IN MANY WAYS, Gisel Villagómez is a typical resident of Southern California. She lives in Huntington Park, a suburb of Los Angeles known for its unassuming homes with lawns and concrete driveways. And she carries herself with an attitude that announces, “Don’t mess with me just because I’m a Latina woman.”
When COVID-19 hit California in the spring, Villagómez was employed as a manager at her sister’s garment factory. Suddenly, she found herself in the role of “essential worker.” Shelter-in-place orders forced most California manufacturing plants to shut down, but Villagómez and her sister kept their shop open, producing more than 180,000 masks and 100,000 protective gowns. (Discover how Latinos are shaping America’s future.)
While she worked, Villagómez faced another, more private drama: the renewal of her immigration status. In the 1980s, when she was two years old, her Mexican mother carried her across the U.S. border. Villagómez, now 34, has been undocumented ever since.
I’LL NEVER FORGET where I was in early March, right before the world came crashing down. It feels, at the same time, like it was a hundred years ago and just last week.
I was in a remote corner of Patagonia, on an international postgraduate fellowship, living off-the-grid with an Argentine gaucho named Pereira. The virus seemed a concerning but still-distant concept, far away from where I was. I relished the idea of not seeing another human being besides Pereira for two days. There was something about escaping the crowded hustle of everyday life, of living minimally in the stead of a traditional shepherd, that was appealing; at night, I fell asleep to the sound of penguins yelping in a nearby cove.
Little did I know that such isolation would be the mandate of the world in the days and months that followed.
By the time I got back to my hometown of New Rochelle, just outside New York City, everything had changed. The state’s first National Guard “containment zone” went up just a few blocks from my front door. My dad, foreseeing an onslaught of cases at Elmhurst Hospital—the public hospital in Queens where he is an infectious-disease doctor—decided it would be safer for us to stay apart for a while. Exactly one week after my stay with Pereira, on a Friday at 11pm, I drove to New Jersey to help evacuate my younger brothers from their college campus. We left my dad behind at home and, with my mother and grandmother, we fled.
It was a short but extraordinary span of time, one that has come to define so much of life during these past few months. In my essay for the November issue of National Geographic magazine, I write about how the virus has exacerbated so many of the challenges already facing my young generation—challenges for which there’s no end in sight—and how that has led many of us to use what little strength we have left to advocate forcefully for change. (Without ceremony, new college grads step into an uncertain workforce.)
I WAS EDITING my high school’s yearbook in March when news of school cancellations erupted in our classroom. Even remotely, we did produce a publication. But just like the year has been, the yearbook is uncommon. That’s evident from the first pages.
Dedication
There will be a different kind of dedication for this yearbook. We dedicated it to the healthcare workers who risked their lives on the frontlines during the height of the pandemic and who continue to sacrifice their lives and time to cure those affected by the coronavirus. While many of us stayed home to protect ourselves and each other, they worked tirelessly for our safety. We thank them for inspiring us and showing us what it means to be a leader in times of difficulty.
Students
A yearbook starts with the headshots of the eldest class and each younger grade follows after. Occasionally accompanying the spreads are collages full of candid photos of happy students. To function properly, a yearbook should serve as a time capsule of the year. Students from all grades and all clubs and groups should be represented throughout, to remind our future selves of this time in our lives. What happens, though, when photos of events are never taken? Or when the events never take place themselves? Documenting students’ lives “virtually” makes it difficult to capture our memories—so instead, we must document the year honestly in the best way we can. (Follow high school grads as they say goodbye to a senior year stolen by coronavirus.)
As I was editing yearbook content, coronavirus headlines had been gradually seeping into school hallways for weeks. Yet when the virus crossed over the borders of Italy in early March, there was still denial that our community would be infected. Then rumors of online school began to arrive, as the hand sanitizer bottles on our lunch tables did.