“…después de la tempestad viene la calma…”: Cariño in the Archives of Mortality Project

Humanizing Acts is a series of essays and artworks that examines the impact of COVID-19 on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Each contributor writes about the ethical quandaries of conducting research at the border, living amidst the vulnerability and violence of pandemic times, and navigating complex interpersonal relationships and responsibilities. The scholars and artists share compassionate stories of people, including friends, loved ones, and neighbors alike, ultimately asking: How can academic research be a humanizing act?

How do we study, research and witness the emotional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Latinx communities with tenderness, love and care? This essay considers The “Archives of Mortality” oral history project as a pathway into examining the emotional impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Latinx communities. The goals of the project are to gently process the pandemic as a research team and teach oral history methods to undergraduate and graduate students. Additionally, we aimed to create an oral history archive and curate a pedagogical podcast detailing our methods. We also sought to present our work, produce scholarship and develop an undergraduate course to prepare students to contribute to the archive. Since 2021, three cohorts of students have completed substantial training in oral history methods and the archive holds over 20 interviews. We also have recorded 3 podcast episodes and are developing six more.¹

Consisting of a collaborative team of undergraduate researchers Allyson Blanco, Krys Orenday, Stephanie Rivera, and Vanessa Washington as well as graduate student researchers Isabel Gurrola, Citlally Solorzano, and Amber Orozco, our work contemplates the way oral life histories, memories and narratives offer emotive in-roads for better understanding the ways Latinx individuals and communities survived, mourned, and cared for each other during the first-year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our narrators were family and friends and shared their stories in two interviews. The first interview was an oral life history that considered memories of relationships from childhood to adulthood. Our team debriefing sessions of the first interview allowed us to consider the significance of relationships, care and the emotional terrain of the individuals we interviewed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The second interview consisted of questions focused on the first year of the pandemic with an emphasis on care and relationships that shed light on major events such as: the realization of the pandemic as a life-changing event, adaption to stay-at-home orders and quarantine, response to the murder of George Floyd and global uprisings, the rigors of the 2020 presidential election, the challenges of restricted holidays, the violence of the January 6th insurrection, and the decisions around vaccinations.

Narrators described initial apathy, unimaginable fear, shock, trauma, grief, constant states of survival, numbness, and hopelessness as well as occasional joy, incredible faith, and an increased love of community and family. Narrators described the 2020 uprisings in support of Black life after the murder of George Floyd as catalyst moments for both social transformation and also, deep personal, familial and communal introspection. The oral history narratives reveal the tremendous trauma that collectively and socially we need to make space for to fully acknowledge, contemplate, process, bear witness to, and ultimately, individually, socially and politically learn important lessons from. The “Archives of Mortality” project argues that the COVID-19 pandemic produced an unwieldy emotional terrain to navigate for our narrators and researchers. The unwieldy emotional terrain of the COVID-19 pandemic was and continues to be difficult to carry and move with because of its unrelenting scale of premature death and its consequent and oftentimes unprocessed mourning, grief, and loss. Narrators describe cumbersome and onerous emotions that required relying on previous personal and social experiences, challenges and tragedies in a time where their sense of reality was unraveling on a daily basis.

For our research team, the first interview proved to be instructive in contextualizing the previous efforts that narrators pulled from to gather energy, strength and fortitude during the first-year of the pandemic. As a result, our project argues that we can learn important lessons from the incredible agility and maneuverability our narrators discussed and demonstrated during this emotionally unwieldy pandemic. This includes the agility and maneuverability of our research team. Our team had to navigate the urgency of our work with the constant new variants that threatened our sense of safety, certainty, and constancy and that directly impacted their own mental, spiritual, emotional and physical health. Our research team also experienced the impacts of COVID-19 on the health of their family members, often providing for their family in times of illness and in the physical, spiritual, and emotional recovery from infection. Indeed, in addition to long covid, we were also confronting the difficulty of receiving care for a variety of health concerns that have only worsened as the pandemic goes on.

Our project therefore aims to alchemize the poison of the pandemic into medicine. To do so, our response to the pandemic’s unwieldy emotional terrain is sharing our process of centering cariño in as much of our work as possible.  This article articulates the centrality of cariño as an ethical, methodological and interpretative lens to our project’s examination of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on Latinx communities. Cariño is the main source of tenderness, gentleness, and love that underscores our training, team, and labor. This article shares the roots of cariño in our research team, training and conceptual work. Additionally, the article contemplates Tonglen meditation as a vital component of centering cariño. Moreover, the article considers the workshops with faculty in helping us define and practice a nuanced understanding of cariño. Finally, the article shares an overview of the themes and nuances in the archive. In sharing a glimpse into our training, conceptual and archival work, this article shares the “Archives of Mortality” project as an urgent invitation to contemplate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Latinx communities as not a relic of the recent past to ensure market productivity and post-9/11 consumerist zeal for joy in times of crisis and fear but as a rigorous, ongoing and lively trauma full of unwieldy emotional terrain that must be witnessed holistically, processed thoughtfully and socio-politically learned from.

