CHAPTER 19

Marked By Covid’s Memory Activism

Christine Keeves, Kristin Urquiza, and Sarah Senk

This chapter is a collaborative work between activists and an academic that seeks to preserve the authenticity of individual voices. The first section is Marked By Covid cofounders Kristin Urquiza and Christine Keeves’s firsthand account of the motivations and lived realities of their work. The second section, authored by Sarah Senk, a scholar in the field of memory studies who also serves as a strategic adviser to Marked By Covid, aims to contextualize the organization’s work. This unconventional approach to writing is driven by our conviction that a blend of autoethnography and theoretical analysis enriches our understanding of social movements; it acknowledges the importance of maintaining the integrity of personal stories while engaging with these narratives in a way that contributes to academic discourse. In doing so, we hope to elevate the voices of those directly involved in activism while also highlighting the value of interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges academia and activism and recognizes the power of personal narratives in shaping theoretical discussions.

Part I

Marked By Covid is the grassroots nonprofit leading the movement for pandemic justice and remembrance founded by and for those most harmed. The direction of our work is determined by thousands of people who have lost a loved one to COVID-19, are living with long COVID, or both and is supported by a robust community of volunteers, advisers, and allies. When we founded the organization in the immediate aftermath of Mark Urquiza’s death on June 30, 2020, our intention was to mitigate the disproportionate impact of the pandemic and other disasters on marginalized communities. One of the touchstones of our policy platform focuses on recognition, and from the beginning, we have worked to “create space and forums for mourning and remembrance and impart to future generations the unvarnished truth about what happened and who is accountable.”1 Since then we’ve advanced justice through a number of commemoration projects, including #HonestObituaries, the Marked By Covid Memorial Matrix, COVID Memorial Day, and our National COVID Memorial (Figure 19.1).

Survivor-led commemoration confronts social injustice by highlighting the harms caused by historic disinvestment and disenfranchisement of communities of color in the United States. Working in the nonprofit sector for years and driving other social change campaigns, we observed how often members of marginalized communities are “brought to the table” in a superficial way that allows established institutions to claim that they got “input from the community” while pursuing their own goals, not the goals of the communities. Our vision of survivor-led, community-centered memorial work resists tokenistic practices where bereaved individuals and communities are superficially included in discussions or projects and then, after their initial participation, sidelined while the so-called real experts take over—a common practice that simultaneously exploits and undervalues lived experience.

Our theory of change is rooted in the notion that to achieve justice we must follow the lead of, work in solidarity with, and build the power of people who experience the worst impacts of disaster. Repair is justice, and repair requires not only meeting marginalized communities’ acute needs after a disaster but also actively dismantling the systemic barriers that marginalize them in the first place. Unfortunately, these survivors are more often tokenized by individuals who have been harmed less by the status quo. We aim to challenge the deeply held institutional, interpersonal, and individual biases and resulting structural barriers that prevent survivors from becoming leaders beyond their own communities.

To begin, we must elevate the value of lived experience. We must also recognize that disasters such as the pandemic may be felt universally but not uniformly. The devastating and far-reaching effects of repeated survivorship compound exponentially and unevenly in multiple dimensions. As scholars such as Camara Phyllis Jones and Michael Siegel have argued, structural inequalities and biases deeply entrenched in the fabric of our society exacerbated the pandemic’s impact. The privilege of remote work was not an option for most essential workers, often from marginalized backgrounds, who had no choice but to report in person. Meat plant workers, restaurant line cooks, and public transit operators, among others, found themselves in high-risk environments, often without anything close to adequate protective equipment or space for physical distancing, let alone paid time off for respite while ill.2 And communities already bearing the brunt of systemic health and economic disparities faced significantly higher infection and mortality rates.

