanding it and holding on to Ramona Laddie. I find myself thinking about where she came from, who she was, her story pre Alzheimer's, because Alzheimer's is not who she is. It's not her story, It's just how her story ends. My mom dropped out of school in the eighth grade to take care of her little brother so her mom could work. Her father
died when she was twelve. She barely knew him. In the late nineteen forties, her mother and aunt came to New York City. It was the first wave of Dominican immigration, and although many were fleeing the brutal dictator Raphael Ruhedro.
Picturesque Trujlio City, capital of the Dominican Republic, turns out for the inauguration of a president, for whom the city is named. General Trugulio is the strong man of the Republic.
Many were just looking for work and an escape from poverty. My then teen mom was left to take care of everything at home, which now included her aunt's children.
But then immigration has brought in many people from the Caribbean area. Most of the immigrants went into the factories and found their homes in the tenements of America's growing city.
In nineteen fifty, she got a chance to come to New York City. She was nineteen, and she got a job in a pocketbook factory and went to beauty school. It's such a New York City story. She met Albert, my dad, in a beauty parlor in Spanish Harlem run by a Cuban woman who was married to a Jamaican man and as a result, had Jamaican customers, which included
my grandmother. My dad went to pick her up one day, saw my mom in the beauty parlor and it was love at first sight, even though she spoke no English and he spoke no Spanish.
Hello, Hello, Hi on Grace, aw you Okay, hold on a minute. Social distancing needs creating more crystal place.
Between yourself and others.
So I wanted to start a few years into my mom's journey in New York City, and to do that, I reached out to Grace Lawrence, or Aunt Grace, who has been very close to my mom for over sixty.
Years, and we became fast friends.
On Grace's ninety four lives in Queen's and her memory, unlike my mom's, is sharp as attack.
Okay, I might as well say, okay, when my age things happened up and down, but I'm okay, so.
To sleave it at that.
And Grace told me that she met my mom in the late nineteen fifties through my dad.
Well, I know that he became very close and he wanted to meet his girlfriend. His girlfriend at that time it was grand Mama, So he didn't say that much about her except that she was Spanish.
That's what they called latinos back then, Spanish.
And of course that didn't bother me at all.
When you first met my mother, what did you what did you think of about her?
Like your mother up to dance.
She was so pretty and vivacious, and.
That's how I remember her dancing with us in the kitchen to disco, salsa, meringe. Everything was hips, hips, hips, didn't matter the music.
She really was a beautiful young lady. And of course you know your mama was very stylish. She was always stylish.
Greece's parents were from Barbados and immigrants, so and Grace knew about the prejudice that existed between some Caribbean blacks towards Latino's, which my mom walked right into by loving my dad.
Albert's mother was Jamaican and she was a very strict lady, very flapa, and unfortunately she did not want to come to the wedding because her mona was Spanish.
So what was happening was this My grandmother was raised by a well off family in Jamaica, and although she was a maid in New York, she felt her son was too good for my mom.
She was very disappointed she didn't come to the wedding, but that did not stop the wedding.
Unt Grace was the matron of honor.
The wind went on and.
Your father kissed his wife. She was so proud of her.
But my grandmother, Nana did not accept the marriage. Nana was a dark skinned woman who would not accept the light skinned Latina in her family. My mom came from the Dominican Republic, a country with extremely negative attitudes towards black skin, but she didn't care that my father was black. The story on my father's side of the family was different. My mom was Spanish and that was enough to be rejected.
Ramona really worked established a relationship with her mother in.
Law, and this is something I really admire about my mother. She did not give up picture this. My mom lived on one hundred and h Street near Central Park West, and my grandmother was just about six blocks away. My father would visit Nana every week without my mom. So she worked on being the best version of herself to figure this out. She worked on her English, she worked on being a good wife, and she had hope no
matter how much she was ignored and rejected. But it took the birth of my older sister, Margie in nineteen sixty to finally warm my grandmother's heart. On my next Skype call to my mother, I try to bring up our old address fifteen was one hundred and h Street. Remember one hundred and h Street. Maybe that a dress the names of her family would trigger a memory Margie. Remember Margie?
Do iha Margie?