While researchers and narrators of the “Archives of Mortality” demonstrate an incredible agility and maneuverability in navigating dangerous and unwieldy emotional and social terrain during the COVID-19 Pandemic, it is also urgent to articulate the tremendous sorrow and irreplaceable loss we have all experienced, often so unevenly. Ultimately, the methodologies of cariño shared here are also meant to be read as blueprints for economies of cariño. Ones where the stories we share are not fodder for capitalist expediency but rather intentionally delicate contemplations of the arduous loss the political economy instructs us to labor through and consume trivially against. Rather, we hope our work provides a moment to sit with our collective mortality, and contemplate worlds beyond premature death.

The Roots of Cariño in Our Team

On Wednesday, June 9th, 2021, Krys Orenday, Stephanie Rivera, Amber Orozco and myself met on zoom for our second workshop on conducting ethical oral history research. Our sources of inspiration for the discussion were two essays: Abigail Perkiss’ “Staring Out to Sea and the Transformative Power of Oral History for Undergraduate Interviewers” and Vicki Ruiz’s “Situating Stories: The Surprising Consequences of Oral History.” Our workshop was part of a two-month summer research program and project that was funded by the Summer Undergraduate Research Academy (SUReA) at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF). This was the second workshop in a two-month program that prepared student researchers to conduct interviews with friends and family on their experiences living through the first year of the COVID-19 Pandemic and examine the violent  realities and emotional responses of racialized labor, life, and mortality. Some of the goals of the workshop were to imagine the possibilities of our own project and begin situating ourselves. However, our discussion of both the readings and our experiences living through the first year of the pandemic surpassed those goals.

The workshop offered a space for us to process an entire year of a very specific form of racialized violence. We welcomed a space to share our emotional realities. We shared our nervousness to start a new experience. We grieved the totality of loss over the first year. We cried. We consoled one another, we grappled with catastrophe and it was from our vulnerability with one another that we established a way of doing things together from that point on. We decided that we would acknowledge the tenderness of our spirits, act in loving and kind ways, and care for each other. We resonated with the essay by Perkiss and their students who “discussed the overwhelming feelings of helplessness” that they experienced during Hurricane Sandy. The pandemic also made us feel overwhelmingly helpless. Yet, we found hope in the essay. It taught us that oral history research projects helped the researchers feel empowered in their community. We found common purpose in oral history research that could allow us to do something, rather than feel reactive to external conditions. We acknowledged that those in power had been cruel and indifferent to our communities. We would do our best to act differently. We aimed to be gentle, patient and compassionate with ourselves even as we made space to grieve collectively with our friends, family and community.

Our workshop welcomed our full lived experiences. We shared how we processed the pandemic. Stories of anger, fear, sadness, disgust and happiness surfaced. We shared our anger about the Trump administration’s vitriol against racialized communities, especially during the uprisings during the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. We shared the embodied dread of contracting the virus, confronting our mortality, and possibly transmitting the virus and causing harm to vulnerable loved ones. We listened to each other share a collective disgust over the misinformation about vaccines. We laughed at the joys that social media brought us. The workshop allowed us to start with ourselves. We had to experience the full complex emotional terrain of being listened to so that we could sense, feel and enact the same care of presence for the loved ones we would be interviewing.

Vicki Ruiz provided pathways for starting with ourselves. Stephanie and Krys identified “self-reflexivity” as instrumental to understanding that research is not just about the person being interviewed but also our own process of learning and reflection. Ruiz outlines “self-reflexivity” as “recognizing one’s own assumptions,” “situating the stories (or centering the narrator) within larger historical and theoretical contexts,” and “acknowledging the reciprocal positioning of narrator and historian with trust at its core.” Perkiss and Ruiz lead us to an important question in our workshop—how would we be inscribing our “own significance as historical actors” throughout this research journey?

Finding our significance as historical actors during the ongoing pandemic and throughout our research journey turned out to be the heart of our project. All of us in one way or another had felt little to no agency in our lives during the first year of the pandemic. We had lost family members and could not mourn with loved ones. Long bouts with the virus had left us tired, caused long-term ailments, and impacted our work, familial and social lives. The pandemic had impacted our aspirations of the future and altered our goals and dreams. One of the biggest rewards of being a professor is offering students resources and opportunities in their life pursuits. Over the first year of the pandemic, it was rare to hear students talk about their futures with hope and resources and opportunities were few and far in between. The exhaustion was palpable.

However, our research project aimed to offer an antidote. A careful, gentle, flexible and compassionate approach to our work was required. The workshop taught me that the approach could not rely too heavily on the outcomes of the project. We all understood the why of our work. It was the how of our work that mattered more than ever. How would we be present for one another? How would we hold space for each other as people who were remembering with compassion while living in a political economy so actively intent on forgetting? How would our interactions hold space for the traumas we experienced? To contemplate these questions and enact them in praxis, our presence in workshops, journaling, and reflection necessitated great warmth and compassion. By the end of the summer of 2021, we called this great warmth, cariño. It was cariño after all that taught us that our research journey mattered more than the destination.   

