Indigenous Language Migration along the U.S. Southwestern Border—the View from Arizona

Abstract

The year 2020 will be remembered in history as the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. This coronavirus outbreak revealed in stark reality vast economic, educational, and health access disparities inside societies that experience systemic racism and endure repeated climate induced catastrophes. If we are to learn from these circumstances, then we must have thoughtfully collected relevant data, especially from the most marginalized populations. Here, we introduce you to the state of affairs of one such population - Indigenous Mayas migrating through the Casa Alitas shelter in Tucson, Arizona. Through the data collected at Casa Alitas and a database maintained by The New York Times, we will investigate the migrants origins in Mexico and Guatemala, their destinations in the United States, and the circumstances of the pandemic at the place of their arrival. We will see that places that provided social services in Mayan languages had substantially lower incidence of COVID-19.