Search for: All records

In March of 2021, undocumented workers in New York state held public hunger strikes to call attention to the essential nature of their work during the pandemic and to demand that Governor Cuomo develop a fund to extend financial relief to “left behind workers,” undocumented workers otherwise ineligible for federal or state unemployment relief. These protests, organized by immigrant rights groups like Make the Road New York, were highly visible ways for undocumented workers to emphasize the embodied sacrifices they make through their labor in the U.S. economy, and they resulted in the New York legislature allocating $2.1 billion to an Excluded Worker Fund. As engaged anthropologists involved with Excluded Worker Funds in our respective states (Oregon and Colorado) since late spring of 2020, the protests in New York—and the national media attention they garnered—caught our attention, especially since the programs we have been working alongside for the past year-plus have received relatively little media or scholarly attention. Our goal in this SfAA News piece is to reflect on the policy potential of EWFs as a mode of social care and inclusion for undocumented community members and on the implications of our involvement with these funds as engaged, activist anthropologists. 

In this paper, we compare observations from engaged ethnography and participant observation with Latinx immigrants in Colorado and Oregon during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on lived experiences of structural vulnerability, as well as the ways in which COVID-related disparities have become internalized as stigma and have amplified immigrants’ experiences of stress, anxiety, and “aislamiento,” or isolation. Indeed, Latinx immigrants in the US—especially those without legal status and those in mixed-status families—face a range of exclusions, discourses of blame and (un)deservingness, and forms of precarity that have contributed to disproportionate risk, suffering, and fear as the pandemic has unfolded. At the same time, by laying bare blatant injustices and racist exclusions, the pandemic has prompted some Latinx immigrants in our research and advocacy sites to enact new forms of resistance and contestation. We detail the range of ways which, in efforts to stay healthy and to challenge discriminatory portrayals of themselves as either disease carriers unlikely to heed public health warnings or as “public charges,” they insist upon their own rights, worth, belonging, and dignity. Finally, we conclude by discussing some of the ways in which these two U.S. states—and the health and social service organizations working with Latinx communities within them—have attempted to address coronavirus disparities among Latinx communities, showing how particular approaches can assuage short-term suffering and improve access to healthcare and other social supports, while others may create a new set of barriers to access for already marginalized communities. 

In this paper, we compare observations from engaged ethnography and participant observation with Latinx immigrants in Colorado and Oregon during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on lived experiences of structural vulnerability, as well as the ways in which COVID-related disparities have become internalized as stigma and have amplified immigrants’ experiences of stress, anxiety, and “aislamiento,” or isolation. Indeed, Latinx immigrants in the US—especially those without legal status and those in mixed-status families—face a range of exclusions, discourses of blame and (un)deservingness, and forms of precarity that have contributed to disproportionate risk, suffering, and fear as the pandemic has unfolded. At the same time, by laying bare blatant injustices and racist exclusions, the pandemic has prompted some Latinx immigrants in our research and advocacy sites to enact new forms of resistance and contestation. We detail the range of ways which, in efforts to stay healthy and to challenge discriminatory portrayals of themselves as either disease carriers unlikely to heed public health warnings or as “public charges,” they insist upon their own rights, worth, belonging, and dignity. Finally, we conclude by discussing some of the ways in which these two U.S. states—and the health and social service organizations working with Latinx communities within them—have attempted to address coronavirus disparities among Latinx communities, showing how particular approaches can assuage short-term suffering and improve access to healthcare and other social supports, while others may create a new set of barriers to access for already marginalized communities. 

In this paper, we compare observations from engaged ethnography and participant observation with Latinx immigrants in Colorado and Oregon during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on lived experiences of structural vulnerability, as well as the ways in which COVID-related disparities have become internalized as stigma and have amplified immigrants’ experiences of stress, anxiety, and “aislamiento,” or isolation. Indeed, Latinx immigrants in the US—especially those without legal status and those in mixed-status families—face a range of exclusions, discourses of blame and (un)deservingness, and forms of precarity that have contributed to disproportionate risk, suffering, and fear as the pandemic has unfolded. At the same time, by laying bare blatant injustices and racist exclusions, the pandemic has prompted some Latinx immigrants in our research and advocacy sites to enact new forms of resistance and contestation. We detail the range of ways which, in efforts to stay healthy and to challenge discriminatory portrayals of themselves as either disease carriers unlikely to heed public health warnings or as “public charges,” they insist upon their own rights, worth, belonging, and dignity. Finally, we conclude by discussing some of the ways in which these two U.S. states—and the health and social service organizations working with Latinx communities within them—have attempted to address coronavirus disparities among Latinx communities, showing how particular approaches can assuage short-term suffering and improve access to healthcare and other social supports, while others may create a new set of barriers to access for already marginalized communities.