Throughout the two summers we have worked together, we have defined cariño in many ways. The translation of cariño from Spanish to English was not enough for us. Cariño was not merely affection. In the first summer, cariño stood for “TLC”: tenderness, love and care. Tenderness meant we needed to be sensitive to pain. Love meant we were committed to our growth with loving action. Care meant that we would be responsible for doing the work gently. We also defined it as caring for one another with warmth. In a workshop in the second summer of 2022, we expressed that cariño feels like a cobija in a cold winter’s night. It is cozy and comforting. Cariño was the warm space we cultivated to initiate our workshops, debriefing sessions, conducting interviews and in our interpretation and analysis. Cariño allows for oral historians to be present for themselves and their narrators, hold space for gentleness in researching traumatic memory, and offer cozy ground in a world hostile to slowness, patience and remembering.

Embodying Cariño Together

During the first two summers, the “Archives of Mortality” team consisted of graduate student researcher Amber Orozco and undergraduate student researchers Krys Orenday, Stephanie Rivera, Allyson Blanco and Vanessa Washington. Their efforts would prove instructive to graduate students Citlally Solorzano and Isabel Gurolla who joined our efforts in late 2022. Eleven months into the pandemic, I was determined to bring a cohort together that was attuned to the sensitivity of the historical moment we were living in. In the Spring of 2021, I asked Krys Orenday to join the team precisely because of their humanizing efforts in two of my courses to that point. Krys read texts to generate questions, and did so, with a warmth for their classmates. As I facilitated discussion on zoom, I would read the chat and Krys would frequently write messages of support for classmates and offer additional resources. I also asked Stephanie to participate because of their thoughtfulness in studying racialized labor and the experiences of undocumented Latinx workers in Orange County. Stephanie’s research was grounded in humanizing her family and was therefore rooted in a love of community. Amber’s experience in navigating academia and conducting research ethically allowed us to form a small learning community interested in sharing warmth, love and ethical research with our loved ones, friends and families. The multigenerational perspectives—undergraduate, graduate student, tenure track faculty and then tenured faculty in workshops—would prove to hold space for shared guidance, mentorship and connection.

This approach carried over when I considered the next summer’s cohort. I asked Allyson Blanco to participate due to their capacious efforts to balance the rigor of study with compassion for community in a Fall 2021 course. Also in the same course, I asked Vanessa to join because of their intrinsic linking of public health with racial justice with a patient ear for listening and storytelling in the course’s podcast projects. Our cohort’s balance of compassion and critical study was vital in confronting the ongoing impacts of the pandemic. This also stipulated that our ways of being and the quality of how we treated peers and community accentuated our identity formations. Our identities were important of course. Our team consisting of Costa Rican, Chicanx, Cuban-American and Afro-Latinx scholars required us to listen intently and reconsider assumptions about Latinx life during the pandemic. Having to work through difference generated strategies, approaches and methods attune to listening to diverse experiences of narrators navigating trauma, mourning, fear, and loss from various Latinx perspectives. However, our focus on compassionate practice created a cozy and comforting space for our discussions of our identities to be tied to our practice rather than the other way around. This is precisely why I initiated contemplative practices to ground our research program and subsequent training and workshop sessions.

One of the critical practices that cultivated cariño in our work was compassionate breathing and quiet contemplation in our workshops. To push against an overreliance on conceptualization of research and intellectualized identities, I introduced students to the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Tonglen as an embodied way to consider our work. This proved quite important as all of the workshops of the project were completed over zoom and we needed ways to find ourselves and have a shared presence in the virtual world. Moreover, Tonglen practice was vital to contemplating the embodied suffering of the ongoing pandemic. In fact, Tonglen, for me, was an embodied representation of what we were choosing to embark on intellectually. Our research was choosing to confront trauma, choosing to remember, and choosing to work with our internal fears with our communities. How would (we) do this gently? How would we do this not just with our minds but with our whole bodies and spirits?  In “Welcome to the Charnel Ground,” Choying Khandro writes that Tonglen is the “practice of taking on the suffering and pain of others and in return offering love and compassion” and “willingly inviting in any difficult and painful energies.” To do this, Tonglen is practiced by “breathing in discomfort” and “breathing out relaxation.” One of the first places we welcome is wandering the charnel grounds, literally a “place where dead bodies are left to decompose” and more psychologically, any place we are afraid of. Practiced often, Tonglen offers a gentle process for confronting the traumas that may be triggered in research. Researching in times of embodied fragility necessitates these practices. Left unresolved and with little communal support, what we do with these energies is rarely part of research trainings in any explicit and formal way.

