There are many for whom confinement is a punishment. There are others, also many, for whom not leaving home is a luxury they cannot afford. There are so many who do not even have homes to stay in.
They are thousands, even millions.
In Latin America this is obvious for the informal workers of different areas and also for the people for whom the street is their means of survival and their home.
In the region, as well as in the United States and Spain, immigrants are among those most affected by quarantine policies, either because their legal status is not resolved or because they live from day to day in temporary jobs.
The street as a livelihood
“If I don’t sell, I don’t eat. It’s as simple as that,” Leonardo Meneses Prado, a Mexico City burger seller, told Kirk Semple and Natalie Kitroeff of The New York Times.
In Latin America, the region where the informal economy is prevalent, street vendors – of food and any product – garbage recyclers, street musicians, depend on the street for their livelihoods and those of their families.
According to the International Labor Organization, more than 2 billion people around the world, about 60% of the employed population, work in the informal economy. In the Americas it is 40% (183 million people) and in Latin America and the Caribbean 53.1%.
In the report by Semple and Kitroeff, they highlight that in Peru more than 21,000 people were arrested for not complying with the official confinement decree, “including street vendors and other workers in the informal economy.”
Santiago Levy, an economist with the Brooking Institution, told the New York Time’s reporters that many informal workers in the region, who are not registered with social security or as contributors, “will be invisible to government agencies” if the authorities put in place compensatory aid programs. In Colombia, President Iván Duque announced payments for informal workers without social assistance, with fears among these people that it would be insufficient.
“What we are making, we are spending daily on food and we are saving a little bit for the rent,” Noelia Flores, a Venezuelan immigrant living in Peru, told BBC Mundo’s Stefania Gozzer. Flores cleans a hotel in Tumbes, in the north of the country, three times a week. She makes ends meet by selling coffee and sweets on the beach. Her son works as a motorcycle taxi driver. She sends some of the money to her mother in Venezuela. “This is creating quite a chaos and the people who have, buy and supply themselves, but you are left with nothing because you don’t have anything to buy with,” Angela says.
Camila Gianella, an expert in international health and director of Cisepa at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, says in the same report by Gozzer: “It’s a time bomb: people can collaborate as much as they can, but if it’s a question of a choice ‘between me and my family to subsist, and the rest’. People will say ‘Look, if I’m healthy, I’ll go out?’ If you live in this precarious situation, it is very difficult to be asked to make this level of sacrifice (…) Because if people go out, it will be to survive.”
The harshness of being homeless amidst the appearance of abundance
In Spain, one of the countries with most recorded infections of coronavirus in the world, with very strict measures of confinement and restriction of movement, the informal economy is not as present as in Latin America and poverty is not as visible.
But there are people who live on the streets. Before the shock of the pandemic, they were concealed by the appearance of abundance and well-being.
The Federation of Associations and Centers to Help the Marginalized estimates that in 2019 there were 40,000 homeless people registered throughout Spain. “We are especially concerned about their maximum lack of protection, the people who are forced to comply with a confinement and not remain on the street, this being their usual space for survival,” they say on their website.
Because of the crisis, they have been confined to squatter’s houses, or have been taken by the authorities to emergency shelters they have set up.
On March 13, when the pandemic and the crisis in Spain were just beginning to worsen, a homeless man in Madrid opened a Twitter account with his mobile phone – to which he recharges 10 euros a month -, to update about his situation and the people who live in the same conditions.
“We are as human as anyone else and we can catch and spread the virus as badly as anyone else, so I would be very grateful if a protocol could be established to help and contain the coronavirus in a dignified way, within the group of social exclusion to which I belong”.
A graduate in Philosophy wrote a testimony from an emergency shelter in Ifema, in Madrid, which was published by El País: “Inside we talk of course of the coronavirus, of its evolution, of its origin, of how vulnerable it makes us to be so close. ‘We are in the slaughterhouse,’ some say. ‘We’re all going down,’ say others. Trying to put words to the fear that inevitably runs through us at times.”
Being on the streets at one time or another in Spain is not something reduced to those who fall into the widespread categories of poverty and social exclusion. It can happen to anyone who, for example, becomes unemployed and cannot afford a roof over their head.
People with addictions also live outdoors. Although the street is immensely hard on those who survive it, a forced confinement has an emotional impact on them.
