TODAY IS JUNE 30, 2020. More than 125,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus; globally, half a million have perished. By now, we are used to hearing or seeing the daily statistics, and I, like many, have developed the morbid habit of awaiting the newest report. I live in New York, what has been the epicenter of the virus for the past few months, a grim title that is now shifting to Latin America, and to Brazil in particular. Even as the local news becomes more optimistic and we cautiously inch forward in the first two stages of reopening, the circulation of the narrative of “returning to normal” has continued to leave me with a sense of unease.

What Maps Tell Us That Numbers Don’t
The pandemic has made clear that our treatment of the “norm” is, at best, relative, and at worst, cognitively dissonant. Epidemics uncloak and exacerbate the structural inequalities that divide our society along class, racial, and gendered lines, in times of official “crisis” and not. Lately, as new infections in New York slowly dwindle, I have been thinking about what maps tell us that numbers don’t. Many have already debunked Governor Andrew Cuomo’s assertion that this virus is the “great equalizer.”¹ Maps have shown that viral cases and deaths are concentrated in low-income and working-class immigrant neighborhoods,² such as Morris Heights in the Bronx and central Queens. As more data around this disease becomes available, mapping them makes visible, and answers, important questions such as: Who has the privilege to stay home? Who do we depend on to provide “essential labor”?

The disproportionate effects of the virus are not just locally confined to New York; rather, they also reverberate on national and global levels. And so, I believe a different kind of mapping can be useful: the adoption of cartographic thinking as a critical response to help draw coordinates of intersection and connection between the boundaries of North/South, East/West. While President Donald Trump refers to the coronavirus as a “Chinese virus,” citing its origin from China,³ it is crucial to move beyond this rhetoric not only because of its continuation of pathologizing Chineseness, but also because of its geographical boundedness. Responses that think transnationally during this time are required; as the domestic toll of the virus has exposed the myth of American exceptionalism, nationalist discourses of insularity also do not hold in a post-globalized world that refuses any simple geographical delimitations to the word “virus.”

Outsourcing Women’s Labor Across Borders
In imagining new cartographies, we must rethink boundaries beyond that of the geographical border. Such boundaries manifested by Covid-19 include the complex relationship between the informal and formal economy, revealing that late-stage capitalism has created the conditions that make them inextricably linked. There is not a simple dichotomy that separates the informal economy from the formal in the first place: rather, global competition has spurred processes of flexibilization and informalization in work and production that continue to evolve. I draw my working definition of “informal” from the International Labour Organization, to describe highly vulnerable workers not recognized or protected by legal and regulatory frameworks.⁴ Here I focus on the implications of the virus for one vulnerable population, women of color, whose low-wage work in the informal economy is often marginalized or invisibilized within the global retail supply chain and the demand for domestic labor services.

According to a United Nations policy brief, emerging evidence suggests that women’s economic and productive lives are being disproportionately affected by Covid-19, especially in developing economies where 70 percent of women’s employment is in the informal economy.⁵ These impacts become especially troubling as the virus establishes a new epicenter, in Latin America and the Caribbean, where 54 percent of women in non-agricultural jobs are informally employed.⁶ Without labor protections and formal contracts, these workers face unsafe working conditions, are not afforded paid leave or benefits, and experience sudden termination without severance pay. These economic and health impacts are further exacerbated by other difficulties the virus and lockdown measures have intensified for women worldwide, such as an increase in unpaid care labor and the threat of domestic violence.

Asia and the Garment Industry
The garment production industry began to experience the devastating effects of Covid-19 almost immediately. By late March 2020, the global retail slowdown had caused a domino effect starting with the cancellation of billions of dollars worth of orders by Western fashion retailers, leaving factory owners in South Asian countries such as India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, and Cambodia and Myanmar in the Southeast, on the brink of bankruptcy, and the livelihoods of 60 million workers in jeopardy.⁷ At the same time, workers and labor advocates in the region worry that the virus will cause a reversal of hard-won, basic labor rights. Besides the fact that factory layouts and lack of personal protective equipment have made adhering to social distancing and health guidelines impossible, factory owners have targeted union member employees by firing them and retaining their non-unionized counterparts.