Thus, Tonglen revealed genuine inquiry of ourselves. For Khandro, genuine inquiry means inner exploration “into one’s entire fabric of experienced reality” and it is through this “experiential engagement with our own minds that we experience movement and transformation.” As a frequent practitioner of Tonglen before and more so during the pandemic, I shared this practice with the team to offer an embodied way to confront our ever present and yet often unacknowledged mortality and suffering. Every one of us had experienced loss and mourning throughout the first year and Tonglen helped us connect to this with gentle energy. Khandro writes that Tonglen breathing helps confront things we “wish to avoid”—“for example the grief we feel when somebody dear to us dies—we tend to shut down, [and] find ways to distract ourselves or dissociate.” Tonglen reminded us in the workshops that, as Khandro writes, “healing comes from connecting with the experience so it can be naturally processed…safely liberated or integrated.” I often facilitated Tonglen breathing exercises in the workshop by first checking in with students and asking them how they were feeling. I asked them to consider five core emotions—anger, fear, sadness, happiness and envy/disgust. I then asked them to be mindful of where this was stored in their body. From there, I asked them to find a comfortable sitting position, release any tension in the shoulders, neck, jaw and forehead, fingers and/or feet. We then closed our eyes. We spent a few minutes focusing on finding our breathing rhythm. Was it fast-paced? Was it slow? Was it shallow? Why was this the case? We contemplated this for a bit. Depending on the workshop and also the flow of our work, I would ask one of two things either a research question or a question related to the emotions conjured by the discussion topic we had prepared for. In one workshop, I asked them a version of one of our research questions—how did you take care of yourself and others during the 2020 uprisings in support of Black life?

In another workshop, our reading for that session explored racialized death as either fast, slow and/or ever-present. I asked them, how do we ground ourselves within these temporal experiences? I then asked them to sit with the question and follow their breathing pattern and make mental notes of their emotions and where it was stored in their body. We tracked how these questions made us feel discomfort and the way that these questions made us feel relaxed. From there, we began Tonglen. We breathed in discomfort, paused and then released relaxation. We breathed in suffering, paused and released compassion. We breathed in numbness, paused and released neutral peace. After a few minutes of this, we sat quietly and breathed normally. We then took a break and re-connected. Tonglen breathing encouraged us to be present for ourselves and for our work. It honors the embodied reality of research, especially virtual research that examines traumatic life experiences. This was a foundational practice in our work of experiencing cariño. Our team shared that they practiced breathing and contemplation prior to and/or after interviews. Tonglen also was used during interviews to comfort the interviewer briefly and/or to hold space for the narrator. Our journal entries reveal that both cohorts found contemplative exercises as vital to their wellbeing as both researchers and people. For me, it was an exercise of sharing peace and compassion and in centering much needed embodied fragility especially within the context of a pandemic that left us breathless in its infection and violence.

Defining Cariño

Our framework of cariño also took root in the wisdom of faculty workshop facilitators. In the summer of 2021, four wonderful scholars joined us via zoom to share their wisdom on oral history research and dialogue with our research team. Our first conversation was with Dr. Bianet Castellanos. We read Dr. Castellanos’ essay “Rewriting the Mexican Immigrant Narrative: Situating Indigeneity in Maya Women’s Stories,” and Dr. Castellanos shared a presentation and led a discussion on ethical practices. Our journal entries, which reflected on the week’s research and workshops, reveal our group starting to conceptualize care in our research. My journal reflected that I resonated deeply with Dr. Castellanos’ guidance to consider our work as service to our narrator rather than just research for the academy. I wrote the question, “how might we decolonize our methodologies and consider the service we can provide our communities?” Dr. Castellanos discussed contemplating long-term commitments to narrators such as offering to support them in the future ranging from processing the research to being available for acts of service related to their wellbeing. Additionally, I reflected on Dr. Castellanos’ discussion of moving away from oral history that contributes to “titillating public consumption” and reprioritizing the ordinary, mundane and the everyday. In our next workshop, we shared that being alive, doing this work virtually and sharing our experiences was more than enough and therefore, the act of listening to our family members, loved ones and community was an act of cariño.

Stephanie Rivera shared that the workshop revealed the ways academic theories before Dr. Castellanos’ workshop had hindered her research and relationship with narrators. In a previous undergraduate course, Stephanie lamented having overused theories from her course to understand her mother’s immigration story. Stephanie writes in her journal entry “I realized that I didn’t do my mother’s humanity justice. I focused solely on these theories and how they impacted her physically, but I wish I would have touched on the internal impact migration had on her. I was caught up answering the prompt, and in doing so I feel I missed an opportunity to incorporate the significance of spirituality while making this journey.” Stephanie would then articulate that academia had preconditioned us to examine for theory and that not listening with care would lead to missed opportunities for questions, dialogue and support for the narrator. Amber Orozco expanded on that by articulating that Dr. Castellanos had taught us to reflect on an “ethics of research” where our positionality, collective ethics, and desire to listen to complex stories allowed for the building of trust and towards, the most important part of the process, to foster caring relationships with our narrators. Krys Orenday was struck by the need to take care of themselves to be present for narrators. Krys writes in their journal “prior to this week, I did not think of my role as an interviewer and research could have as great of an impact on our work. However, I now know that I need to take care of myself, respect my boundaries and check my biases.” Krys also articulated that Dr. Castellanos taught them that methodologies of care also meant that we “would not be speaking for” narrators as “voiceboxes” and instead, we were listening to share their experiences in an authentic and mundane way.