But I came up empty. My talk with Aunt Grace and April left me wanting more. The mom I have had for years now is a shadow of who she was, and I want that mother back so badly. Coming up on Latino, USA, she.
Was seeing this boy in her apartment, this like evil boy, and at one point it got so bad that she was hiding knives so that she could stab the boy.
Stay with us, Yes, hey, we're back. And before the break, journalist yvon Latti had introduced us to her mother's world and what it's like to have advanced Alzheimer's disease in the middle of a COVID nineteen crisis. We return now to Yvonne's intimate portrait of her life with Ramona, and just a warning, there's some offensive language in.
This part of the story. In mid April, about a month after the COVID lockdown started in New York, I recruited Nola, my oldest daughter, to help me dig through some old photos I keep in a big plastic bin in our home in Philadelphia. I took these photos out of my mom's photo albums when I cleaned out her apartment after she was placed in the nursing home. The day I packed them three years ago, I was crying, confused, and disappointed in myself for not being able to slow
down the inevitable. I have not looked at the photos since. Nola, this is my mom's wedding picture.
I've seen this one. It's really pretty.
Nola is twenty one and studies acting and directing at NYU. We're sitting on an old yellow sofa in the basement and the first photo we pull out is an eleven x fourteen black and white wedding picture. What do you think of her dress?
I love her dress.
I love all the lace in the photo. My mom is where a beautiful white lace dress and in her arms a bouquet of white flowers. My dad is in a dark suit behind her, holding her. She has a slight smile on her face. She's twenty six, and she looks almost regal and ready for what's next. She looks like you, Yeah, do you see yourself in her?
M H?
I think you've.
Always Nola looking like my mom has always given me comfort. Nola and my mom were always close. She was her Nolita, her oldest grandchild, and she loved to cook Dominican food for her and buy her clothes. But these photos reveal an Albuerlita Nola had never seen.
Waita wait, what's this one?
Nola pulls out a black and white photo booth image of my mom taken in the early nineteen fifties, that's when she first came to this country. She looks so good in this picture. She's looking away from the camera in a playful way. She's wearing hoop earrings and dark lipstick. The photo seems timeless. She's like working it. Can I have this?
Yeah?
I really like this picture. She looks like you and this really yeah, she looks like you.
When people tell me I look like my mom, I don't believe it. Oh my god, what a compliment. She looks so pretty. We are different colors. She's light skinned and I am dark skinned. I think she's way prettier than me. She's petite while I'm five eight. And when I was growing up, there was this idea that the lighter skins you are, the prettier I tried to explain this to Nola, and I was in light skin that
I wasn't even my mother's complexion or Margie's complexion. I was darker than my dad, and my darker skin led to bullying. I was called ugly and mocked. The first time I was called a nigger, I was in third grade and it was by light skinned Latino classmates. We were, you know, the ugly ones, and there was nothing I could do to change the color of my skin. My mom indirectly reinforced in negativity by constantly commenting on my hair and forcing me into painful, smaller shoes because she
didn't want me to have big feet. Although she was rejected by my grandmother for being Spanish, she held some form of internalized racism which was directed in me and my hair. Black hair is bad. Straight hair is good, you know, like the hair had to be relaxed, it had to be pressed. I couldn't sweat. Everything had to be about my appearance, and I was a tomboy. I wanted to play sports and wanted to run around. My
hair didn't really go natural until you were born. And when you were born and she saw you, one of the first things she said to me, was how old does she have to be before we can strain her hair? That was the game changer. I never relaxed my hair again, and my mom had to live with both my daughter's curls. Growing up with my mom could be frustrating. There were a lot of extremes. I grew up on one hundred and h Street between Manhattan Avenue and Central Park West.
It was rough back then, and my mom would not let us out of the house. My outside space was the fire escape. I wanted to share what that was like with my daughter Nola. There were murders and people got raped, and it's a lot of robberies. One of my early memories is one afternoon when my mom went shopping and came home with a red welt across her face.