The pandemic—and the varied responses of the country’s elected officials—further exacerbated disparities of almost every kind. Differential outcomes in infection rates and public trust can be traced to whether decision-makers at the municipal, state, and federal levels prioritized public health and safety or (short-term) economic gain.3 In the first week of July 2020, for instance, the number of confirmed COVID cases was growing more quickly in Arizona than anywhere else in the world,4 while state leaders continued to obfuscate the risks.5

Institutional decisions are felt at a starkly personal level by millions of families. Before the removal of the shelter-in-place ordinance in Arizona, Mark Urquiza avoided indoor gatherings and wore a mask. But on May 28, 2020, when Arizona governor Doug Ducey reassured his constituents that it was safe to resume normal activities, Mark believed him.6 He asked Kristin, “Why would the governor or president say it was safe to return to normal if it wasn’t?” He died in the ICU on June 30, 2020, while a nurse held his hand after we said our final goodbyes over Facetime.

Our first goal was clear: share Mark’s story to illuminate the real-world impacts of policy decisions and demand an end to the disproportionate toll of the politicization of public health. Our strategy was first to compel: We aimed to exhibit the widespread public support for a nationally coordinated, data-informed pandemic response, specifically pressuring Governor Ducey and Cara Christ, the director of Arizona Health Services, to allow local municipalities to equitably implement infection control measures recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as mask requirements, accessible testing, and clear instructions about risk and mitigation. At that time there were state-level bans on mask requirements, fourteen-hour waits in 100+ degree weather in predominantly Black, Indigenous, and people of color neighborhoods, and a minimization of the tragedy in progress. Fundamentally, we wanted bystanders to understand that behind the numbers and statistics were people—people whose lives and deaths deserved to be witnessed and mourned.

On July 3, 2020—between choosing a coffin and choosing burial attire for Mark—we drafted a plan to “raise hell for dad.”7 This included the publication of Marked By Covid’s first Honest Obituary which invited the public to share their own stories and join us in a public vigil on the steps of the Arizona State Capitol on July 8, immediately following Mark’s funeral (Figure 19.2).8 We also invited Governor Ducey to the funeral and sent an exclusive pitch to a reporter at the Arizona Republic. We were incredibly privileged to have a network with the knowledge and ability to help. Publisher and friend Renée Sedlier helped us write Mark’s obituary, fundraiser Nicole Stratton set up a GoFundMe to defray funeral costs and eventually raise seed money for other obituaries, grassroots campaigner Isaac Bloom helped drive vigil attendance, organizer and constituent services pro Molly Rose Lewis managed incoming messages from social media and email accounts, policy expert and fluent Spanish speaker Ryan Pukos translated materials (including a Google form to collect stories and contact info) and helmed a nascent policy team, and labor organizer Lauren Burke made connections to lawmakers in Phoenix. Christine’s contacts supplied reporter lists from expensive databases to ensure effective media outreach. On July 9, we woke up to a deluge of messages from reporters, trolls, supporters, and other families marked by COVID—the response was almost unmanageable, even with our large support network and preparation. Kristin repeated her story over and over again, often multiple times per hour, to national print reporters and on live TV from our hotel room, while her dad’s Honest Obituary was shared by tens of millions of people on social media.

To take full advantage of the media cycle, our ad hoc team started outreach. Our plan was to help families share their stories and experiences, turning obituaries into calls for action, and one of the first things we did was to crowdsource funding to pay for other people’s Honest Obituaries,9 putting faces to the statistics and urging both the government and the public to take the pandemic seriously. Policy and leadership failure is often felt behind closed doors in the lives of ordinary people experiencing their consequences. One of the stories we shared was Rosemary Rangel’s, a civil engineer in San Antonio and the daughter of immigrants who lived in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas; she experienced the devastating collapse of the health care system firsthand when her father in Brownsville, Texas, couldn’t secure an ambulance or a spot in an overflowing funeral home. By sponsoring these obituaries, we hoped to preserve some small record of the grave injustices exacerbated by political negligence. Through these stories, we strove to reveal the truth about America’s fractured response to the pandemic and the inordinate toll it took on marginalized communities.