Our next journal entries also reveal our process in defining these authentic and mundane acts of care in the research journey. In the next workshop, we were joined by Dr. Ana Rosas who laid a blueprint for us of how to do research and be of service. Our conversation with Dr. Rosas allowed us to consider oral history as not producing “perfect timelines” and instead, embracing the temporalities of our lives as such. Methodologically, Dr. Rosas taught us to consider deeply archival questions such as: What are the archiving practices of the people we care about? Where do they keep pictures? What are the museums of their hearts? What is the gallery of their love? What is the space they open for us to see and what do we need to do to see it? Our journal entries also reveal that in fact our work was an opportunity to be “lifelines” to each other both professionally and personally. We commented on Dr. Rosas’ discussion of working with oral memories as emotional terrains. How might oral life history interviews regarding the pandemic be avenues for changing the way we see the material world? How might it say more about the agency of the people we talk to? For Amber, the questions raised by Dr. Rosas’ workshop allowed for finding a “way to bring both humanizing and academic language together.” For Stephanie, this was of critical importance.

Additionally, our language and the way we word our questions may also impact how interviewees answer questions. According to Dr. Rosas, the best way to avoid constraining folks in a category would be by avoiding using the language of things we are hoping to find. For example, we can’t ask questions like, “Have you experienced racism throughout the pandemic?” First, the interviewee may not view race as a significant factor throughout their pandemic experience. Second, folks may not understand terms (like feminism in Dr. Castellano’s reading). Third, I think we lose a lot by constraining folks into categories of “victim” and “laborer.” If I would have created my own questions without having this dialogue, I think my questions would have kept folks in these categories. Reading Dr. Rosas’s piece gave me a new and beautiful perspective of what our questions can capture. By using emotions, such as love, to construct these questions, we will learn so much more about the complexities of our community and pandemic experiences. (From Stephanie Rivera’s diary entry, June 21, 2021)

In that same week, we were joined via zoom by Dr. Vicki Ruiz, who reminded us of the humbling nature of humanities-based research. Within our journal entries, we discussed Dr. Ruiz’s conceptualization of oral history as holding a messiness, an unpredictability, a kind of attentiveness to the possibilities of whatever may come. A flexibility to what is given to us. How do we ensure that we meet people where they are? How do we allow folks to reveal themselves on their own terms? How does this allow for the democratization of social history? An ethics emerged from our talk with Dr. Ruiz. Attentiveness, perpetual and unwavering capacity to learn, listening to learn and learning to listen, and making time to process with interviewees and on our own terms, spend time with the transcript and learn from it, see the gaps in stories and develop a relation with them and be open to the unexpected turns. For Dr. Ruiz, these processes allow for us to take the formality out of some of the work we do. Our workshop with Dr. Ruiz taught us that this recording might be one of the only and/or the last time someone is recorded. Dr. Ruiz instructed us to not complete an interview we were not committed to and therefore, be present, enjoy the moment and luxuriate in the complexity. Revisiting my notes from our debriefing sessions, we shared a general feeling that cariño in this work would require balancing an awareness of the seriousness of the work while also embracing the flexibility to be present. On the one hand, from Dr. Rosas, we learned that we have to value the importance of preparation, and on the other hand, from Dr. Ruiz, we learned to roll with the beauty of the unexpected. In an analogy, what do we learn when we show up in a white tee and jeans and what do we learn when we show up glowed up? We discussed the fluidity of learning either way. This to us was beautifully generative. We, in fact, articulated that we could not fully experience either without the other. Be prepared but also let it all go. It is in this space between and betwixt the informal and the formal that we find what we are looking for or better yet, where what is looking for us reveals itself to us and finds us.

Our final faculty workshop facilitator was Dr. Abigail Rosas. Our journal entries reveal that Dr. Rosas articulated that cariño also must consider joy, creativity, and complex personhood. I left that meeting thinking about how joy and mindfulness can be re-centered in our work. Questions we contemplated after were: What makes us uncomfortable when we are being interviewed? What stops us at our tracks? What would we like to hear from the interviewer that could be supportive? What are our boundaries? Dr. Rosas reminded us that affirming folks is critical and seeing what their favorite things to do would be great. We considered questions such as: do they like to grill asada? Do they like to listen to music? How might we break the ice and just be in their space of leisure and joy, especially to balance the pain and trauma that may be conjured with some questions? Krys wrote in their journal that “Dr. Abigail Rosas reminded us that folks have their own timelines, and we can do our best to work with them; whether that’s doing preliminary interviews, rescheduling interviews, or just being understanding and empathizing with any last-minute changes.” This complex tapestry of guidance to balance the formal with the informal, to take the work seriously while enjoying the messiness of it all, and to offer gentleness whenever possible provided a nuanced and critical blueprint for our working definition of cariño as a method in oral history research.

