ABSTRACT
Meet the Montoyas is a series of six entertainment-education fotonovelas produced by the New Mexico Department of Health’s Diabetes Control Program. Each fotonovela tells, in still photos and bubbletext (something like comic books), how the Montoyas, a fictional Hispanic family in New Mexico, deal with the onset of diabetes on the part of the head of the Montoya family. These entertainment-education fotonovelas, available in both English and Spanish, were distributed to the public through health clinics and by other means, but they reached only a small portion of the intended audience. Then Meet the Montoyas was placed on the La Plaza Telecommunity’s Web site in 1998 by the Diabetes Wellness Project, a Federally funded health intervention in Taos County, NM. Community outreach trainers employed by the Project taught people how to use computers and the Internet, and guided them to Meet the Montoyas on the Web site (Photo 15.1). La Plaza Telecommunity is a local intranet, established in the early 1990s to provide access to the people of Taos County (who have the lowest per capita income of any county in New Mexico, which has one of the lowest per capita incomes of the 50 states).