Media coverage alone is not a panacea to change. It’s a tool for organizing masses of people and casting illusions of power, and in July 2020, we began organizing toward a National Day of Action for August 13, 2020, Mark’s upcoming sixty-sixth birthday. We knew the power of storytelling from decades of prior work in social change. As we documented the existing accountability mechanisms (or lack thereof) that characterized our public health infrastructure, we collected thousands of deeply personal, often harrowing accounts of those who suffered and died due to systemic failures, such as Fiana Garza-Tulip’s mother, Isabelle Papadimitriou, a Mexican American respiratory technician in Texas who lost her life due to a medical facility–acquired infection because she and other health care professionals had inadequate personal protective equipment five months into the crisis.10 The goal of collecting and sharing these stories was to secure recognition of the immense human cost of the pandemic and to expose how structural inequities and the inherited systems mired in structural racism were playing out in real time. Firm believers in Representative Ayanna Pressley’s ethos that “those closest to the pain belong closest to the power,”11 we chose strategically to focus on the storytelling of our peers—immigrants, people of color, working-class people—to shape a more accurate narrative of what was happening on the frontline of the so-called war on COVID in the national media.

Drawing inspiration from the ofrenda (altar) we created in Phoenix for Mark’s vigil on July 8, activists in dozens of locations across the country created similar altars featuring photos of their lost loved ones. In an effort to foster more community involvement and solidarity, we extended an open invitation for communities everywhere to participate and join us in these acts of remembrance. In early October 2020, we observed a “Week of Mourning” (Figure 19.3). Every morning that week, an hour-long memorial featured spokespeople from impacted communities (for example, we dedicated a day to commemorating the deaths of people of color, a day focused on incarcerated people, and a day focused on health care workers). They were daily vigils we cocreated to draw attention to the need for spaces in both time and place for this particular kind of intersectional grief, where people are not only mourning their loved ones but are also struggling with the knowledge that so many of these deaths were preventable and enabled by systemic inequities.

As we planned for the Day of Action, we activated our network to help us put together tool kits and training for nascent activists to leverage personal stories to convince the broader public to demand more from elected officials in charge of the pandemic response. Simultaneously, we continued to build a digital database to preserve what was given to us, knowing that what we were doing was keeping a historical record for future researchers. As we would learn time and time again (and further substantiated in a comprehensive Community Needs Assessment conducted in collaboration with Ricardo Villareal’s Capstone Project at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy), people wanted the opportunity to have their stories recorded. An overwhelming 95 percent of respondents feared that the government was not going to do enough to recognize their losses, highlighting a pervasive sense of apprehension that their loved ones would be forgotten. The accounts we collected, which fundamentally formed and drove Marked By Covid’s policy platform, were also acts of memory—accounts we knew we wanted to preserve for the future to prevent the whitewashing of pandemic history. By documenting the lived experience of those most impacted by systemic inequities, we hoped to prevent them from being erased from the public record and to create a clarion call for systemic reform.

Experiencing firsthand the differences in the public health response in San Francisco, where we live, and in Maricopa County, Arizona, where Kristin grew up, and where the public health infrastructure was so overwhelmed in June 2020 that people were waiting fourteen hours in line in 100+ degree heat just to get a COVID test, hit home in the most personal way regarding what we knew about the inequities at the heart of our systems of care. Even within the same cities, hospitals in Black and Brown communities were facing apocalyptic conditions, while those that catered to wealthier, insured, and often whiter clients were better resourced to manage patients.12 To accurately represent the story of the pandemic required an unflinching look at the systems that were failing people, and by elevating personal stories of harrowing loss, systems of care in collapse, and the families left behind, we were able to create a powerful counternarrative to what was being downplayed by politicians.

Ensuring that the COVID-19 pandemic is recorded in the history books has become one of our most important objectives—one that’s manifested in our memorial work. But in addition to thinking about challenging narratives and changing minds in the moment, even in those early days, we talked about the importance of ensuring that the unvarnished truth of the pandemic was recorded. One of the first things Kristin said after receiving the call that her father had died was a cogent warning against revisionist history: “I’ll be damned if I let them tell a ‘Columbus discovered America’ version of this crisis.” Kristin is of Mexican American descent and studied pre-Columbian art history of Mesoamerica in college. This helped her build deep pride in her Indigenous cultural heritage, which was largely written out of history until the rise of the Chicano movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Living at a time when politicians are successfully legislating against teaching the truth about the founding of our own country—the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the building of wealth through chattel slavery—we wanted to avoid having to mount a defense against revisionist history years from now, and to do that we need to make sure we are preserving and elevating the right evidence in this moment. When people are unable to historicize the past, they are unable to see its ghosts; those with only superficial knowledge of chattel slavery will never be able to trace the throughline to mass incarceration or the way our current systems are built to maintain race-based power structures. We needed to build a historical record that would offer future researchers and students of social justice alike a powerful narrative for social change. When a society actively resists the falsification of history, it refuses to let anyone be deemed disposable.