In the summer of 2022, Allyson and Vanessa expanded our definitions of cariño. We continued our contemplative practices and had the privilege of learning from Dr. Eddy Alvarez and Dr. Tala Khanmalek. Dr. Eddy Alvarez introduced us to the ways oral history research was an act of survival and resistance for queer Chicanx communities. For us, Dr. Alvarez’s method of finding sequins in the rubble allowed us to focus on the details, on the mundane and the beauty amidst the wreckage of the ongoing pandemic. How might we find freedom in the beauty of our communities’ efforts in self-preservation, self-fashioning and memory? This question shaped our discussions of learning to listen to every detail. As Dr. Tala Khanmalek taught us, this means being mindful of nonlinear methods. Allyson considered these approaches as “portals of care”:

This week my focus was on learning how to build portals of care. Dr. Khanmalek’s talk highlighted the importance of listening to and uplifting nonlinear narratives. Through our generative discussion with Dr. Khanmalek, I uncovered a fundamental truth of oral history: oral histories are not linear by nature. Furthermore, I learned about the value of nonlinear narratives and tangents. Too often, society tells us that tangents are obsolete to historians, but they are vital to stories. I also contemplated how humans do not experience anything in a straight line because life is messy. Thus, linearity is a form of oppression because there have always been other worldviews that understood time as nonlinear. Lastly, another big takeaway from this week’s work is that nonlinear narratives counter eurocentrism. (From Alyson Blanco’s journal entry, July 3rd, 2022)

The critique of linear time generated portals of care. For Vanessa, this was practical guidance to work against assumptions about taking on the role of interviewer. She writes in her journal that “We may feel like our interview is supposed to be crazy professional but I have to remind myself that this is not the purpose of this work” and that a “big part of our job is listening and not interrupting our interviewee for the sake of “staying on topic.”

Student researchers finished the summer preparing a presentation on their research. Taking into consideration the wisdom from faculty workshop facilitators, our workshop meditations and their own research, we conceptualized five elements that defined cariño. First, cariño meant embodying tenderness, love, and care before, during and after interviews. Second, cariño is a willingness to hold space for silence and difficult emotions during interviews. Third, cariño means that when we debrief as a team we hold space for patient breathing and we listen to each other to care and validate our work, anxieties and life experiences in and beyond the research process. Fourth, cariño is an act of interpretation where we de-homogenize our academic language in describing a binary pandemic experience. We choose, for example, to describe events, narrators, and stories from the perspective of our narrator and refuse the urge to rely too heavily on theory, for instance, that of resistance. Cariño also meant gentle reflection on our experiences and boundaries so we could be open-hearted to the experiences and boundaries of our narrators.

Cariño in the Archive and in Future Endeavors

The journey of embodying and conceptualizing cariño in our collective efforts and work has healed many wounds for me regarding academic research. Our work proved that we could support one another in constructive and generative ways. At times in the workshops, we were tired and fatigued and the breathing and contemplation helped. Other times, we grew frustrated with the bureaucracy of the university and with clear mind and spirit, we did our best to provide resources and emotional capacity for each other. Other times, family members passed and we canceled workshops. When someone could not attend a workshop, we recorded it without questions and sent it to them. Erring on the side of compassion became our norm and challenged notions of time, speed and efficiency. Radical openness to cariño in collaborative faculty-student research teams is pivotal for projects that aim to build positive relationships amongst team members.

The positive relationships we developed in our training translated in producing a robust archive. At this point, we have conducted over 20 interviews and presented at two research conferences. ²

Our ongoing podcast recording sessions reveal the generous and reciprocal practice of cariño within our archive. Our archive is full of humanizing acts of care and tenderness that demonstrate the ways narrators navigated the unwieldy emotional terrain of the pandemic and the ways researchers held space for processing, making meaning of the pandemic and sharing cariño. Amber Orozco shared that one of her narrators, Jose, navigated the lockdowns that drastically impacted his small business by turning to his love of music, specifically playing the drums. After playing the drums for the first time in a long time since being part of a band, he had the idea of starting to “flip drums” as a “little side hustle” which he also found to be a useful way of turning a profit and a positive and “therapeutic practice.”

Oh, I will tell you one thing, I’m sorry… what made everything bearable for me…I played the drums in our band and I bought a drum set, I cleaned it up, and I was like, I haven’t really liked this and so I’m just gonna sell it and I sold it on Craigslist for profit. Okay, I was like, oh, okay, that’s kind of cool. So I was like, hey, maybe I’ll try this again. So I started a little side hustle on flipping drums. So that was like, so fucking therapeutic for me. Just sit here, like, I am with you right now at my kitchen table. And I will just buy old vintage drums. And I sitting here in polish and clean them, restore them, and then slap them back on Craigslist and make money. Sometimes I would just break even on stuff. And I was cool. And that was what kept me positive the whole thing. Because it was my only escape from the fucking bullshit… (from Amber Orozco’s interview with Jose, July 21, 2021)

Jose’s agility to navigate the “fucking bullshit” of the pandemic turned into an entrepreneurial practice, which, in turn, lead Jose to turn the “living room” into a practice room. The importance of music in making things “bearable” during this cumbersome emotional terrain became clear when Jose shared the significance of returning to drumming, refurbishing vintage drum sets and practicing again—the passing of Jose’s father.

