Community embraces families of 6 workers who perished in Key Bridge collapse

In the back of a taqueria on South Highland Avenue, a handful of community activists gathered at two tables they had pulled together.

They tried speaking into a microphone, but it wasn’t working. Their efforts to translate each other’s Spanish to English were interrupted by the sounds of flames from the kitchen’s grills.

They smiled before asking the restaurant staff to turn down the mix of ranchera and Latin hits so they could tell members of the media that they had raised almost $100,000 in roughly six hours.

“We are all united in this pain,” said Lucia Islas, a member of Latino Racial Justice Circle, a group of community advocates that supports Baltimore’s growing Spanish-speaking community in ways big and small.

In the days since the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, government agencies, community allies and religious groups have mobilized people to support the families of the six construction workers who perished when a nearly 1,000-foot cargo ship lost power and struck the bridge early Tuesday. Two bodies have been recovered so far; four other people remain missing and are presumed dead. Such community support has deep roots in Southeast Baltimore, where mutual aid is a daily practice for Islas and others.

The six men were Americans, just not from the “America” that people often use to refer to the United States. They were family men, soccer fans, dreamers. They were victims of a catastrophic event that investigators are still working to explain. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time when a cog in the machine of global market demand lost control and crumbled the bridge supports they stood on like flimsy toys.

“We are made of steel,” said Carlos Crespo, another member of the group.

Members of the Latino Racial Justice Circle set up a GoFundMe site to support the victims’ families; they were shocked at how quickly it amassed funds. The group plans to distribute the money evenly among the six families, they said, while “passing the baton” to the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, which has organized a fundraising effort through a Baltimore City civic fund.

Officials with Baltimore city and county have worked long hours this week to attend to the families’ immediate needs.

“The needs are tremendous,” said Giuliana Valencia-Banks, immigrant affairs coordinator for Baltimore County, but so is the support from all levels of government, religious groups and nonprofits.

Her office will continue to assist the families and help raise money for long-term needs that are to come: financial help for rent, car payments, food and school. There will be gaps in health care and college funds to worry about, she said.

‘All the cycles of grief’

Donna Batkis, a licensed clinical social worker and longtime ally of Baltimore’s Latino community, spent significant time with the families of victims Tuesday and Wednesday as they awaited news about their loved ones.

“All the right people were there,” Batkis said.

Government officials were there, too. So were faith leaders and volunteers. The FBI had a team of bilingual interpreters relaying information to families as soon as it was available.

“They are in a lot of pain, they are hurting, they are living in this liminal space,” said Father Ako Walker, pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in Highlandtown, a predominantly Latino parish. Like Batkis, Walker spent considerable time with the families this week as part of a “ministry of presence” — to be with them, offer comfort and stand in solidarity. In addition to feeling sorrow, many of the victims’ families have unanswered questions and no closure, he said.

“Between numb, angry, if you go through all the cycles of grief, every single one of those was represented,” Batkis said, describing the mood in the holding room for families Tuesday and Wednesday. “There was a heaviness, but there was also hope. There was extreme sadness and fear and horror,” she said.

Batkis has been doing crisis response for years. But the families will need continued mental health support moving forward, she said.

Both the call for such help and the desire to provide it spread quickly, in part thanks to an online group through which Spanish-speaking mental health providers can connect and refer clients.

Amy Greensfelder, executive director of Pro Bono Counseling, a local mental health nonprofit that connects private practitioners with individuals in need, said many therapists were quick to offer their help and now stand at the ready. “People really just stepped up,” she said.

As this week’s events unfolded, Greensfelder thought of other recent events that have also befallen the local Latino community: a house fire on Lombard Street last month that left two children and an adult dead, a crash last year on an Interstate 695 construction area that killed six construction workers. Now the Latino community is being asked to be resilient again, she said.

