This post is a part of The COVID-Chronicles series. This series is dedicated to giving voice to graduate student experiences and needs during the course of the pandemic. It is a space for graduate students to come together, to share, to listen, to reflect, to empathize, to lament, and to learn from one another. We hope that faculty and administrators will listen to and engage in dialogue with graduate students, and act in ways to help support the graduate student community.
Being an unfunded master’s student is an economic challenge, but working full-time at a grocery store during COVID-19 adds a layer of distress I was certainly not prepared for. When I moved to Santa Fe, NM, I began working for a national chain of grocery stores a year before I started graduate school. Once I began taking classes, I decided to continue working there because it provided necessary economic stability and allowed me to pay for part of my tuition. I was offered a scholarship, but I turned it down since I was making more in a month while working, compared to the entire amount offered by the scholarship. Had I accepted the funds, I would be required to sign-up for three graduate courses each semester, maintain a minimum B+ in all courses, something I could do but not in a manner that was satisfactory. It is a matter of survival, to work full-time to pay bills, contribute to rent and cover tuition. The added pressure of fulfilling the required coursework was just not feasible. In addition, the scholarship wasn’t going to cover all academic costs, only about 1/4 of them per semester. I opted to take two courses at a time and work 30-35 hours a week (the minimum to receive benefits). This was the only way to balance work and study, while also limiting student loans. I realize that scholarships are often hard to come by, especially in the humanities, but I had to make a calculated choice.
Thus, I began a routine of working 4 days a week in Santa Fe and 2 to 3 days of classes and meetings in Albuquerque. My workday begins at 4:30am, while on class days, I wake up at 5:00am in order to catch the early train headed south to Albuquerque. With Covid-19, classes have moved online, and I now work five days a week, attending zoom classes in the afternoon. The 6:00am shift begins with ‘opening a section,’ which entails stocking shelves, placing flowers in buckets, filling up the produce table, breaking down pallets, etc. It’s strenuous and physically demanding labor, a stark contrast to the mental work of academia. At the grocery store, we take turns, we help one another, we never do the same task at every hour. Solidarity among workers occurs in those moments of communal support and need. For me, life is a balancing act and all formative experiences present themselves primarily in a practical and social manner. As Marx states in the eighth Thesis on Feuerbach, “All social life is essentially practical.” This mundane working-class experience teaches me as a philosopher to not only interpret the world, but to finally begin to imagine a possible change. This practical social life was my awakening to class struggle, and now with COVID-19, it has strengthened my commitment to social justice and fighting against inequality and oppression.
But for a grocery store worker, now called “essential” for what we do, the everyday experience was revolutionized, the moment’s panic enwrapped people’s psyche. Once entitled neoliberal subjects forgot that we, the grocery workers, were humans too, and that we are taking higher risks in exposing ourselves to the virus in order to provide the much-needed rolls of toilet paper and countless cans of black beans for them to survive the pandemic. Not a single one of us has been immune to the wrath of hyper privileged and condescending customers. We’ve been yelled at. We’ve been mistreated. We’ve been called ‘dirty,’ spat at, given the finger, and even mocked and belittled for wearing a mask during our eight-hour shifts. We’ve been pitied and looked down upon for the work that we do. We have been treated with disdain because, as members of the working-class, we do not deserve to be the “heroes” of this pandemic. In the neoliberal subject’s mind, we are merely “sacrificial.” Our up-beat attitude and our positive temperament have diminished. The weight of responsibility we embody is more often than not met with furious resistance. Our store’s number one value is “integrity,” and we attempt to do our jobs guided by this value. It has been, and continues to be, a disheartening period for us all, in addition to the many other stresses brought about by Covid-19. I am grateful I have a job, but I cannot ignore the millions at risk for being evicted from their homes in the US alone, or the increasing numbers of cases and COVID-related deaths, or the racist attacks on Black and Brown-owned businesses, or the xenophobic threat of forcing international students to leave the United States, and especially, the constant threats to Black lives in America. These struggles are interconnected and we must build chains of equivalences among us. This is what gives me and my comrades solace, we are all in this together.
María Constanza Garrido Sierralta
María Constanza Garrido Sierralta is a M.A. student in philosophy at the University of New Mexico. Still finding her way, her research interests are Marxist theory and practice, philosophy of the Global South, and critical phenomenology. She is the proud cat-mom of two, Marx and Freud. She loves to knit and crochet.
I sympathize. I was not raised by a blue collar worker, but an immigrant who was trained via the apprenticeship system, and a mother who was forced to leave school in grade 8 due to getting pregnant at 15 by a 45 year old. So, I had never heard of a PhD until I found philosophy, and I grew up in rural area and was quite ostracized, and the only group that would accept me were the HS drop outs. So I have that attitude in me, never mind the checkered youth I had. We all need to unify, and I believe that shifting the focus to economic class can help us do that. I find myself with one foot in blue collar culture and one in academia, and I am repeatedly reminding white blue collar males who resent other groups for being candidates for affirmative action, and so on, that (a) they deserve it, since the American economy was built on slave labor, and in my eyes, that alone is sufficient (b) the entire capitalist system requires illegal immigrants, and other groups to keep wages low. So I tell them to thank members of these groups for their jobs, and to be pissed at the what 6 corporations that own every thing. I mean they do have a legitimate issue, but identity politics is simply divisive in its overall impact on social justice. Just like body cameras, with good intentions, have been used not to help minorities, but instead to circumvent a person’s Miranda Rights — pretty depressing since the justification is that video footage is not technically speech. What? Seems like a pretty simple fix to revise a sentence. And the letter/spirit distinction justifies the change. The fact that the current political divisiveness has also made its way into academia as well, and I’ve seen various others simply having their lives stolen via social media is seriously depressing, and it is good to keep in mind that post-modernism’s roots lie in Nietzsche’s work — a position that the Nazis endorsed, since if everything is subjective, how can you criticize anything?
Oh and that immigrant was a 2x Soviet POW who saw Dresden, and was not a racist person at all.