Juan Carlos Ruiz Malagon, M.S., M.A., a third-year doctoral student pursing his PhD degree in Public Health, with a concentration in global health, uses his lived experiences as a Latine, first-generation, and low-income scholar to reshape public health research and advocacy. While Latine communities are among the most affected by disparities in healthcare access, labor conditions, and environmental health risks, their stories are too often absent from the data or improperly represented.
“Through knowledge sharing, we were all engaging
– Juan Carlos Ruiz Malagon
in a compassionate approach to tackle challenges
that required openness, community, love, care, and
sharing about difficulties to determine the advocacy
needed in the community.”
To remedy this, Ruiz Malagon suggests a new framework of thinking: acompañamiento, or the grounding of research practice in sustained, family-like relationship processes that extend to broader forms of personal and social care for community partners in research. His article is included in the journal, Latino Studies.
As Ruiz Malagon explains, “Acompañamiento can be broadly defined as a praxis that cultivates social understandings through a familial relationship committed to supporting and being in a community with others. It can occur in various domains of relationships.”
Ruiz Malagon was first introduced to the acompañamiento model while working on a grassroots environmental justice project focused on farmworker rights. Collaborating with local promotoras, community health workers, he experienced the early stages of this practice, witnessing firsthand the power of co-learning, storytelling, and community-driven advocacy.
“Through knowledge sharing, we were all engaging in a compassionate approach to tackle challenges that required openness, community, love, care, and sharing about difficulties to determine the advocacy needed in the community,” shared Ruiz Malagon on his fieldwork experience.
Acompañamiento creates opportunities in public health research for mutual learning between researchers and community members that dismantle traditional academic hierarchies. By fostering more inclusive knowledge exchanges, researchers can leverage their technical expertise to more meaningfully support and uplift the communities they work and serve alongside. This approach also addresses key shortcomings in the public health sphere, particularly the tendency to pathologize illness in ways that distance scholars and academia from the realities of those most impacted by health disparities.
“This aspect of acompañamiento amplifies the reach of community voices and positions the research endeavor as a catalyst for broader societal transformations,” said Ruiz Malagon. “Our commitment to collaboration in the community requires us to constantly be engaged in advocacy efforts without silencing or being the voice for the community.”
By emphasizing a nuanced cultural understanding between researchers and community members, the practice of acompañamiento recognizes storytelling and lived experiences as valid and powerful forms of knowledge in advancing community-based public health research. Integrating this interpersonal approach into research has the potential to humanize both practitioners and the field of public health.
Driven by his early experiences in community clinics and environmental justice efforts, Ruiz Malagon’s research examines the social, economic, and political forces behind health disparities.
“This work comes from growing up in a family of agricultural laborers and confronting classism and racism throughout my childhood and education. Despite often feeling isolated in predominantly white academic spaces, I am dedicated to bringing a humanized lens of ethnic studies to the forefront of public health discussions,” Ruiz Malagon added.