Headlines focusing on Covid-19’s effects on retail’s plunging sales numbers place emphasis on the profits and losses of business conglomerates and obscure the human impact being felt in countries such as Bangladesh, where ready-made garments comprise 84 percent of its total exports.⁸ These garments are assembled in a diverse ecosystem of factories by low-wage workers, mostly women from rural areas, who are presently left with unemployment or precarious working conditions and owed wages. Apart from canceling orders, some retailers have demanded delayed payments to suppliers and discounts of up to 70 percent, representing a loss to manufacturers and the inability to pay employees.⁹ Beyond the factory model, subcontracted homeworkers at the bottom of the supply chain have also been left more vulnerable by the actions of these brands.

In Border As Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson argue that there is a proliferation of borders in the post-globalization world. Following French philosopher Étienne Balibar’s essay “What Is a Border?,” they claim that “[n]ot only are there different kinds of borders that individuals belonging to different social groups experience in different ways,” but these borders crucially demarcate “between distinct social exchanges or flows, between distinct rights, and so forth” (79).¹⁰ Returning to the map of the coronavirus outbreak in New York, it allows us to visualize such borders that may be invisible to the naked eye—borders that order not only space, but also social relations. The transnational routes of the retail supply chain, in turn, configure how the expansion of capital has partitioned the world into a neocolonial relationship between the Global North and South based upon the outsourcing, or multiplication, of low-wage female labor.

It is real human labor that constructs the global supply chains built upon uneven production relationships. Connecting the nodal points between these legs is not only a mapping exercise, but also an attempt to move beyond what Karl Marx termed as “commodity fetishism,” or our tendency to divorce a finished commodity from the hands that produced it. For all the discussions right now about the transformation of the retail landscape, brands need to start holding themselves accountable to their suppliers and the workers who produce their products. Likewise, solidarity in this moment involves joining the fight against a production and consumption model based upon exploitative social relations. This means recognizing the diversity of laborers in the supply chain and their different needs while demanding, with workers who are organizing,¹¹ the rights of all workers to job security, fair and timely wages, safety protections, and union organization.

Domestic Workers of Color in the Americas
Between the boundaries of informal and formal labor, this current moment also calls for a rethinking of the marginalization of reproductive labor associated with paid and unpaid care giving and domestic work performed by women in the private sphere. Cartographic thinking in this case acknowledges what Rhacel Salazar Parreñas calls the “international division of reproductive labor,”¹² in which the demand for nannies, housekeepers, and home care aids—fueled by middle and upper-middle class women in the workforce in the Global North—has relegated caregiving and housework to African-American, Latino, and immigrant women of color from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia.

According to the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), there are more than 2.5 million domestic workers in the United States, the majority being immigrant women of color.¹³ The pandemic, by forcing white-collar workers to stay at home, has made more evident capitalism’s reliance on reproductive labor performed by others. Under Governor Cuomo’s “New York State on PAUSE” executive order, “child care services” was included under “Essential Services.”¹⁴ The designation of these workers as “essential” speaks to a dependency that has established, and made clearer now, the racial hierarchies that exist when women of color care for the children of white women at the expense of their own.

Labor activists such as Ai-jen Poo, a co-founder of NDWA, have pointed out that the exclusion of domestic workers from landmark U.S. labor laws, like the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, was by no accident. According to Poo, “The first professional domestic workers in this country were enslaved black women.”¹⁵ She traces the lack of a standard minimum wage, overtime pay, benefits and protections for domestic workers to how U.S. labor laws were, from the outset, tied to Jim Crow, and inherited a history of exclusion, sexism, and racism.¹⁶ During Covid-19, the informal employment relationships that characterize the domestic labor industry have made these workers’ jobs even more precarious.

