It’s a busy morning for Su Casa Seymour. Outside of an office door heavily covered in English and Spanish flyers, a family of three waits for their turn. A little girl runs about with her parents’ phone, watching videos with the volume turned up.
Community health coordinator Monica Gonzalez opens the door and welcomes them in. The little girl plays with the fake vines decorating the wall.
“How can I help you?” Gonzalez asks in Spanish.
The family needs help signing up for a school and community garden program. The program has been popular this week, but what people need help with varies depending on the season.
In December, families come in to register for a Christmas program that provides gifts for children in need. Other times, Gonzalez helps clients register for Medicaid, translates letters and documents and refers them to immigration lawyers.
Gonzalez has worked at Su Casa, an organization that works to connect immigrant Latino families with tools and support as they adjust to life in Indiana, since August 2024. She’s from Guatemala originally, like many Seymour residents, but moved to Indiana in 2021 after meeting her husband online.
Gonzalez started at Su Casa as a volunteer, which she said helped her meet new people. She didn’t have family in Seymour, and it was hard for her to branch out. She knows other immigrants might feel the same way.
“You feel sometimes isolated because you don’t know how it works, you know?” Gonzalez said. “You don’t know what to do, where to go, where to find things, so it takes a while. It takes some time for you to get established, familiar with everything.”
Gonzalez had the advantage of already being familiar with English when she moved to Seymour, and she now teaches English classes for Su Casa online. She said the organization wants to give the community the skills they need to thrive on their own.
Jackson County is part of the Vecinas de Enlace community outreach program within the greater Su Casa nonprofit, which was founded in 1999 to address the needs of a growing immigrant Latino community in Columbus, Indiana. Su Casa also has nine Vecinas in Bartholomew County.
Su Casa Executive Director Ashley Caceres was born and raised in Seymour, but her parents are originally from El Salvador and Mexico. While growing up in Seymour, she said, her parents didn’t have the resources they needed to get their bearings.
She joked that she’s been an interpreter since she was 6 years old. Caceres recalled a time when she was 10 or 11 and had to explain getting a loan for a mobile home to her mom, which is the kind of thing Su Casa helps families with now.
“I didn’t know what an interest rate was, like, I don’t know what any of that was, but like, having to roughly interpret it for my mom because no one else was there for that,” Caceres said.
When Caceres was in Seymour’s school system, the number of Latino students in her school was pretty small, but the number of Mexican and Central American immigrants in Seymour has grown significantly in the past 15 years, she said. Its mayor thinks the growth is due to high-paying jobs with a low cost of living.
She said there were always strong leaders within immigrant communities, but resources for immigrants were sparse to non-existent when she was little. That drove a lot of her interest in getting into the nonprofit space around Latino needs and advocacy.
“I was always with the mentality of, ‘I want our families now to have the resources my mom didn’t have when I was younger,’” Caceres said. “Or what would have helped my mom have a better quality of life.”
Now that she’s the executive director, her experiences growing up have driven a lot of her passion and interest. She’s been with Su Casa since 2020 and has served in her current role since 2023.
On any given day, Caceres manages the office’s day-to-day needs, understands the needs of the clients and engages with grant and fundraising opportunities and partnerships.
She says the organization doubled the number of households it has served to about 1,600 in the past six to eight years.
“The need is still here, our community is growing outside of political rhetoric,” Caceres said. “Our community is wanting to stay and invest in this community, and so we want to make sure that we’re sustainable.”
Su Casa offers translation services on their website and volunteering opportunities.
Back at the Seymour office, Gonzalez hands the family a flyer for a children’s English spelling bee aimed to help kids build confidence in the language as they head out the door.
“See you later!” she calls after them.
Natalia Nelson covers immigration issues in southern Indiana. Her work is supported by a rural reporting grant from the Hearst Foundation.
