As COVID raged through the Northwest last year, many people avoided infection by staying home. That was not an option for caregivers who spent their days in the homes of others, helping with the tasks of daily living.
This year, geography graduate student Olivia Orosco interviewed Latinx immigrant caregivers in the South King County region to learn about their COVID experience and their work more generally.
“The space of the home is a really interesting site for work — especially in the age of COVID,” says Orosco. “For people who were able to work from home, it was a safe place to be and work. But for caregivers going into others’ homes at the height of a global pandemic, homes were spaces of risk for them, and in some ways for the people they were caring for too.”