This comes on top of the trauma that many immigrants still have after fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries, said Flor Giusti, a retired clinical social worker who has worked with Spanish-speaking immigrants in Baltimore for decades. And for many of those who are not legally authorized to be in the United States, they fear seeking help or stepping out of anonymity could jeopardize the lives they have established here.

“There are thoughts and ideas that weigh very heavily for some in the community that can be barriers,” Giusti said.

They pay taxes but may be afraid to open a bank account; they are frontline workers but may refuse medical attention.

“The fear is very strong,” Giusti said.

Backbone of a nation

Under Patterson Park’s blooming magnolia trees Thursday morning, members of the Redemption City Church, which is located in Canton, and other local pastors led a gathering in hymns and prayer.

“We come together with our community, with our neighbors, to mourn the losses, to mourn this tragedy, to come [together] alongside these families as we seek to pray and offer help and offer aid however we can,” said Eric McAllister, director of gathered worship at Redemption City Church.

Days earlier, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski and others had bowed their heads with worshipers at Dundalk’s Mount Olive Baptist Church, which is located about 1 ½ miles away from bridge.

“The city will stand with them [the victims’ families] through this, every step of the way,” Scott wrote on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Walker, the Sacred Heart pastor, said the religious affiliation of the families doesn’t matter — he said he would make his church available to them for funeral services if they so choose. He’s planning a prayer service in the coming weeks to honor the victims and intends to organize a financial offering.

The men who perished were from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico. There’s a sense of “journeying together” among those who make up Baltimore’s Spanish-speaking community, regardless of their native country, Walker said.

“If there’s a food distribution in Curtis Bay, we go to Curtis Bay. We go to [Prince George’s] County. Wherever they call us, we go,” Islas said Wednesday night.

They did it when Latinos were some of the earliest and hardest-hit by the COVID pandemic in the Baltimore area, Crespo said. They’re doing it now. They’ll do it in the future.

“As an immigrant, as a proud Baltimorean, we carry that in our DNA, that resilience,” Valencia-Banks said. “The level of generational trauma that exists in our Latino community is immense, but so is the ability to rally and to support each other.

“We may have no family when we arrive, but we build that family, whether it’s as family members join us or whether it’s a family that we make in our neighborhoods and our faith communities, at our job,” she said.

Immigrant workers are more likely than their U.S.-born counterparts to work in the service industry, as well as in construction and other dangerous jobs, according the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“When people attack our state, when people attack our city, when people attack our county for creating spaces for immigrants to call these places home, we need to remember that they are our siblings and they are the ones that are doing the things that keep our country going,” Valencia-Banks said.

Islas described the Latino immigrant experience this way.

“We didn’t come to invade this country, we came for a better life” Islas said. “We do the jobs that others don’t want to do.”

Islas and fellow volunteer Crespo touted the community’s work ethic. Their neighbors build, fix, feed, clean, direct, heal, grow, pray and pay taxes in this community.

They repair its potholes on a towering bridge in the middle of the night.

Islas, Crespo and their group helped raise $97,000 in six hours for people they didn’t even know.

“The men that lost their lives, they are Marylanders,” Valencia-Banks said. They were breadwinners supporting families both here and in communities thousands of miles away.

Walker tries to find deeper meaning in a local tragedy so closer to Easter — the Christian holiday that marks Christ’s resurrection from the dead.

“The families don’t carry this cross alone, we are there to help them as a community, as Baltimoreans, as Marylanders,” he said. “So even as we journey with this pain and this hurt [over] the loss of our six brothers, we know that death does not have the final say.”

Reporter Jess Nocera contributed to this article.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct when the Lombard Street fire was.

Daniel Zawodny

Daniel.Zawodny@thebaltimorebanner.com

Daniel Zawodny covers transportation for the The Baltimore Banner as a corps member with Report For America. He is a Baltimore area native and graduated with his master's degree in journalism from American University in 2021. He is bilingual in English and Spanish and previously covered immigration issues.

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