This story aired in the September 11, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
It’s not an exaggeration to say: right now is a tough time for immigrants, even in the Bay Area.
The Trump Administration’s crackdown on immigration is contributing to heightened levels of stress and anxiety for immigrants across the nation. It’s good timing, that research conducted by "Somos Remedios," which translates to "We Are Remedies," is coming out soon.
The six immigrant women behind this community-driven research project are sharing mental health tools that are affordable and accessible, to San Francisco’s Latiné community.
KALW’s Wendy Reyes, spent the evening with Rosario Ortegón to learn how this project has impacted her life and what the findings mean for the communities who need it the most.
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Herbalism and Mental Health
It’s a windy overcast day in San Francisco when I visit Rosario Ortegón at her home. I notice her smiley eyes and short black hair immediately. Inside, there’s a large Virgen de Guadalupe display with a short table beneath it, almost like a shrine.
She walks me over to a wall filled with pictures of her daughters, from infancy to now adults. “My daughters are grown up. Since getting married, I’ve never worked. I’ve dedicated myself to them,” Rosario informs me.
She’s lived in San Francisco for 26 years with her husband and three daughters. She immigrated from Chiapas, Mexico, and what was supposed to be a short stay became nearly 3 decades. For most of that time here, she’s been a stay at home mom. Her husband and daughters were her routine, but just a few years ago, all of her kids moved out.
With her husband working night shifts, and her home now empty, Rosario felt like a caged lion, as she describes it. At night, she’d toss and turn, feeling desperate, restless, unable to sleep. This went on for days. She chokes up at the recollection of those nights.
She would try to self soothe, count in her head, think positive thoughts, but she’d suddenly start sobbing and feel the urge to jump out of bed and run off. “What is happening to me?” she asked herself. She prayed to the Virgen de Guadalupe by her bedside, searching for answers.
“This went on for several nights,” Rosario shares, “and I said to myself, ‘this isn’t ok, why do I feel like this?’” She saw a doctor who informed her that what she was experiencing were panic attacks. She was prescribed medication to help with the sleep and anxiety. “I took the pills,” she says, but the pills didn’t work. This is when Rosario turned back to a practice she’d learned as a young woman – herbalism. “I decided to focus on tea.” Finally, she was able to sleep, she says.
In her small kitchen, Rosario fills a medium black pot with water over the sink. She sets it on her electric stove.
Rosario shares about different herbs and spices and their healing or soothing effects. She drops a bay leaf in the water, milk thistle and dandelion for her liver, turmeric for its anti-inflammatory effects, black pepper to activate the milk thistle, oregano to help her sleep, and cinnamon sticks for blood pressure. She drinks tea like this everyday.
From Somos Esenciales to Somos Remedios
Stories like Rosario’s are typical of the people who make up Somos Remedios. Together, they explore traditional remedies from around the world that support mental health and overall wellness. Remedies like acupuncture, nature walks, and cold plunges. Their goal is to share these tools with the Latine community who either find therapy or medication too expensive or too difficult to access due cultural barriers.
Somos Remedios came out of a COVID-related project called Somos Esenciales, or We Are Essential, where people learned that turning to their community and culture, in a time of extreme isolation, helped them cope with mental health challenges. These findings came out of a practice called Participatory Research Action, says facilitator Adriana Camarena.
“ So this is a type of methodology that tries to trust community to know their own problems and their own solutions.”
People at the center of the problem decide how they want to go about the research and what they want to do with the findings. “It is incredibly informative, uh, rich in knowledge and very spot on. You get very quickly to what is at the core of an issue,” Adriana adds.
For Somos Esenciales, their research found that residents of the Mission District relied on everyday practices rooted in their culture – things like dancing, cooking, and praying – which supported their mental health. These findings were turned into a short documentary, a performance, a research paper, and received funding for two other research projects, including Somos Remedios.
Somos Remedios Takes on Their First Project: Long COVID
In 2023, this team of local immigrants took on their first project: the impact of long COVID on their community. After contracting COVID, Rosario had experienced loss of taste and smell herself. “I met with my doctor and told her [about about my symptoms],” but Rosario’s primary physician told her there were no treatments for her symptoms.
Rosario became determined to investigate. She and the other participants of Somos Remedios started asking people about their experiences.
Rosario couldn’t believe it, there were so many people who also suffered from long COVID. Their experiences mirrored findings from the Center for Disease Control which reports that those most susceptible to long COVID fall under the following categories – women, Latinos, people over the age of 65, those with existing underlying conditions, and people who have not received a COVID vaccine.
The research Somos Remedios conducted turned up a few other patterns. People reported feeling neglected by doctors. They relied on home remedies to treat their symptoms, things like anti-inflammatory foods. They also reported not knowing their health issues were related to long COVID.
Somos Remedios decided they needed to create a tool to share that information. They came up with loteria, or Mexican bingo, a beloved and familiar game in many Latine households. But in this adaptation, they tweaked the loteria card. Each square reflected a long COVID symptom, things like migraines, muscle pain, anxiety and so on.
They played this game at community centers and street fairs, giving out prizes. During these presentations, Rosario reports that people were surprised, “they’d say things like ‘wow, it’s like [the loteria card] is talking about me because I have [those symptoms]’”.
Somos Remedios used what they knew would engage their community to address their problems.
Fear, Immigration, and Power
Today, the problem looks different. With recent ICE raids, this is an especially scary time for immigrants.
Rosario says, for her mental health, she’s having to manage how much news she takes in. She doesn’t watch the news, when she's on Facebook she avoids doom scrolling, and with friends, she asks that they not speak about what’s going on.
In fact, she had a nightmare recently, “I was dreaming that I’d gone to La Raza [Community Center], but we weren’t really there. ”
She was heading to work. When she arrived her coworkers got in a van and disappeared. Then suddenly she was in a park, people were screaming and running in all directions, with ICE agents everywhere. “Too many”, she says.
Rosario shakes her head as she recalls her dream, she won't talk about it more. These days, she avoids going outside as much as possible. She no longer walks to work, something she used to really enjoy.
Mental Health, Stigma, and Empowerment
In this context, Somos Remedios is even more important to Rosario and the other participant researchers. This year, they dedicated their research to finding remedies that support their mental health. Facilitator Adriana Camarena shares their activities so far this year, “We've done volunteering at the Healing Collective at Hummingbird Farm and around Crocker Amazon [Park]. We've gone to temescal [or sweat lodge], we've also done paseos [or walks]”.
When they practice an activity, Adriana gives them a simple prompt, be aware, pay attention to how this impacts your mental state. After they complete a practice, they debrief. They meet twice a month and talk about what they felt. Adriana says members have told her some surprising things like, “I had never thought of a paseo as a remedy for mental wellness or a cold plunge or just…kind of unburden your heart with a friend.”
These are the kinds of things we do all the time and just don’t notice, she says, but just having that intention behind a walk, making dinner, playing loteria, that’s where the effect takes place.
Rosario says, before Somos Remedios, she used to believe therapy meant someone was “crazy”, a common belief in the Latine community. But these past two years, participating in Somos Remedios, she’s opened up to mental wellness practices, like acupuncture and therapy. “If it hadn’t been for this group… I wouldn’t have accepted a therapist,” she shares.
Now, she hopes that this research – influenced and led by her community – will do the same for others. She hopes to write a book, to share the practices and learnings of Somos Remedios – not rejecting western medicine, but incorporating traditional remedies communities already have at hand to support their mental health.