She had been robbed. She had a man's handprint on her face because he slapped her so hard when he robbed her, and she was crying and she was really upset, and she called my dad. This was not a one off. My mom was robbed a lot. But the next week my mother got a shopping cart out again and she went right back to the grocery store. I admired her for it, but it made me angry. The neighborhood was
filled with abandoned buildings and so much neglect. Our building was abandoned by the landlord when I was a kid, and the city took it over. Fires were set aimed at forcing us to move. Most winters, we went weeks without heat or hot water. Sometimes it was so cold we all had to sleep in the living room with a space heater and close off the rest of the apartment. But my mom was happy. I think she would say those were the best years of her life. We were all together.
I feel there's a lot of her that I know, you know, and that I've experienced, and a lot of her that I don't like. I can see a lot of vibrants in her.
My mother's world was the pocketbook factory, the beauty parlor, and then finally the insurance company she worked for in their mailroom. She felt like a big success coming to this country, and she always raised me to believe how lucky I was to be here. But that wasn't how I felt. So like my mom in the Dominican Republic, I dreamed of a way out, and that was something that really drove me in my life was figuring out how to get the heck out of there.
I mean, I think they were both driven, you know, like you talk about wanting to leave one hundred and h Street, but like they were there because I believe to leftr like, so there's definitely like just a wanting to move up and out. I mean, did you guys not get along?
I really didn't understand her. By the time I was sixteen, I felt that had grown past her in so many ways. I struggled to understand the lucky sprays, the candle lighting for saints, the hoarding, the confusion. The next photo we pull out of the bin is of my dad, my mom, and my sister. And this is a photo of their first Christmas with my sister Margie. It's an eight x ten black and white photo. There in front of the tree, all dressed up. My sister is sitting on my dad's
lap and my mom is crouched behind them smiling. Margie has a smirk on her face.
Oh, Margie's such a smash.
Mommy, do you remember it was Margie's birthday last week? Mommy, Mommy, My big sister, Marjorie was killed in a car accident in nineteen eighty eight, when she was twenty seven. She was engaged and on her way back from respeech in Brooklyn when a driver high on pill struck the car her fiance was driving. Margie and my mom were real close. She spent endless hours in the kitchen cooking with her, talking to her. They looked so much alike and seemed to have so much in common. I fell close to
Margie too. She was my playmate, my friend, and always looked out for me. This is a really hard picture for me, Nola, because when Margie died, this was the photo that my mother was holding and running up and down the house screaming. If there was anything that changed my relationship with my mom, it was Margie's death. A few months after Margie died, I booked my mom and I a flight to Paris with a stop in Rome. I did it on a whim. It was a magical trip.
We scratched Margie's name on every surface we could, saw every tourist site, walk too much, ate too much, and drank too much. At one point, we were climbing to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, and she just zoomed by me with this huge smile. In her face, and when we got to the top there was a gorgeous view of Paris. I looked over at her and at that moment, there was so much joy in her eyes, so much hope. Despite her pain. My mom was alive
and living her life to the fullest. And I learned so much about strength just watching her survive the unthinkable, And for the first time in my life, I saw what we had in.
Common, Mommy. I was thinking about our trip. Remember the trip we took the Dominican Republic. Remember that trip we took, all the fun we had.
Do you remember? Twenty four years later, I took another life changing trip with my mom. It was twenty twelve, her eightieth birthday, and I decided to take her and my daughters Nola was fourteen and Margo eleven, to the Dominican Republic. I wanted them to experience where my mother had come from.
Yeah, that was fun.
That was a trip for me.
That trip was the first red flag that something was seriously wrong.
I think that.
Going to dr it was really clear because we saw Obbliet in the place that wasn't her house, and so like seeing her in comparison with like other hotel guests and like in an airport, Like I think it's a lot easier to be like, oh.
She doesn't understand how to do things that she should know how to do.
The trip started out uneventful. When we exited the plane, I grabbed Margo's hand and Nola held.
My mom's, and she had some kind of like idea that we had to go down some like secret corner that was like not where anybody else was going.
I heard you say we're Elita no, Ablita no, and then I was like, you know, Mommy.
Yeah, I realized that like me, as the older sibling too, you know, would have to like kind of keep an eye on her, you know, and take care of her, make sure that she didn't run off.
As we finally made it to the hotel, my mom morphed into a different person. I mean we all turned to her like, okay, Mommy, go for her. Check us in.
We were just kind of expecting that, I'll believe it would be like our resident Spanish speaker, like we tell her what to say in the Englishman, you'd say it in Spanish.
