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Photo. A couple's debate over safe sex is told in Spanish and
English in comics like this one in a New York City subway
car. The comics are part of an AIDS awareness push aimed at
Hispanics. Associated Press
NEW YORK _ Guillermo Garcia spends his Sunday nights among the Latin-American men sipping beer and listening to female impersonators croon Spanish love songs in the gay bars of Jackson Heights.
Armed with Spanish-language brochures and condoms, the 29-year-old Venezuelan quietly tells men from Colombia, from Argentina, from Cuba about the dangers of unprotected sex, and of SIDA _ the Spanish acronym for AIDS.
Elsewhere in the city, health workers drive a Winnebago into drug-ravaged neighborhoods to give immigrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic condoms and bleach kits for sterilizing needles.
And on the West Coast, in Ventura County, Calif., Roberto Rojas carries condoms and the message of safe sex to the dusty camps of Mexican farm workers.
These are some of the front-line warriors in the battle to educate Spanish speakers in the United States about a disease claiming more Hispanics each year.
Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimate that there are thousands of AIDS educators like Garcia and Rojas across the country who travel into urban barrios, suburban neighborhoods and migrant farm camps where Hispanics live.
"For them, it is a labor of love to get the word out, to reach these hard-to-reach people," said Bill Parra, deputy director of the CDC's Office of HIV-AIDS....