As people who grew up witnessing firsthand the slow violence of poverty and environmental degradation that makes marginalized communities especially vulnerable to the impacts of more sudden disasters, we knew that the narrative had to shine a light on systemic problems. The disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities already exposed to a broad base of harms necessitated a response that explicitly named the pandemic as part of a compound disaster. It’s worth mentioning that Kristin’s childhood neighborhood doesn’t have—and never has had—safe drinking water.13 Maryvale is a cancer cluster and a declared superfund site. From 1970 to 1986, newborns to nineteen-year-olds died at twice the rate of the national average from leukemia. Oil tanks have ruined the water table and pipes. That experience was a fundamental reason why Kristin pursued a career in environmental justice work.

Nurturing a cultural memory of the COVID-19 pandemic that simultaneously bears witness to structural harms is essential for fostering social change, as it’s a means of encouraging everyone, not just those directly impacted by a disaster, to shine a light on social injustices. Democratizing memory is the first step in addressing other structural inequalities. The pandemic is the opening act to the worst of the climate crisis to come—a slow disaster whose ongoing impacts are already exacerbating the same disparities that COVID-19 has.

Fundamentally, a more equitable approach to recognizing and recording the stories of these deaths can help support future arguments about the need to prepare better for crises. But to create lasting and meaningful change, it is essential to center the leadership of those most impacted by disaster, and thus nonprofit (and other) organizations must prioritize and build the power of the voices and perspectives of the communities they claim to serve. In other words, instead of assuming that they know what is best for people they claim to help, allies should not just engage with them but also play an active role in building the organization’s goals, strategies, and actions.

Part II

Kristin Urquiza and I (Sarah Senk) have been friends for over twenty years, and at the simplest level, our friendship is what got me involved with Marked By Covid. By the time I officially joined the board at the very end of 2021, Marked By Covid activists had already held over three hundred meetings with lawmakers, culminating in the introduction of resolutions to both houses of Congress supporting the creation of a COVID Memorial Day. Additionally, Marked By Covid activists had already designed and implemented an egalitarian process to create a memorial that centered the COVID-bereaved community; in a virtual “watch party” webinar held on the night of President-elect Joe Biden’s ceremonial candle lighting vigil to remember COVID-19 victims, they declared the organization’s intention to establish a National COVID Memorial created by and for people who have lost loved ones to COVID. As an academic with a scholarly interest in commemorative practice, Urquiza and Keeves asked me to attend community meetings to speak with activists about past precedents. The first thing I remember observing is that attendees were voracious learners—asking me in the Zoom chat to recommend books and articles that addressed how national memorials got made, requesting my memorial course syllabus, and asking for feedback on written materials they were working on. It quickly became clear to me as I engaged with more and more activists that I was witnessing a contemporary application of everything I’d ever studied: the invention of new mourning rituals, the ways that people negotiate individual grief in the context of collective trauma and marginalization, the impact of new media on how people experience and process loss.

As Yale undergraduates between 1999 and 2003, Kristin and I were steeped in the field of memory studies even before it had a name.14 The Fortunoff Video Archives loomed large, of course, and one of the most popular courses at the time was the late, great Robert Farris Thompson’s “Black Atlantic Visual Tradition,” which showcased—indeed celebrated—the sub-Saharan African influences in the Americas. The past is always right before our eyes, we learned in our art history classes—often in forms we’re unable to recognize because the dominant narratives we learned in school don’t provide us with an appropriate frame of reference. In those formative years, we were taught the vital importance of recording the voices that disaster typically silences. We were also taught that our understanding of history is shaped on the frames we’ve been given, that those frames are not permanent fixtures, and that people are capable of adjusting their ways of seeing if you offer them a new frame.

