Migrant Teens Take to the Stage ANN ARBOR, MI (Michigan Radio) - Michigan employs thousands of Hispanic migrant workers every year to work on farms and in factories. They're paid minimum wage, live in cramped quarters, and don't get a lot of health education. A group of teenagers is trying to promote better health knowledge through theater.

Ines Perez lives in a tiny, one-bedroom trailer with her husband. It's just up the hill from the processing plant where she works a 12 hour shift every day.

About 150 migrants work at Arbre Farms. Every fall they make the trek from the Rio Grand Valley in Texas up to Walkerville in mid-Michigan to work in the plant.

Perez has worked on the farm for more than 30 years. Outside the factory, she spends her days cooking tamales and teaching other migrant adults how to live healthy lives.

She even used to drag her teenage daughters with her to do health outreach.

"But they started asking questions...questions that they weren't prepared for," explains Perez, "like sex, drugs, what was this about, what was the other about. So they said, oh my God, we need more training."

So, Perez took her daughters vision for a teen health outreach program to a group called Migrant Health Promotion. The non-profit applied for a bunch of local, state and federal grants and soon enough they developed something called the Informate Teen Health Program in 1995, complete with a traveling Teen Theater Troupe.

Christina Boothman is the Michigan resident who heads up the Informate Teen Health program in Walkerville. The program is made up of 4 migrant teens who provide health education outreach in the form of skits:

"Part of the population is illiterate," says Boothman, "so you know written word is not necessarily the best way. So this is a way to be interactive and put things in a real-ish setting and see how it affects them. Because if you tell someone: Don't get HIV, it's bad, that's much harder to grasp than to actually watch and see people interacting and discussing it."

The teen health aides become mini health experts by taking an intensive, 3-week crash course in topics that are generally considered taboo to talk about in the Latino community, like date rape, substance abuse, and HIV/AIDS.

The migrant teens then take what they learn and translate it into skits in both English and Spanish. They take the skits on the road, to schools and Tex Mex fairs around town.

Jesus Arriano and Stephanie Gonzales have been teen health aides for a while now: Gonzales for 4 years, Arriano for 3.

"It's a nice and cool way to spread our knowledge and show people what STDs are out there," says Arriano. "At the every end of our performance, they say: Oh I didn't know this, and thanks for teaching me that."

Arriano doesn't want to stop there. He wants to go to college and learn even more about health and science. After he graduates from high school this December, he plans to go to school to become a radiologist.

As for his friend and co-teen health aide Stephanie Gonzales?

"Well, I want to own my own business," says Gonzales. "I want to own a bakery. I want to bake cakes."

She wants to call it Gonzales Bakery, but her boyfriend, well he has a cheekier name in mind: Stephanie's Buns. © Copyright 2010, Michigan Radio