She spoke sis time.
All the time.
It was primarily oh.
Spanish, you know, and if it was English.
It was like English with like Spanish words kind of mixed in there.
And this was like this still makes me laugh.
I know it's not funny, besca. She turned to us like stone faced, and she.
Was like, I do not speak Spanish. My husband's American husband is American.
I do not speak Spanish.
And we were like what I was in shock. I had no idea what my mother was doing. My dad had died in nineteen ninety seven, fifteen years before, and my mom's first language had always been Spanish, and suddenly she was refusing to speak it. It didn't make any sense.
She was so distant in.
A place that we really thought she was going to like come alive and be really excited.
A few months after the trip to the Dominican Republic, we were joined by on Grace and her husband Paul for Thanksgiving, and Grace had noticed my mom had seemed off lately and confronted us both. My mother said everything was fine, and I chose to believe my mom.
Your mother did not want to get old.
That's another place she liked to stay the way she loved.
She wanted to be young, she did not want to get old.
But my mother was not okay.
She stopped liking people.
You know, she have friends, and then she didn't like them anymore. She got really reclusive, she got angrier.
In December of twenty fifteen, I decided to go with my mom to see her doctor. He suggested cognitive testing and gave us a referral. Three months later, after a series of tests, we ended up in a neurologious, packed bronx waiting room filled with black and brown people. When it was finally our turn, we were told my mom had out Gheimer's disease. The doctor wrote down a few URLs and told me to google it. A life altering, life ending diagnosis was given to her in the same
manner I was told. I was nearsighted. I grabbed my mother's hand as she stared blankly at the doctor. It was clear she was just a number to him, part of the statistic that shows a growing number of Latinos and African Americans stricken by this disease. I soon learned that African Americans are two times more likely and Latinos one and a half times more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than white Americans. And so here is where my
mom and I clashed again. She struggled to believe the diagnosis while I was researching the hell out of it and trying to form a fight plan.
But your mother said to me, you know how Ivana, she's always torn. I said, your daughter talks a lot of stuff, but a lot of stuff is true because she.
I was lost in my research and disgusted by what I found. All the issues that play communities of color converge in making Alzheimer's disease the last chapter of too many of our lives. Low socioeconomic status, high rates of cardiovascular disease, and a higher incidence of diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and depression are aggravating factors, even education factors. In Latinos also may develop symptoms at a younger age than non
Latino whites, and the community is under resourced. Income, retirement and pension benefits are far too thin to get too many members of my community the help the resources it needs. I thought about my future. We it's going to be my end too, and I search for answers, anything to help. A few weeks after my mother received her dietnosis, hallucinations began to take over her world.
She was seeing this boy like in her apartment. This like evil boy to me felt like big demon energy.
By the summer of twenty sixteen, things spiraled out of control. My mother's behavior became more erratic, even dangerous, and at.
One point it got so bad that she was hiding knives so that she could stab the boy. She needed an aid all the time because it just wasn't safe for her to be alone.
Six months after getting her original diagnosis, I scrambled to get her into a clinical trial. Latinos make up just seven point five percent of research participants, and I read that clinical trials are key to finding ways to help not only my mom, but other Latinos caught in the web of this disease. Since my mother was presenting with psychotic tendencies, her new doctor suggests that this could help.
Time demands were horrific. The driving her back and forth from the Bronx where she lived, to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Upper Manhattan, the waiting in the office, interviews with several doctors, the administration of the drug which she could not do herself. It was about six weeks of stress, and in the end she got the placebo. I was wrecked and like.
Things just got harder, like we couldn't do Christmas the same way.
I also discovered my mom had given away all her money to mail order psychics who promised her riches. She was always binge buying from catalogs, and.
I feel like and it's because you like love her and like see the best in her and want her to be okay. But you always hope that it's going to get better, and instead it gets worse.
And it did. The hallucinations of the boy and her apartment were joined by Ice agents, who she believed were coming to deport her, despite the fact that she was an American citizen. She would call me frantic that they were coming for her, begging me to help her. Things kept spiraling out of control until she ended up in the nursing home, the last thing I wanted to happen.
And now my mom, who worked all her life, learned English, raised two daughters, and gave me the tools to succeed, her life has deteriorated.
