SAN ANTONIO – Ray Cisneros never wanted to be a husband or father, but three years ago he fell in love, got married and became a stepfather.
To give his new family a better life, Ray took steps to start his own graphic design business. He planned to have high-quality family time in 2020, including taking the kids to baseball games with his sister Tina.
Instead, 2020 is the year Covid-19 killed Ray. He was 35 years old when he died on July 27th. The coronavirus also killed his aunt and grandfather.
“Within a matter of three weeks, we’ve all lost,” said Tina Cisneros. “It’s sometimes hard to understand that it all happened.”
Covid-19 dragged most of a year through the lives of Latinos and beat, maimed and killed with his poison.
The sadness of the Cisneroses, their stress and depression, the economic hardship of Ray’s family and the fallout for his children are multiplied many times in many families.
On December 23, Covid-19 killed more than 54,000 Latinos, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID tracking project, which acknowledged that their numbers were incomplete.
The coronavirus took advantage of many Latino gaps compared to white Americans in income, education, and access to health care – including fewer doctor visits to treat diabetes, high blood pressure, and higher obesity, while having fewer savings and lower wealth, as well as limited business capital. .
It flourished with the work of many Latinos in work that could not be done at home, as well as language barriers for some.
“The only state where Latinos are not overrepresented in cases and victims is in New Mexico, and that is because Native Americans have been hammered,” said Gabriel Sanchez, director of the Center for Social Policy at the University of New Mexico, said earlier this month. By the end of December, Latinos in New Mexico, who make up 49 percent of the population, accounted for 55 percent of coronavirus cases and 37 percent of deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University and Medicine’s finding.
Taking advantage of the gaps, Covid-19 tore up the foundations of family and work and overthrew the progress that made many Hispanics to better economic status.
A deadly strike on younger Latinos
“It’s been a hell of a hell of a year,” said Rogelio Sáenz, a professor of demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio, who helped paint the true picture of the destruction Covid-19 inflicted later on. CDC numbers have been confirmed.
“Once you have adjusted for age, you really see Latinos dying at a rate more than three times as high as the white population,” Sáenz said. “Texas is still the only state where more than half of the people who died from Covid are Latino.”
Another more shocking truth is that Covid-19 killed a larger proportion of the youngest members of the Latin population than other groups, according to racial and ethnic numbers in the states.
According to CDC data, Latinos had the highest death rate in age groups under 54, while the highest death rate among whites in age groups older than 65 occurred.
Among Americans in Ray Cisneros’ age group, 35 to 44, nearly half (48.9 percent) of those who died were Latino, compared with 27.3 percent of blacks and 15.5 percent of whites, according to an analysis of 226,240 deaths using CDC data.
In the age group 65-74 years, 45.3 percent killed by Covid-19 were white, 24.7 percent black, and 23.1 percent Latino.
The horror of Covid-19 raping young people and adults of working age was vivid early in the pandemic as meat planters, whose safety has been a problem for decades, fell ill and died, forcing the recognition has that Latinos were overrepresented in ‘essential’. jobs in service industries, farm work, grocery stores and more.
Economic, educational gains – then Covid
The deaths and cases have brought many Latinos back from the better times.
Ray’s wife, Matilda Cisneros, is struggling to pay medical expenses from his hospitalization on top of her other bills. She exchanged the nicer apartment she had with Ray for a smaller, cheaper apartment.
To help Matilda pay for Ray’s funeral and burial, Tina started a GoFundMe account with the generosity of friends and family members and others who donated.
Before Covid-19 struck, Latinos retaliated against the economic downturn of the Great Recession. From 2016 to 2019, wealth among Latino and Black families grew faster than that of other groups, although they still had a long way to go to catch up with white families, whose average family wealth last year was $ 188,200, compared to $ 36,100 for Spanish and $ 24,100 for Blacks.
Before the pandemic, Latino’s unemployment was at 4 percent, but then rose to 19 percent in April. It fell back to 8.4 percent in November, but it is still double the pre-pandemic rate.
Latino businesses were the driving force behind small business growth, and some added jobs to the pandemic. According to the Urban Institute, more jobs have been lost in various industry sectors with an excessively higher number of businesses owned in Latino – such as food services – in general.
“The housing market, higher education and the increase of women in the labor force are driven by Latinos,” Sáenz said. “The devastation we see today will bring us back in terms of many of the gains we have made.”
Katia Paz-Goldfarb, Vice President of Spanish Ministry Initiatives at Montclair State University in New Jersey, measures the long-term impact of the coronavirus on Latinos in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York, using research from 30 colleges serving Spanish and universities.
“This is a loss of what we have achieved in recent years in terms of moving our community to higher education, opportunities to improve themselves with social mobilization,” Paz-Goldfarb said. “What we see now is a regression to a place we were a few years ago.”
According to the Census Bureau, 18.8 percent of Latinos 25 years and older were 18.8 percent last year – an improvement of 13.9 percent in 2010. Yet the share is far behind the 40 percent whites with university degrees, up from 33 percent a year ago.
Meanwhile, studies have shown that black and Latino K-12 school children in poorer schools perform worse than their white peers during the pandemic after learning to learn at home for large parts of the school year – if they could get online. The share of Latino children in the country’s public schools rose to 27 percent in 2017.
A curse and a wake-up call
San Antonio City Councilman Adriana Rocha Garcia knew from the beginning that the coronavirus would prey on the residents of her district, whose zip code has the city’s second highest poverty rate.
She struggled to find ways to protect the residents of her district, many without internet access and many who worked in the hospitality industry. Meanwhile, Covid-19 assaulted her family and killed six of her cousins living in San Antonio. They were all under 60.
At one point, 14 of Garcia’s family members were in the hospital.
“My father thought everyone in his family would die,” she said. Now Garcia is focusing on the best hope of her community – to mobilize to ensure everyone is vaccinated.
Latinos and Blacks are more hopeful after the recent presidential election, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center found. But even when vaccines begin to spread and a new administration comes underway, the impact of Covid-19, according to Paz-Goldfarb, will not be short-lived. “The Latino community is not going to return to normal,” she said.
Sanchez, of the University of New Mexico, said that if there is a silver lining, it has seen the consequences that large sections of the population do not have access to basic necessities such as health care and the internet. It will have to be resolved for full economic recovery, he said.
Ray Cisneros has always supported his sister Tina’s plans to go to law school, which she still wants to do. Her brother’s death led her to seek advice, something out of the ordinary for her family. She and other family members walk more and take steps to stay healthier.
The year was a curse, yes, but 2020 was also a wake-up call, she said.
“It made me realize all the things I take for granted,” Cisneros said. “Even just the hugs, you know, to be in my family.”
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