On the level of job security, as early as the week of March 30, 2020, data compiled by the NDWA showed that more than half of domestic workers surveyed had no job for the week; and two-thirds reported that they were unsure if they would be able to return to work after the pandemic.¹⁷ However, those without paid leave have continued to show up to work by using public transportation, and without adequate personal protective equipment, face significant health risks. Employment becomes a matter of life or death, both in terms of maintaining an income and protecting oneself and family. In the United States, undocumented domestic workers do not have access to health care and are not included in the paid leave relief measures being discussed by policymakers. The ramifications could be even greater in Latin America and the Caribbean, where numbers from 2010 indicated that domestic work was highest as a percentage of total employment at 7.6 percent.¹⁸

As of June 30, 2020, Covid-19 has taken nearly 60,000 lives in Brazil, which now has the second-highest cases of the disease globally (almost 1.5 million confirmed). President Jair Bolsonaro, a longtime ally and friend of President Trump, continues to downplay the threat of the virus and vehemently maintains an anti-lockdown stance.

On March 17, 2020, the first coronavirus-related death in the city of Rio de Janeiro was a 63-year-old housekeeper, Cleonice Gonçalves, who contracted the disease from her employer, a woman who had recently vacationed in Italy.¹⁹ Gonçalves worked in the upper-class neighborhood of Leblon and lived in a remote village in the municipality of Miguel Pereira two hours away. Her death ignited demands for guaranteed protections for domestic workers during the pandemic, and the campaign “Pela Vida de Nossas Mães” (For the Lives of Our Mothers), which has over 130,000 signatures.²⁰

Gonçalves’s death also underscored the structural inequities demarcated along spatial lines in Brazil. The virus, imported by white elites shut away in gated communities, now threatens to spread rapidly in the cramped and densely populated spaces of the favelas—slum neighborhoods—home to low-income and predominately Black and mixed-race Brazilians. This method of transmission, where well-to-do citizens bring the virus from abroad or refuse to adhere to social distancing guidelines, has been increasingly documented in other Latin America countries. It represents a significant added threat to a region where domestic labor is an ingrained institution whose class politics, the rich being served by the poor, also bear colonial legacies.

Intimate Geographies, Spatial Solidarities
Contemporary liberal feminism has been critiqued for reinforcing class divisions by placing “third-world” women in the role of victim, to be saved by their educated counterparts and humanitarianism. I believe it is fundamental to acknowledge the issue of victimization and emphasize that solidarity means fighting alongside workers for legal and social protections and the organization of female workers worldwide. Women who work low-wage jobs in the informal economy are political subjects, and we cannot negate their own role in choosing to enter the global marketplace and participate in the multiplication of their labor. The political project here has to do with challenging and transforming hierarchies that often manifest as boundaries or borders, ones that subordinate these workers based on capitalism’s alienating effects and privileging of production to reproduction.

Mapping, as I have proposed, is a way to understand the social and spatial relations of women’s labor on dual local and transnational levels. In many ways, Covid-19 has challenged neoliberalism’s war on subjectivity: do we adhere to the myth of the self-sufficient man, or recognize the need for an ethics of care? Our answer will condition our response: will we close our borders and fall back into insularity, or recognize that our post-globalized world is characterized by porosity?

Covid-19 has forced us to think outside of national borders and towards what Lisa Lowe describes as the “intimacies” that have established the links between world geographies through bodies that labor, and the importance of acknowledging the racial, gendered, and classed structures of domination that have marked such relationships.²¹ While writing this article, global protests around Black Lives Matter underscore the unfinished dimensions of race, labor, and gender, and the domination and policing of Black bodies by the State. Above all, a moment like this encourages questions, and the productive question for me will always be: What is the connection?