For as long as I’ve known Kristin, she has thought in terms of the ripples—the invisible, long-term threats, the least spectacular and most insidious dangers. While the rest of us were paranoid about terror threats after the September 11 attacks, she was concerned about contamination of the air and the water supply. When I moved to California to start my job at Maritime Academy and invited her to give a talk at a whale-themed event, she gave a presentation not about whales but instead about krill and how indiscriminate krill harvesting combined with warming water temperatures could decimate a crucial part of the ecosystem that could critically endanger blue whales again. Kristin’s tendency to see beyond the immediately visible is a central part of Marked By Covid’s ethos of memorial work, which isn’t just about remembrance but is also about laying the groundwork for social change in the future. The organization views acts of commemoration as a tool to ensure that the stories of health system failure are neither ignored nor forgotten and are integral to our collective memory. Marked By Covid’s project is to construct an archival legacy that lays bare the complex and uneven toll of the pandemic.

As Urquiza and Keeves explained above, the premise is simple. For stories to inspire action they have to be heard in the first place, and if we want future policymakers to take seriously the task of mitigating “slow disaster,”15 then (1) the dominant national narrative about the pandemic cannot be a tale of that time when no one could find toilet paper or yeast, and (2) the dominant way of speaking about the pandemic today cannot relegate it to the past as if it were a distant memory. The more we attempt to rhetorically confine ongoing crises to the distant past, the less capable we are of addressing its imminent manifestations.

One of the biggest challenges that pandemic memorial projects face is how to account for what Urquiza and Keeves call the “unevenness” of experience. From early on, Marked By Covid has been about blending personal mourning with political action aimed at highlighting the pandemic as a slow disaster whose impacts (in the United States and elsewhere) hit poor and working-class people of color significantly harder. Urquiza’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, which highlighted the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on minoritized communities, echoed much of what she had written in her father’s obituary, where she blended that personal storytelling with a powerful political statement: “Mark, like so many others, should not have died from COVID-19. His death is due to the carelessness of the politicians who continue to jeopardize the health of brown bodies through a clear lack of leadership, refusal to acknowledge the severity of this crisis, and inability and unwillingness to give clear and decisive direction on how to minimize risk.”16

Recognition—of lives lost but in particular of lives lost due to structural inequities—was a crucial piece of Marked By Covid’s early policy platform, developed by a massive and diverse community of activists whose input was the centerpiece of the organization’s work. Crucially, that work was not just informed by but was also driven by community members, the majority of whom had no prior activist experience. Urquiza and Keeves drew on decades of experience in policy work to provide training and mentorship, policy and letter-writing templates, and checklists and activist tool kits covering everything from how to write a political obituary to how to tell a compelling story in under five minutes to how to prepare for meetings with elected officials. These internal documents offered concise and engaging introductions to advocacy work and also helped to build capacity in a community of people without much formal training or prior experience. Trainings typically took place over Zoom, where bereaved individuals from across the country would convene to get a crash course in collective action—explicitly and intentionally designed for people without much time or resources to spare—while also leaning on one another for ad hoc grief support.

One of the things that stood out to me about Marked By Covid’s work, particularly as a newcomer to the world of activism, was the meticulously coordinated and intentional approach the organization employed to train the people joining its network but also to establish the Marked By Covid narrative. From the very beginning, Urquiza and Keeves took several strategic steps to ensure that their message was heard. These actions ranged from the logistical, such as sending the governor’s invitation to Mark’s funeral via FedEx with signature requirement to guarantee receipt and scouring local Arizona media to identify reporters who had previously been critical of the governor’s pandemic response and inviting them to the funeral, to the “big picture” strategic actions designed to impact the broader cultural narrative. These actions include doubling the vigil as a press conference, for instance. Conflating the press conference with the vigil was a powerful way to draw attention to deaths that were being repressed or denied. Vigils connoted keeping watch over the dead, standing in solidarity with the grieving, while press conferences provided the opportunity to demand accountability and highlight the urgency of the crisis in Maricopa County.

