Baltimore Sun: Latino community and beyond rallies to support victims, families of Key Bridge collapse
Like many others in Baltimore, Susana Barrios awoke early Tuesday morning to a flood of messages asking if she was okay. She soon learned that the Francis Scott Key Bridge had collapsed into the Patapsco River. As with all tragedies, Barrios, vice president of the Latino Racial Justice Circle, started to wonder if members of her community were affected.
As the news developed over the course of that day, her thought crystallized into fact: six construction workers who were filling potholes during a night shift on the bridge have been presumed dead since Tuesday evening, and on Wednesday, divers found the bodies of two of those men. All six men, plus one construction worker who survived, were Latino, originally from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.
“Once we heard that there were workers on the bridge, and they were missing, we were like, I mean, we assumed that it was gonna be Latinos,” Barrios said. “When they realized there was people working there and those were the people who were missing, that’s when we went to ‘How can we help?’ mode.”
