Covid, Climate Change, and Carework: Mesoamerican Diasporic Indigenous and Latino Communities in the Willamette Valley
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Date
2022-10-04
Authors
Herrera, Timothy
Journal Title
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Community-based agriculture is not only concerned with the cultivation of food, but also with the cultivation of connection, care, and exchange. This dissertation is based on fieldwork with a non-profit organization that operates seven community garden sites in Lane County, Oregon. Most of my research activity occurred at the largest garden site which happens to also be the oldest garden site, with some families having the same garden plot for two decades. I also travelled to all seven sites to either volunteer or attend workshops. In addition, I draw on my participation as an analyst and interviewer in the COVID-19 Farmworker Study (COFS) of Oregon, a collaborative research project involving twelve community-based organizations that serve farmworkers in Oregon. My research examines the experiences of multigenerational immigrant families in Oregon engaged in preserving traditional foodways and collective care through community gardening. The primary goals are to investigate the historical relationships between foodways and emotional carework within Latino and Mesoamerican Indigenous communities in diaspora. It examines how foodways shape community well-being despite the many challenges and traumas of migration. Participation in community gardening can serve as a social, emotional, and health resource for immigrant Latino families, functioning as a nexus of care and source of hope. This research is urgent since disproportionate food insecurities have only been exaggerated by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Using ethnographic methods such as participant observation, formal interviewing, and informal conversational interviewing, I document some of the integrated physical, emotional, mental health, and social impacts of the pandemic. These impacts include getting infected with COVID-19, losing loved ones, living in uncertainty, and experiencing significant loss of income that affected people’s ability to pay rent, utilities, food, and other expenses, producing what I call stress proliferation. Being exposed to the virus or having the virus forced people into two-week quarantines or even longer periods of recovery when many could not work, and if sick were physically debilitated. The precarity of Latino workers’ economic situations and the stress that comes from that precarity was inflated during the pandemic and left many struggling to catch up even after recovery and quarantine. Because the research has taken place both before and during the pandemic, I demonstrate how the caregiving practices forged through community gardening may continue to benefit families and communities after the pandemic through ideas such as curar y pertencer, caring and belonging, identified by my study participants. I also demonstrate how care practices might have shifted from pre-pandemic times to pandemic times.
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Keywords
Care, Carework, COVID-19, Food Studies, Latino Communities, Mesoamerican Indigenous Communities in Diaspor