Today, however, tandas are becoming more modernized, drawing interest from younger generations of Latinos in the Central Valley. The Education and Leadership Foundation, based in Fresno, partnered with Mission Asset Fund, a Bay Area nonprofit, more than three years ago to expand access to these traditional lending circles. Both organizations use the model as a way to help communities build savings and access small, no-interest loans through structured, community-based programs. Special Projects Manager at the ELF, Vianey Barraza, explains how tandas work. “You get a group of people, usually between six and 10 individuals, and they decide to lend to each other. They decide on an amount, and usually every week or every two weeks, one person will get the full loan amount, and everybody will be paying in, including the person that receives it,” Barraza said.
Traditionally, participants knew each other; they used to have family members, neighbors, friends, and coworkers within the tanda. Trust is essential because a person is less likely to take the money and never return. In the system operated by ELF, participants do not know each other.
And although this method of saving money is not widely heard of, it also is not totally new; in fact, it is a very old technique. Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, a professor of Chicano studies at California State University, Los Angeles, says that the origins go back centuries. “They’re not new,” Hinojosa-Ojeda said. “There’s multi-thousand year old roots of communal labor in Mexico, there’s 1000-year-old roots in Asia of communal work and communal savings and lending.”
A Sunnyvale carpenter who was rushed to the emergency room during an immigration arrest last year is suing the Trump administration, saying violent treatment by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and months of medical neglect in ICE detention left him seriously disabled.
Ulises Peña López, who was deported to Mexico in October after eight months in custody, said ICE officers beat him until he lost consciousness, despite the fact that he and his wife warned them that he’d been diagnosed with a life-threatening condition. ICE denies the allegations. Today, Peña López, 32, said he’s paralyzed on the right side of his body and walks with a cane, his vision and hearing are impaired, and he can’t work to support himself or pay for the medical care he needs.
“What I want more than anything, I can’t get back: to recover my health, to be with my wife and daughter, and to be able to work again,” he said in a recent phone interview from an aunt’s home in Michoacán, where he lives now.
His U.S.-born wife, Aby Peña, who has remained in California with the couple’s now-5-year-old daughter, Emily, said she doesn’t understand how ICE officers could treat another human being as her husband was treated. “It’s just inhumane,” she said. “And it also affects children because they’re being separated, and it’s a damage that is irreversible.”
In a federal civil rights lawsuit filed Monday, his lawyers say the arrest, on Feb. 21, 2025, led to “a cascade of harms,” including lasting trauma for Peña and their daughter, who witnessed it. By law, the complaint said, ICE “bears responsibility for the safety and well-being of individuals” it detains. Yet court records indicate the arrest triggered a heart attack and stroke. And the lawsuit said ICE and private prison contractors failed to get Peña López critical follow-up care, including an urgent neurological workup and physical therapy.
The lawsuit also alleges that staff at both facilities where he was held — Golden State Annex and California City Detention Facility, both in Kern County — denied him disability accommodations, such as glasses and hearing aids, as required by law.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages to compensate Peña López and his family and to punish the government.
In a statement emailed to KQED, an unnamed Homeland Security spokesperson said ICE arrested Peña López “during targeted operations.” It said “he resisted multiple lawful commands made by ICE officers,” but it didn’t address the lawsuit’s allegations that he was beaten. At the time of the arrest, an ICE spokesman told KQED the allegation that officers beat Peña López was “absolutely inaccurate.” The ICE statement said, “Any claims of subprime medical care at ICE facilities is FALSE,” and reiterated boilerplate language asserting that the agency provides comprehensive care that “for many illegal aliens … is the best healthcare they have received their entire lives.”
