From the Editor: The Art of Survival in the Age of Coronavirus

This issue of Chiricú Journal was conceived in 2019 as a space for considering how art can make visible the lives of migrants seeking refuge or asylum. Inspired by undocuartivists working in the United States (featured in our Spring 2018 issue), and by the ongoing plight of refugees and migrants in contexts far from US borders, such as the Mediterranean and South America, we wished to draw connections between national and global contexts of migration, and between art and migrant conditions. Professor Leonardo Tonus (Sorbonne Université), a specialist of Lusophone literature and a writer himself, graciously agreed to curate and contribute to this issue. We issued a call for submissions in the summer 2019.

Since then, so much has changed.

Our worlds have been torn asunder. The novel coronavirus (a.k.a. COVID-19) sweeping the globe has taken a colossal toll, infecting 12 million and claiming 540,000 lives; upending economies, livelihoods, and social relations; disrupting routines, relationships, plans, expectations, travel, and sleep. We are nowhere near the end of the crisis and already its material cost is staggering. Unemployment has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. Economic productivity and consumer spending have plummeted. Transportation networks and industries operate at a fraction of their pre-pandemic heights. And the psychic toll is beyond measure. Emotional suffering is captured not in statistics but in mostly private expressions of loss, grief, mourning, loneliness, or the longing for a return to normality. But life before COVID-19 was hardly ideal.

The pandemic has laid bare truths that ought to hold our attention long after the crisis ends. It has magnified social inequalities determined by race, income, zip code, and legal status. Health disparities that for decades have impacted immigrants, rural communities, and people of color (African American, Indigenous, and Latinx communities, especially) have led to higher death rates among these populations. As of this writing (July 9, 2020), more than 3.1 million US residents have been infected with COVID-19 and more than 134,000 have died. The tragic consequences of health disparities are painfully clear in the data: The Navajo Nation, with nearly eight thousand individuals afflicted, has seen 378 loved ones perish, the highest per capita death rate of any state or locale in the country; African Americans are five times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than non-Hispanic whites; and Latinx individuals are four times more likely.

We know that those “on the front lines” of the disease—health care workers, first responders, food and transportation workers, particularly—have seen higher rates of infection and morbidity than the general population. Smithfield Foods, one of the world’s largest meat processing companies (with $16 billion in sales), has seen outbreaks among its more than two dozen processing plants nationwide. In April, a Buzzfeed exposé chronicled the evolution of a COVID-19 cluster at a South Dakota Smithfield location. Among the plant’s 3,700 workers, more than seven hundred became infected within weeks of the first known case. Company officials disavowed any responsibility and attributed the outbreak to the workers’ close living quarters. Noting the facility’s “large immigrant population,” a spokes-person explained that “Living conditions in certain cultures are different than they are with your traditional American family.” Since most of the workers have limited English proficiency, the company’s health and safety instructions usually are issued in five languages. But Smithfield’s COVID-19 safety directives were issued only in English. Social distancing was not practiced or enforced.

Similar tragic outbreaks have ravaged meat and poultry facilities in Texas, Colorado, South Carolina, and elsewhere. During the month of April alone, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) documented 4,913 COVID-19 cases and twenty deaths among 130,000 workers at 115 facilities in nineteen states. On April 28, President Trump issued an Executive Order preventing such meat and poultry plants from closing, “to ensure a continued supply of protein for Americans.” Immigrants account for more than 40 percent of the industry’s 470,000 workers; estimates of those immigrants...