In Vigo, Galicia, in the north of Spain, several of them live in “sub-communities”: they settled in abandoned buildings in the city and now they cannot move from there because of the confinement measures. “Here we live as we can,” Javier Romero tells Salto Diario. In addition, writes Raúl Novoa González, the author of the article, they distrust the authorities and society. “In addition to the difficulty of being on the streets, it is also difficult to live with people you don’t know,” adds Antón Bouza, of the NGO ‘Foro Socioeducativo Os Ninguéns’.
There are also those who live at Barajas International Airport in Madrid. 100 people were expelled from there because of the pandemic. Rafael Méndez reports for El Confidencial that several had come there to take refuge, because of this crisis. The reporter tells the story of Lenin Antonio Rubio, a 32-year-old Guatemalan who has been living at Barajas airport for a year. He has tried to return to his country; once he almost succeeded: he even bought a ticket, but it was stolen.
The situation of immigrants that sums it all up
Immigrants whose legal status is in limbo or whose economy is fragile have also been left on the streets.
El Espectador reported that at least 200 Venezuelans were evicted from a shelter in the south of Bogotá, the Colombian capital, as the quarantine measures imposed by the authorities prevent crowds of more than 50 people. The district to which the shelter belongs gave them help in finding a roof over their heads, but the people affected argue that this is very difficult given the conditions of the confinement, which have disrupted the lives of the immigrants living there on a daily basis.
In Colombia, at least 60 per cent of the 1.7 million Venezuelans living there depend on the informal economy.
Angela, 27, arrived in Bogotá a year ago from Venezuela. She used to live on selling brownies, earning as much as $13 a day, Karen Sanchez reports for the Voice of America. The confinement imposed by the Colombian government diminished her clientele. So she had to go to Trasmilenio (the busiest transportation in town) to beg for money, with her six-year-old son, who also cannot go to school because it is closed.
“I’m not used to doing this kind of thing. I have always ridden this type of transport to sell some kind of product, but due to the situation that both Venezuelans and Colombians are experiencing because of the coronavirus, many are inhibited from buying a product,” she says.
Only between Friday, April 4 and Saturday, April 5, some 600 Venezuelans have returned to Venezuela over the land border, according to another Voice of America report. They arrived at the Colombian border city of Cúcuta in more than 20 buses.
A report by EFE describes that there were many young people on those buses, who “shouted that they were going back to their country because the COVID-19 had left them no choice”. “I’d rather spend time with my mom than spend time in another country,” one of them said.
In the United States, on the other hand, the pandemic and confinement hits Hispanic workers who do not have a stable monthly income and a contract, but live as day laborers in construction, gardening, cleaning or seasonal farm work.
Univision Noticias’ Isaías Alvarado spoke with María Zamora, a Mexican single mother who has lived in Los Angeles, California for 30 years. She had not been called to work in the cleaning of the houses she used to go to, her regular clientele: up to 15 in one week, and $1,200 in income.
Now she’s running out of money.
“Even though I’m very much in demand and have been cleaning the houses of these families for many years, no one wants me. They tell me, ‘It’s for the good of you and us.’ (…) If I don’t work I can’t pay the rent, I can’t pay for food, and I can’t support my family. I’m worried about that. What savings will I have if we live from day to day? When I pay one rent, I already have the other one on me,” she says.
Because of this crisis, 3.3 million people in the United States went to employment offices for the first time to apply for assistance,
Ruben Vives wrote for LATimes that, regardless of the fluctuations in the economy, precarious income is instead a constant for that portion of the population who works by the day. A large majority of them are undocumented immigrants – without visas or work permits. Therefore, they do not have access to paid sick leave, health insurance, or any unemployment benefits.
On any given day –Vives quotes Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the NGO National Day Laborer Organizing Network– 120,000 men and women work for days or look for such jobs in at least 22 states of the U.S. The data is similar to a study –albeit from 14 years ago– by the University of California that Isaiah Alvarado consulted for his Univision’s report. According to the research, the average income of these people was $700, and 59% of them were Mexican, 14% from Guatemala and 8% from Honduras
In Spain, the situation is not much different. “Confinement is being a traumatic experience for hundreds of vulnerable immigrants who were living on a daily basis before the crisis,” reports María Martín for El País. The alarm decree has taken a toll on their incomes and they face the fourth week of quarantine without money, locked up in tiny rooms or in floors where there is no room for another mattress. Some have no papers and are afraid to even go to the supermarket. Others don’t know where to go for help.”