“COVID-19 has fundamentally changed who we are—how we work, how we think about work, how we interact with each other—but it also exposes how interconnected we all are. We are dependent on rural areas as the rural areas are dependent on cities,” says Professor Armando Ibarra from the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

And no matter where you live, all of us are dependent on the Latinx laborers who do vital work all along the food supply chain—in agriculture, in the meat and dairy industries, in food processing and packaging—many of whom are undocumented, unprotected, underpaid, uninsured, and under threat of deportation.

Today on the show, we turn our attention to this often overlooked class of essential workers with guest Armando Ibarra, who talks about the series of overlapping crises and vulnerabilities faced by undocumented Latinx workers before and during the pandemic.

Armando Ibarra is director of the Chican@ and Latin@ Studies program and associate professor in the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is co-author, with Alfredo Carlos and Rodolfo D. Torres, of The Latino Question: Politics, Labouring Classes and the Next Left (Pluto Press, 2018).

Cover image by davispigeon0 from Pixabay