Given that the starting point was a funerary vigil, it is perhaps unsurprising that Urquiza is often framed using the trope of the “grieving daughter” in most media accounts, many of which fail to connect Urquiza’s current work with her years of prior experience working to change policy in the environmental sphere and omit entirely Keeves’s extensive experience working on public health and equity campaigns. Take for instance, a July 2021 New York Times article about COVID Victims’ Families and Survivors Lobby Days,17 an event that Marked By Covid conceived and coordinated, in which Urquiza is described as a “a former environmental activist from San Francisco whose impassioned obituary for her father went viral—and landed her a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention.”18 Not only does “former environmental activist from San Francisco” make Urquiza sound like some kind of hobbyist rather than someone who had previously campaigned for and negotiated major global environmental policies, but it also completely erases the active and intentional nature of the work. Such an oversight exemplifies how even stories that help get the word out about activist work can sideline elements of their history.

Despite years of practice with “close reading,” this was something I only really noticed when Urquiza and Keeves took issue with a line I’d written for an academic talk in which I attempted to contextualize Marked By Covid’s “emergence” during a critical moment in early twenty-first-century cultural history when increasing accessible digital tools enabled more and more people to preserve and share their experiences.19 “Emergence” is not uncommon phrasing in my field. Aleida Assmann’s foreword to The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, a book that validates the “importance of individual and collective actors in memory studies,”20 talks about how “independent actors emerged that started to challenge the official past and its normative self-image.”21 In a recent essay in Memory Studies, James E. Young describes how “a memorial movement, ‘Marked By Covid[,]’ was born.”22 But, of course, as both Assmann and Young are keenly aware, memorials and movements don’t birth themselves, nor do they grow themselves; they are strategically built. In talking about Marked By Covid’s “emergence,” I had obscured that fact.

Journalists and academics, and all of us for that matter, often frame events using specific narrative templates. The grieving daughter performs a memorial act that is also a political protest against the status quo. Substitute “daughter” with “sibling” and you have Antigone. Ways of seeing have long histories. The grieving daughter—in an emotional-driven moment of temporary inspiration—performs a radical memorial act, and out of that emerges a national movement. It’s a good story, one that captures in some small way the momentum of Marked By Covid’s early days and how acts of mourning galvanized more acts of mourning, which in turn doubled as acts of political resistance. But this narrative obscures the truth. Urquiza and Keeves didn’t publish an obituary and then create an organization once they got traction; they established the group first and devised a concerted plan to increase their reach in order to get traction. This is something neither is shy to admit, and is it something that should come as a surprise: the last line of Mark’s obituary instructs other mourners to meet “outside the Arizona State Capitol building on Wednesday evening at 4:30.” Visible in footage of the vigil are posters with the Marked By Covid logo, which Keeves created at the same time as Kristin planned the funeral.

Partly I wonder if sympathetic commentators don’t mention that the organization was formed before the first public expression of grief because it feels calculating. “Strategic” can feel like the opposite of “authentic” and risks undermining the power of individual grief or plays into trolls’ mischaracterization of the work as exploitation of grief to serve a political agenda. But calculating women are rarely sympathetic, and in some way I suspect that commentators downplay the strategic nature of Urquiza and Keeves’s work because the strategic organization of grief into action—especially when undertaken by women—is only palatable when it fits a framework that reinforces the passivity and accident of “going viral,” downplaying the agency and power of people who threaten the status quo. Saying that movements “emerge” perpetuates an out-of-the-blue logic that not only downplays the strategic nature of the work but also inscribes the harms as event-based rather than as slow disaster. But Marked By Covid’s work has from the beginning been a response not just to the pandemic but also compounding disaster—to health system failure, racial injustice, and environmental catastrophe.