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Notes

[1] Andrew Cuomo (NYGovCuomo), “This virus is the great equalizer. Stay strong little brother. You are a sweet, beautiful guy and my best friend. If anyone is #NewYorkTough it’s you,” Twitter, March 31, 2020, https://twitter.com/nygovcuomo/status/1245021319646904320?lang=en.
[2] “New York City Coronavirus Map and Case Count,” The New York Times, December 16, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/nyregion/new-york-city-coronavirus-cases.html.
[3] “‘Not racist at all’: Donald Trump defends calling coronavirus the ‘Chinese virus’ – video,” The Guardian, March 18, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2020/mar/18/not-racist-at-all-donald-trump-defends-calling-coronavirus-the-chinese-virus-video.
[4] International Labour Office, “Decent Work and the informal economy,” Report VI from the 90th International Labour Conference, Geneva (International Labour Organization, June 2002), https://www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/relm/ilc/ilc90/pdf/rep-vi.pdf.
[5] “Policy Brief: The Impact of COVID-19 on Women,” United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), April 9, 2020, https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2020/04/policy-brief-the-impact-of-covid-19-on-women.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Kieran Guilbert, Naimul Karim and Anuradha Nagaraj, “As fashion sales fall globally, big brands leave Asia’s garment workers in limbo,” Reuters, April 29, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-global-fashion-ana/as-fashion-sales-fall-globally-big-brands-leave-asias-garment-workers-in-limbo-idUSKBN22C01J.
[8] “Export Performance,” The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), https://www.bgmea.com.bd/page/export-performance-list.
[9] Kieran Guilbert, Naimul Karim and Anuradha Nagaraj, “As fashion sales fall globally, big brands leave Asia’s garment workers in limbo,” Reuters, April 29, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-global-fashion-ana/as-fashion-sales-fall-globally-big-brands-leave-asias-garment-workers-in-limbo-idUSKBN22C01J.
[10] Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border As Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013): 4.
[11] James North, “Coronavirus at the Bottom of the Supply Chain,” The Nation, April 23, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/kalpona-akter-interview-bangladesh/; Pallavi Pundir, “International Fashion Houses Are Leaving Millions of Asians Jobless. Now the Workers Are Protesting,” Vice, June 25, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/akzkvp/international-fashion-houses-are-leaving-millions-of-asians-jobless-now-the-workers-are-protesting.
[12] Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work, 2nd ed. (Stanford University Press, 2015).
[13] National Domestic Workers Alliance, https://www.domesticworkers.org/about-us.
[14] “Governor Cuomo Issues Guidance on Essential Services Under The ‘New York State on PAUSE’ Executive Order,” New York State, March 20, 2020, https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-issues-guidance-essential-services-under-new-york-state-pause-executive-order.
[15] Lauren Hilgers, “Out of the Shadows,” The New York Times Magazine, February 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/21/magazine/national-domestic-workers-alliance.html.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Julia Wolfe, “Domestic workers are at risk during the coronavirus crisis,” Economic Policy Institute, April 8, 2020, https://www.epi.org/blog/domestic-workers-are-at-risk-during-the-coronavirus-crisis-data-show-most-domestic-workers-are-black-hispanic-or-asian-women/.
[18] Domestic Workers, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), https://www.wiego.org/informal-economy/occupational-groups/domestic-workers.
[19] Gram Slattery and Rodrigo Viga Gaier, “A Brazilian woman caught coronavirus on vacation. Her maid is now dead,” Reuters, March 24, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-rio/a-brazilian-woman-caught-coronavirus-on-vacation-her-maid-is-now-dead-idUSKBN21B1HT.
[20] Jo Griffin, “‘For the lives of our mothers’: Covid-19 sparks fight for maids’ rights in Brazil,” The Guardian, May 5, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/05/for-the-lives-of-our-mothers-covid-19-sparks-fight-for-maids-rights-in-brazil-coronavirus.
[21] Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015).