“I can’t read or write. I ask ‘Ms Guerra’ for help with anything I need.” Miss Guerra is a bilingual special education assistant at Nancy DeBenedittis School in Queens, New York. The quote is from the mother of one of Guerra’s students, “She helps me,” says L.S., whose name appears only with the initials in the report by Ariel Goodman for Univision News and Propublica.
This piece of Goodman is about the turnaround in the work of Janina Guerra, a 32 year-old Ecuadorian immigrant who arrived in New York at age 15. She is in charge of 11 fourth-grade students, among them Yaretzi, L.S.’s daughter. Guerra has worked in this school for 10 years.
In a little more than a month, everything changed.
The neighborhood in New York with the most cases of coronavirus is precisely called Corona, localted Queens, in the west of the city. The neighborhood is epicenter of the world’s pandemic epicenter, as Ariel Goodman highlights.
At the end of March, 77% of the 1500 residents of Corona were infected, Kathleen Culliton reported for Patch. Corona is in central Queens, an area inhabited by hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Annie Correal and Andrew Jacobs reported for The New York Times that Elmhurst, East Elmhurst and Jackson Heights are other neighborhoods in the district that add up to the epicenter of the infection. With Corona, they have a population of 600,000 people. With data from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Correal and Jacobs report that these neighborhoods alone accounted for 7,260 cases of coronavirus in early April. And to demonstrate why they form the epicenter of the contagion, they show other data: Manhattan, with a population three times larger than this four Queen’s neighborhoods, had at that time just 3,600 more, with a total of 10,860 people infected.
There are more deaths from Covid-19 in Queens than in any other New York City area, according to the city’s Health Department. More than 30% of the deaths in the whole of NYC were Hispanic, according to records also from early April.
And it’s right in Corona, Queens, where Benedittis’ Nancy school is located. The relatives of Janina Guerra’s students are part of that portion of the U.S. population, immigrants above all, who in the midst of this crisis do not qualify for any type of federal aid, are living on the edge, or merely surviving.
“It is a frustration to see that in the richest country in the world, there is such great inequality. It affects me to see how people without money can die. People’s lives are not worthwhile if they don’t have money,” Guerra said, as quoted in the Univision News and Propublica report.
In the disruption brought on by the pandemic, Guerra added new work to her job as an educator: she now does social work, translation and emotional support to her students’ families. Ariel Goodman reports that, in addition to remote online classes, Guerra connects them to critical services they might receive aid from.
“They need real information. The number one challenge for most is the limitation of language, but I also pass on information about where to get food, and immigration resources,” Guerra tells the reporter.
So, as Ariel Goodman shows in her piece, Guerra fills out applications at the New York City Department of Education to request I pads for her students, helps them fill out the 2020 census, uses the voice notes from the WhatsApp chat to translate documents for these families, calls phone companies to request the internet service into her students’ homes. “I have a student who lives in a hostel with his family. They don’t have internet there, so when the cell phone data is gone, the child’s remote learning is gone,” she says.
“It’s very easy for me to empathize with the parents’ experiences, because I’ve lived through similar things,” Guerra adds. “I always say the same thing, they are my countrymen. Many teachers don’t understand these things. I lived in Corona, Queens, for the first three years I worked at this school. It’s my community. I went through many of the difficulties they go through. I am an immigrant, and I was for a while without papers and without being able to speak the language,” Guerra explains.
One of Janina Guerra’s students lost a family member to Covid-19. She organized with a female colleague from the school to follow up with the girl, who has a neurological disorder. On a daily basis, in the afternoons or evenings, they call the students on video calls. “We focus on calming her because we were very worried that she would have a seizure that would end up sending her to the hospital,” Guerra says.
“We have to think about what’s going on in people’s lives, not just inside the classroom… If we are going to get into their lives and see if they do their homework, I would also like to be able to get into their lives and give them information,” she stresses.
Years ago, right after their retirement, Janina Guerra’s parents returned to Ecuador. She was left alone in the country. So she used to travel to her homeland every year, on April. Not this year.
“What I’m most afraid of is getting sick while I’m here alone. But in spite of what I am going through, seeing what my students are going through, and seeing what the world is going through, I feel lucky to still have a salary, to still have food and a roof over my head. It has made me value my life more,” she says.