And then when my old man died, we hadn’t played, my brother and I had broken off the band, obviously. And we hadn’t played together almost two years. And we got the guys back together and we rehearsed. And we played at his at a service we did. and it was like coming home. My dad was a huge music lover. Yeah, my brother and I were fanatics… And to be able to play for my old man with my brother and the band. That was the height of the band. [Amber: And yeah, it sounds like a very beautiful moment to have the service [and] to be able to play. Like the music and like as a tribute but to be there and be with your brother, especially after two years of not playing together. I think that’s yeah, I think that’s a really beautiful way to [express] also your love…] Yeah, that was Yeah. I mean, 100%. Yeah, to be able to play for him. And, you know, one of my favorite pictures, that old man is just having, standing, he’s standing up against the wall watching us play the gig. Yeah, and I just fucking love it. (from Amber Orozco’s interview with Jose, July 21, 2021).

In our podcast, Amber reflects on the importance of having conducted an oral life history interview, first as context for understanding Jose’s agility in the unwieldy emotional terrain of the pandemic described in the second interview. In the first interview, Amber noted that Jose had a very complex relationship with his father and a difficult upbringing. Music was a site of connection, reflection and emotional expression. Jose’s relationship with his father and his brother, who was also part of the band, found ties that bound them with and through music. The central bond shared in music was pivotal in Jose’s agility to navigate the challenges of maintaining a small business in the context of lockdowns and most importantly, the rigorous process and onerous sorrow of mourning his father’s passing. Jose so graciously shared with us the beautiful photograph of his father watching his sons play together in the band that he details in the excerpt of his narrative.

Citlally Solorzano shared a similarly poignant story when she interviewed her sister-in-law, Evelyn Castillo. Like Amber, Citlally articulates that the first interview allowed her to have a comprehensive understanding of the strength that allowed Evelyn to confront the pandemic. Evelyn shares that she navigated caretaking and the challenging burdens of the pandemic through the experience of having taken care of her grandmother who battled cancer.

So, as you know, my grandma passed away of cancer when I was 21, and she was having a lot of like, medical issues before that, but like, I felt like during the time when she was sick, I was going to school at Cal Poly. My older sister was, she wasn’t in school, but she was like, working graveyard shifts, and my mom has always been, like, almost like a workaholic, I think. So, when it came to like her being sick, and being able to take her to like all her doctor’s appointments, and to, like really take care of her. I kind of like stepped up in that. And you know, it did take me away from, like, school. And that was really hard for me just always thinking like, you know, school, school, school, school, school. But I think that making the intentional choice of, you know, taking care of my grandma. And you know, especially because she, she was, she’s like my second mom, like, she’s who would walk me to school every day. When I was in elementary school, she would, she was our babysitter because my mom was like a single parent and had to, like, work very long hours. So I think in that point, being able to be the person to take care of her when she did, you know, when her, when her illness kind of started taking more toll on her in her body. And you know, when I think about that time for me, even though it was really hard. I feel like it really, it really helped me feel like I could give back and really support my family in a way that I don’t think I ever really thought of before. Like, of course, it was always like, being supportive towards my family, but never in a way that I feel like was adult. Right. And I know, like, at 18 you’re considered an adult, but I don’t really feel like I had any, like, responsibility other than going to school and working because I, like, worked. But I think that during that time specifically for me, I’m really thinking about what are the most important things for me in life, like my priorities. Being there for the people that I care about. And I think taking action is what really helped to, like, help me grow as a person. And so like ever since then, like I’ve always been, like, someone that in my family, if anything is needed, like okay, what are we going to do about it? (From an interview with Evelyn Castillo by Citlally Solorzano, March 28, 2023)

The care Evelyn took on in supporting her grandmother during her illness provided a sense of clarity and purpose in her life. As Evelyn articulates, taking her grandmother to appointments, caring for her when her illness took a toll on her body and being supportive for her sister and mother despite her desire to pursue higher education prepared her to take action in catastrophic times.

And even like, when the pandemic started, it was more of, okay, what do we need to do to, like, get things going or to, like, making sure that we’re safe and secure? So I think that when I experienced that, that’s what really got me to, like, kind of to take charge and do more of that growth as an individual and my capabilities in, you know, taking care of someone else. And also, like, making sure that I took care of myself so that I could be as independent as possible. (From an interview with Evelyn Castillo by Citlally Solorzano, March 28, 2023)

Citlally’s interview with Evelyn revealed the way her cariño and care for her grandmother prepared her to navigate the demands of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her confrontation on an everyday basis with illness, aging and mortality provided her the growth and strength to confront the unwieldy terrain of more loss, adjustment and sacrifice. Citlally also interviewed Evelyn’s husband, who is also Citlally’s brother, Anthony. Evelyn’s resolve was cared for by Anthony’s sense of humor, creativity and drive which as Citlally shares in the podcast was rooted in Anthony’s appreciation of his grandfather’s sense of humor growing up, introduction to comedy movies through his Uncle Victor, and cultivated in his passion for comedy, writing and theater. For Citlally, she found joy and happiness in her brother’s abundant creativity and fun ideas during the quarantine months of the pandemic, including finding ways to connect with his spouse.

