A woman who disinfects every egg. A mother of two who experienced her first panic attack. A graduate who thought he was witnessing the end of the world.
These were just some of the behaviors and emotions described by San Antonio residents in online video interviews conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic as part of an oral history project developed by Whitney Chappell, a professor of Spanish linguistics at UTSA.
Chappell and three students interviewed over 100 Hispanics from November 2020 to December 2021, some in Spanish, some in English, and some in what the researchers called Spanglish. Chappell said he wanted to focus on the Hispanic community because statistics show they are more negatively affected by the pandemic, get sick more often from the coronavirus and die at higher rates than white Americans.
“I felt it was very important to share their stories in a way that honored them and reflected and amplified their voices, because otherwise they might get lost,” said Chappell, who conducted the Zoom interviews.
During the interview period, many people had lost their jobs, while others—mostly low-wage, service-oriented workers—continued to work outside the home. Many schools remained closed.
As the interviews began in November 2020, the US had just passed the milestone of 100,000 COVID-positive cases diagnosed within a 24-hour period, vaccines against COVID-19 were still in trials, and e- r Anthony Fauci had just described symptoms of prolonged COVID that a third of patients experienced.
By the time the interviews ended, the number of deaths in the US had exceeded 800,000, but vaccines were widely available and many schools had reopened. A worrying new variant, omicron, has just been identified by scientists in South Africa.
By December 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 100 people age 65 or older in the U.S. will have died.
Documenting the sense of loss
In the videos, several interviewees noted that the Hispanic community has sacrificed normal cultural customs, such as greeting family and friends with a kiss on the cheek and a hug.
The people interviewed also talked about serious crises, such as not being able to buy food and relying on the food bank. They also described the more prosaic weirdness of navigating everyday life during a pandemic: standing in lines outside stores, taking your temperature before going inside, wearing face shields and hand-sewn face masks.
They described not being able to blow out birthday candles, debated whether it was okay to hug someone, and communicated via online group messages. Many also said that watching news reports on television exacerbated their fears and anxiety.
One woman said she resorted to Latin American cultural healing practices to treat her husband’s COVID-19 diagnosis, including putting alcohol in his belly button. Another recounted the exact moment she doubted the future of the world: when she couldn’t find bottled water or paper towels at the supermarket. A teacher described the heartache of watching her students regress socially.
“What scared me the most was that every day there was something new,” then-student Ada Zamaripa said in her interview in November 2020. “There was another restriction, another ban. Here the shops are closed, now the hospitals. Now, unless you’re dying, you can’t go to the doctor.
Yedid Mejia, at the time a graduate student in UTSA’s Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, was one of three students who conducted interviews.
She said doing them affected her own mental health.
Interviewees described grieving the death of loved ones who could not say goodbye properly, visit them in the hospital or even see them for the last time as coffins were kept closed due to the virus. She learned about marriages that ended and worries about elderly family members.
“Covid has revealed the most humanitarian side of the human race, but also the ugliest,” she said.
Mejia said she reached the point where she no longer wanted to continue working on the project as the pandemic progressed, as the themes became more intense and dark.
“It was all very, very recent,” she said. “We were still surviving [the pandemic]so everything still felt very tense.
She did hear some hope, especially about the vaccine becoming widely available in early 2021, allowing people to once again spend time in person with family and friends.
Looking back at myself
The San Antonio Report recently spoke with two participants who participated in the oral history project, showing them their videos and hearing their reflections on their experiences of the pandemic.
Lydia Gonzalez, a 39-year-old high school teacher, teary-eyed as she watched herself describe in January 2021 her fears that her mother, who has underlying health problems, would not survive if she contracted the virus.
Her mother is alive and well today, Gonzalez said, but she continues to worry. After a concert the couple recently attended in Austin, she admitted to feeling anxious and worried, keeping a close eye on her mother for any symptoms.
“I want to cry,” Gonzalez said in Spanish as he watched his video interview. “The fear if something like this happens again and my parents are old. … It’s different.”
Pavel Demon, a Judson Independent School District teacher who was interviewed in February 2021, lost his best friend and former roommate to COVID-19 seven months earlier.
“As a teacher, you try not to show a lot of these personal issues to your students,” Demon said of how he felt then. “But sometimes it affects you in a negative way and no matter how hard you try to fight it, it’s sad. It’s hard to focus. … You try to shake it off, it’s not always easy.”
More than two years later, Demon said he still looks at his best friend’s photo first thing every morning.
And he still religiously disinfects everything.
Painful but important work
Chappell said at first she had a hard time finding residents interested in sitting down for interviews. To get the project off the ground, she asked her bilingual students to tap into their social circles to find willing participants.
The stories she and other researchers from the country collected during the pandemic, she said, will be preserved forever, available to future scientists who want to understand how we lived in this unprecedented time.
“We have statistics on how many people have gotten sick, how many people have died from the pandemic,” she said. But soon enough, “we’ll forget how we felt, how our emotional response to this international emergency affected us to begin with.”
The videos will be housed in the UTSA library archive and will be viewable on YouTube through three playlist collections. Chappell also created a website for researchers and the general public to read and browse.
The Witte Museum is also documenting San Antonio’s 2021 COVID-19 pandemic by asking the community to provide oral histories, photos and objects that show how people helped the community during that time.
A number of items are now on view at the B. Naylor Morton Research and Collection Centre. A COVID-19 vaccine, a face shield and a mask with the words “Black Lives Matter” are among the items on display.
For Gonzalez, memories of the uncertainty and fear she experienced during the pandemic persist despite the passage of time.
“Every time I leave work, I put the computer in my bag and think, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to come back.’ … You don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “We are marked. Is not the same. Even though we want to go back to normal… after three years, that’s not possible.”