It feels taboo to say that we should politicize grief. People accused of “politicizing” grief are often demeaned as manipulative, as exploiting their personal experiences for political gain. But the journalistic narrative of movements emerging obscures the fact that those hit hardest by acute disaster already know suffering well. People with lived experience of society’s unevenly palpable ongoing harms—harms that are intermittently made visible in the news cycle but present in every moment of the lives of people who live on the margins—are chronic witnesses to the consequences of “bad policy and entrenched systems,” as Urquiza and Keeves often say. When they refer to the pandemic as “the opening act to the worst of the climate crisis to come,” they highlight how the pandemic exposed weaknesses in our infrastructure and systems of care that will be even more devastating as we endure the resource shortages, public health crises, and mass migrations that will inevitably result from continued extreme weather events. The phrase “opening act” alludes to crucial differences in scale and magnitude of the problem. While the pandemic’s global repercussions have been undeniably devastating, the long-term consequences of the climate crisis will be even more pervasive and deleterious. (As Kristin memorably said to me once, “if our systems break down from something as manageable as COVID, we are f—ed for issues like climate change.”)23 Ultimately, building the capacity of individuals from traditionally marginalized identities in disaster response gathers expertise and talent and willpower, and foregrounding the lived reality of these disasters and why/when/where they happened paves the way for the political and policy work required to establish improved structures for coping with our transformed reality.