And there was one time Evelyn and I, we looked up like a spot. Like I literally looked up make out spot near us [Citlally laughs] And we found this like this hill in Chino that oversees like, the lights of the city and we went to In-N-Out and got some food and parked there and just hung out like, obviously, I mean but we didn’t just go there to make out, we went to have a date. That was our date. (from an interview with Anthony Solorzano by Citlally Solorzano, April 5, 2023)

Citlally describes that the process of interviewing her brother and sister-in-law allowed her to gain a deeper appreciation for her family and also, regain the joys of conducting research. I make note of Citlally’s joyous laughter in the previous excerpt precisely because the oral history work allowed researchers to also remember the beauty and joy that allowed us to navigate the pandemic’s challenges and to highlight the way oral history invites these humanizing interactions. Our discussion in the podcast of Evelyn and Anthony’s date allowed us to take a minute to meditate on not only the sorrow of the first-year of the pandemic but also the panoramic perspective that this world-altering event had on all of us. We imagined the views in the wonderful narrative of them sharing the night sky on a hill in Chino, overlooking their city, staring at the stars and eating In-N-Out. Citally shares that this memory of romantic and serene intentionality transformed her sensibilities of the nature of research and knowledge production. Rather than grappling with the pressures of high theory to describe the pandemic, Citlally encourages us to contemplate on the lovingkindness of finding a date idea that could sustain love, connection, peace and perspective during a time of persistent lockdown, uncertainty and fear.

The “Archives of Mortality” project demonstrates that when we start from a place of tenderness, love and care, we receive it in abundance. In Stephanie’s wonderful interview with her mother, Norma, we are reminded that our narrators’ stories are acts of unwavering and endless cariño and hope. Norma beautifully shares:

Yo namás digo que siempre después de la tempestad viene la calma. Y digo que después de todo esto que pasó, viene algo bueno, bueno para nosotros que esto nos sirva de experiencia. Esta pandemia nos sirva de experiencia para estar más unidos, a la mejor también este nos hacía falta que no descansará porque el tiempo nos den la escuela, y el trabajo, y que a veces no nos damos tiempo en la familia. Que esto que nos pasó nos sirva de mucha experiencia y ya esta marcada para nosotros, pero que sigamos adelante, sigamos adelante, porque de después de todo esto viene lo mejor, viene algo bueno para todos nosotros. (From an interview with Norma by Stephanie Rivera, July 15, 2021)

With enormous cariño, Norma teaches us that calm and peace will follow this storm. Norma also instructs us to allow the pandemic to teach us life lessons—to not allow work and school to keep us from spending time with our loved ones and to find unity in times of struggle. Norma’s hopeful message for her daughter specifically, and to us, more generally, demonstrates precisely what we were all searching for in participating in this work: to find hopefulness in times of helplessness and to find cariño in a cruel society. For us as a research team, this hopefulness is the emotive outcome of the cariño that grounded our work on a daily basis. Our hope is that future contributors as well as those who engage the archive for learning and contemplation can find an archive of calming reflection.

This essay is part of the series Humanizing Acts: Resisting the Historical Erasures of the COVID-19 Pandemic across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, funded by UCHRI’s Recasting the Humanities: Foundry Guest Editorship grant. Listen to the collaborative podcast, in which series contributors discuss the gifts of resisting the historical erasure of the COVID-19 pandemic with community and research.

This publication was partially funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

1. We have presented at two conferences and this article constitutes one of three working manuscripts in development. With funding and support from the California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) Mellon Latinx Lab for Storytelling and Social Justice, I developed an upper-division undergraduate course “Cariño and Memory in the Time of Pandemic” for the Department of Chicana/o Studies at CSUF. The course will include a digital story map that maps the emotional terrain of the oral history narratives.
2. As mentioned earlier, the “Archives of Mortality” project is the bedrock of a new course proposal at California State University, Fullerton that is funded and supported by the CSUF Latinx Lab. The course prepares students to situate their contribution to the “Archives of Mortality” through analyzing the role of epidemics in the genocide of Indigenous people in the Americas, the histories of disability and disposability in world history and neoliberal labor regime, the HIV/AIDs epidemic’s impact on queer and trans people of color, the relationship between racialization and the essentialization of labor during the pandemic, white supremacy and religion, mutual aid and care, and ways to honor our loved ones who passed. Students will combine this knowledge with engagement with, discussion on and writing about our podcast and story map to prepare them to contribute to the archive.