To this Mommy Ramona Ramonita Abita.
Long deal.
My mom's nursing home is big. It's residents are mostly black and Latino. Some strap boomboxes to their wheelchair so you often hear music like salsa or hip hop. The elevators are very slow and it's a bit run down. Before COVID they had started renovations, but it's a sad place, not a lot of smiles. Hello, Hi, Hi. When COVID first struck her nursing home, I took advantage of the skype calls they offered, Hi, Mommy, Hi, how are you.
The first two or three I made, she seemed to know who I was by the end of the call, but the last few I had she had absolutely no idea patients, they have no recreational activity. They're isolated a lot. Iris, the nurse we heard from earlier, told me about the extreme lockdown measures in my mother's nursing home after the first case of COVID nineteen was discovered back in March.
The little bit of stimulus they were able to absorb has disappeared.
My mom did have a group of friends. She did art classes, played bingo, went to church and loved the music group where they would play Celia Cruz, Mark Anthony and Beyonce to the residents who would dance in their wheelchair. Now she's wheeled into the hallway and placed six feet away from her friends so they can look at each other. I've seen a lot of patients experience a tremendous decline. That's my mom. I last saw her five months ago and have no idea if or when I will see
her again. I know there has been a lot of death in the nursing home, but I can't get a straight answer to how many residents have died. Sometimes I obsess over what's next, what will happen to her? What is the timeline? But there is none.
It's a hard answer. I mean usually loss of functional status, the loss of the ability to speak, weight loss, loss of ability to feed yourself, more apathy. All of that points to worsening dementia, and dementia is a fatal illness.
I have at this point on memories to get me through, like the last time she sang me Happy Birthday last year before she truly lost the ability to speak.
The virus they told you stay they are evil, A pre virals stay, and.
A little bit of Nola's wisdom.
I don't expect anything from her. I can always just see that face value and be happy that they get to see her at all.
Nola is so my mom's grandchild.
I don't care.
I don't care if she remembers me or not. If she knows my name like okay, And if she doesn't like, that's okay too.
And so I asked her she could reach her just one more time. What she would want to talk to her about?
Her hair is getting so long, and it's really solid, and it's really gorgeous. And I wish you could tell, like completely lucid Aqualita that her hair looks.
Really nice and my mom's hair, for the first time in her life, is natural. I wish I could tell her about my daughter Margot's high school parking lot graduation. And I wish I could tell her that Nolah's doing great in college and in love. And I wish I could fill her in on all the gossip, tell her stories about my hectic job. And I wish that she would remember me, always remember me, her daughter, her only living daughter. Hi, Mommy, it's Yvonne Ybonne. Do eat her?
It is, but she doesn't remember me anymore. So in the end, COVID nineteen did take my mom, not physically, but it took what was left of her essence. I love her, and I choose to hold her memories until I too Am just a memory.
Our thanks to Yvonne Lattie for bringing us that story. Yvonne is a journalist who also teaches journalism at New York University. Alzheimer's In Color is a collaboration with Black Public Media with funding provided by.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
We want to thank Denise Green from BPM, Jason Risendez, the organization Latinos Against Alzheimer's, and Janelle Pifer. If you need help or supportavocating Alzheimer's disease, contact the Alzheimer's Association at alz dot org. This episode was edited by Luis Trees and mixed by Stephane Lebou. The Latino USA team also includes Andrea Lopez Cruzado, Marta Martinez, Mike Sargent, Daisy Condreds, Victoria Strada, Brinando Leanos Junior, Patrisa Subran, and Elizabeth Loenthal Torres.
Our editorial director is Fernandes Santos. Our senior engineer is Julia Caruso. Our associate engineers are Gabriel Levayez and jj Carubin. Our marketing manager is Luis Luna. Our theme music was composed by Sea Rubinos, I'm your host and executive producer Mariango Hosa join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, remember not te Vayas e astor Approxima Cchoo.
Funding for Latino USA is coverage of a culture of health is made possible in part by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Latino USA is made possible in part by New York Women's Foundation, The New York Women's Foundation funding women leaders that build solutions in their communities and celebrating thirty years of radical generosity, and the Heising Simons Foundation Unlocking knowledge, opportunity, and possibilities.
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