Notes

1. 1.  Kristin Urquiza, Christine Keeves, Ryan Pukos, Aly Bonde, and Kelly Reynolds, Marked By Covid Policy Platform, May 2022.
2. 2.  By July 2020, meatpacking plants were linked to 6–8 percent of all US coronavirus cases. By October 2020, subsequent community spread caused a staggering 334,000 illnesses and 18,000 COVID-19–related deaths. This accounted for 10 percent of US fatalities. See Michael Grabell, “The Plot to Keep Meatpacking Plants Open During COVID-19,” ProPublica, May 13, 2022; Charles A. Taylor et. al. “Livestock Plants and COVID-19 Transmission,” PNAS 117, no. 40 (September 19, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2010115117; Tina L. Saitone et al., “COVID-19 Morbidity and Mortality in US Meatpacking Counties,” Food Policy 101 (May 2021); and Brian Deese et al., “Recent Data Show Dominant Meat Processing Companies Are Taking Advantage of Market Power to Raise Prices and Grow Profit Margins,” White House Briefing Room Blog, December 10, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2021/12/10/recent-data-show-dominant-meat-processing-companies-are-taking-advantage-of-market-power-to-raise-prices-and-grow-profit-margins/.
3. 3.  See Covid Crisis Group, Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report (Public Affairs, 2023).
4. 4.  David Leonhardt, “Arizona Is #1, Bahrain Is #4,” New York Times, July 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/briefing/arizona-mary-trump-facebook-your-wednesday-briefing.html.
5. 5.  Laurie Roberts, “Why Won’t Arizona’s County Health Officials Tell Us Where People Are Picking up COVID-19?,” Arizona Republic, July 9, 2020, https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2020/07/09/coronavirus-hotspots-arizona-kept-secret-why/5407563002/.
6. 6.  Doug Ducey, “Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey Q&A on Further Reopening of State Economy,” interview by KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Arizona’s Morning News, May 28, 2020, https://ktar.com/arizona-news/arizona-gov-doug-ducey-qa-on-further-reopening-of-state-economy/3201303/.
7. 7.  Kristin Urquiza (@kdurquiza), “RT & Follow @MarkedByCovid to show your support for #CovidJustice. Dad died on 6/30. On 7/4 @CKeeves and I were finalizing a plan,” Twitter (now X), February 20, 2021, https://twitter.com/kdurquiza/status/1363217310358532098.
8. 8.  “Obituary: Mark Anthony Urquiza,” Arizona Republic, July 8, 2020, https://www.azcentral.com/picture-gallery/news/local/phoenix/2020/07/10/maryvale-family-blames-gov-ducey-fathers-death-covid-19/5410995002/.
9. 9.  See “Honest Obituaries,” Marked By Covid, https://www.markedbycovid.com/honest-obituaries. See also James E. Young, “Remembering the Victims of COVID-19: From Personal to Civic to Reparative Memory,” Memory Studies 16, no. 3 (2023): 646–50, https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980231162321; Allison Gordon, “People Are Using Honest Obituaries to Blame Governors for Coronavirus Deaths and Invite Them to Their Loved Ones’ Funerals,” CNN, July 21, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/21/us/texas-obituary-covid-abbott-trnd/index.html; Kerry Breen, “Her Father Died from Coronavirus. She Turned His Obituary into a Powerful Message,” USA Today, July 10, 2020, https://www.today.com/health/how-one-woman-turned-her-father-s-obituary-powerful-message-t186507; Reis Thebault, “Grief. Rage. Action. Out of COVID-19 Loss, These Women Lead a New Movement,” Washington Post, October 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/10/coronavirus-victims-online-activism/; and Chris Megerian, “Families Are Turning Obituaries into Final Pleas to Avoid COVID-19,” LA Times, December 26, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-12-26/obituaries-include-warnings-of-covid-19.
10. 10.  “Obituary: Isabelle Odette Hilton,” Austin American-Statesman, July 21, 2020, https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/statesman/name/isabelle-hilton-obituary?id=8575176.
11. 11.  Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley), “When I say . . . ‘The people closest to the pain, should be the closest to the power, driving & informing the policymaking . . .’ THIS is what I mean,” Twitter (now X), June 30, 2018, https://twitter.com/AyannaPressley/status/1013184081696346113.
12. 12.  Jim Dwyer, “One Hospital Was Besieged by the Virus. Nearby Was ‘Plenty of Space,’” New York Times, May 14, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/nyregion/coronavirus-ny-hospitals.html.
13. 13.  See Jeffrey Horst, “Maryvale, Arizona Once Epitomized the American Dream. Then Chemicals Seeped Under the Town,” Arizona Luminaria, June 2, 2022, https://azluminaria.org/2022/06/02/maryvale-arizona-once-epitomized-the-american-dream-then-chemicals-seeped-under-the-town/.
14. 14.  Aleida Assmann notes that the “consolidation” of memory studies “as a coherent field” began in 2008. Aleida Assmann, “Foreword,” in The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, ed. Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg (Routledge, 2023), 1.
15. 15.  See Scott Gabriel Knowles, “Slow Disaster in the Anthropocene: A Historian Witnesses Climate Change on the Korean Peninsula,” Daedalus 149, no. 4 (2020): 192–206.
16. 16.  “Obituary: Mark Anthony Urquiza,” Legacy.com, July 2020, https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/azcentral/name/mark-urquiza-obituary?id=2188298.
17. 17.  “Register for COVID Lobby Days,” https://actionnetwork.org/forms/register-for-covid-lobby-days.
18. 18.  Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Scarred by Covid, Survivors and Victims’ Families Aim to Be a Political Force,” New York Times, July 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/us/politics/covid-survivors.html. Compare Urquiza’s description to that of COVID Survivors for Change’s founder Chris Kocher, whom Stolberg describes as “a media-savvy veteran of the gun safety movement who said he has already trained more than 500 survivors in the tools of advocacy.” Notably, she does not characterize Urquiza as a “media-savvy veteran” of the environmental movement who had been training survivors for months before COVID Survivors for Change launched. See also Ivan Pereira, “‘A Slap in the Face’: Families of COVID-19 Victims Slam President’s Downplaying of His Diagnosis,” ABC News, October 5, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/slap-face-families-covid-19-victims-slam-presidents/story?id=73436967. A similar juxtaposition is “Chris Kocher, executive director of COVID Survivors for Change” versus “Kristin Urquiza, the Arizona woman who appeared at the Democratic National Convention,” a description that again frames Urquiza as a passive token who just wandered into the convention bumped into a microphone rather than the executive director of Marked By Covid.
19. 19.  See Ramesh Srinivasan, Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World (NYU Press, 2017), 18.
20. 20.  Assmann, “Foreword,” 1.
21. 21.  Assmann, 2 (my emphasis).
22. 22.  Young, “Remembering the Victims of COVID-19,” 647 (my emphasis).
23. 23.  Conversation with Kristin Urquiza, April 29, 2022.