The Pandemic Reinforces My Desire to be an Agent of Change

By Alycia Raya / Spring 2022

I had never been more scared in my life than when I received confirmation in my email that I had tested positive for covid 19 in July of 2020. This was a time before a vaccine and before anyone knew much about the disease. Every day the news was reporting that thousands of people were dying day by day. When I received the news I felt powerless and no longer in control of the harm I might have brought onto my family, a living nightmare for me. Even more painful and infuriating was that I was aware that among the communities hardest hit by the pandemic were working class Black, indigenous, and other racialized people here in the United states. This meant that my neighborhoods, my family, my community, was being violently attacked by both a Pandemic and social and political culture that considers them disposable. The inevitable nightmare of getting sick was unfolding in real time for me.  

My entire life has been a journey of coming out of the “matrix.” Looking back, I started to confront the “matrix” when I was exposed to the great wealth in my city when I began visiting school friends who lived in the richest neighborhoods in Stockton. My awareness of the great health and wealth inequalities within my immediate reality turned into rage which turned into motivation. I raged through my community college classes, encompassed with Political Science and Ethnic Studies courses. Both my education and my experience as a working class Chicanx person from Stockton have been my red pills, if you will. Understanding the material conditions of my family helped me understand myself and my lived experience. Understanding has brewed a deep sense of love, compassion, and dignified rage. I know it’s obvious when I speak.

My family is working class Latino. I was raised by a single mother. Before the pandemic I saw my mom suppress pain until it became absolutely intolerable for her as a way to avoid medical insurance copays. I experienced thoughts of doom when I pondered what it would be like if her immunocompromised body got sick. My mother, a 48 year old mother of five already suffers from chronic pain caused by fibromyalgia, restless leg syndrome, and two rotator cuffs that never quite healed perfectly from surgery. My mother, Marina, did not graduate high school, but she got her GED. She worked at Minimum wage jobs up until she landed a good unionized job with the San Joaquin County office of Education as a Teacher assistant in disabled student’s classrooms. Today, 21 years later despite working a full time and now a part time job at Macy’s, my mom is still trying to build the economic wealth and credit it takes to buy a house. I grew up in the apartment she still lives in, the apartment I quarantined for two weeks in 2020. If my mom got covid, the chances of her getting extremely ill were high. Knowing this, my siblings and I tried very hard to protect her, and follow quarantine etiquette. So, one can imagine the terror In my voice when i called her with the news; I needed to quarantine.

I had decided to come home from my place in Oakland to celebrate my sister's birthday. I was extremely paranoid every time I came home because I knew I was entering a new precious pod despite these people being family. For my own peace of mind I created a system of going to get tested and keeping my mask on, as well as consciously keeping a distance from others around the house until I got my results. At this time, my three other siblings and niece were living in the apartment I came home to. This meant that they had been potentially exposed, leaving me more to haunt my thoughts. My niece Alena, my older sister’s toddler daughter, was a little older than one years old. I wondered what could happen to her if she got the virus.

I went into quarantine for 14 days and found a different person. I realized how weak and flawed our country's covid 19 response was and pondered the structural roots that might explain it, deeply. In those moments by myself I realized that our government system had painfully failed at protecting the general welfare or its people in the most profound and clear way. I realized how disastrous our future might be if our society didn’t transform in an effort to properly prevent, mitigate, adapt, and respond to the climate crisis. Climate change and deforestation are two symbiotic violent forces that will produce more pandemics in the future. A future plagued with war, destruction, disease, economic turmoil, and extreme weather sound like less than what my siblings on earth deserve.

During my time in quarantine everything else but family, community, and struggle seemed sort of ridiculous and unimportant. My time in isolation gave me space to see the inefficiency of a government and economic system that does not value life and the wellbeing of the masses over profit. When I along with the entire world became sick at the height of Covid-19 pandemic, I realized it was because we collectively live under social systems that are sick to the root themselves.

Gratefully, although I had come home to my family due to the precautionary measures I took upon arrival, no one in my family got sick after me. It wasn’t until December of 2021 that my entire family got sick with covid, another disastrous episode in my red pill experience. Of course, that’s a story for another time. My desire to be a “Change Agent” (Havens 1962-1966) was truly strengthened and solidified during 2020 in general but especially when I sat alone in quarantine. I hope to continue to live my life like it is 2020, when material things were less salient than building communities of care, mutual aid, and having the willingness to heal.