First published 2024
College students at Brooklyn College and California State University Los Angeles document how the COVID-19 pandemic affected their working-class families and communities of color. Author Jeanne Theoharis presents their firsthand accounts from 2020 to 2022, when politicians celebrated frontline workers as heroes but rarely listened to their actual experiences. These students and their families could not work from home or retreat to second homes. Instead, they drove delivery trucks, worked as EMTs, cooked in restaurants, and did construction. Many families consolidated households to save money as the crisis deepened. The accounts reveal how the pandemic followed existing patterns of racial and economic inequality in American society. Yet these stories also capture the love that sustained families through impossible circumstances. The book illuminates the daily acts of care and extraordinary efforts that kept communities together during the first waves of COVID-19 in New York and Los Angeles, two major epicenters of the outbreak.
Genres: american, contemporary, social-issues, non-fiction, biography-memoir, 21st-century, academic, american-history
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: community, family, firsthand-accounts
Setting: Brooklyn College, California State University Los Angeles, New York, Los Angeles
Period: 2020-2022
321 pages · Kindle Edition · University of Pennsylvania Press