Even after a weeklong intubation in an ICU unit and months of recovery, Maria Cabrera still didn’t know how she became infected with COVID-19.
But here in Indiana’s biggest COVID-19 hotspot, Latinos make up just 17 percent of the population, but accounted for up to half of positive cases in the early months of the pandemic, according to Goshen Health Hospital. When Indiana reopened in early May, thousands of Latino immigrants like Cabrera, many of them undocumented, returned to physically demanding work—building RV frames, wiring units, manufacturing parts, and sewing furniture—in packed factories where social distancing can be difficult. Distancing, mask wearing, and temperature checks were inadequately enforced throughout the industry, according to interviews with community leaders, workers, and activists.
In every regard, Elkhart County is a company town. Home of up to 80 percent of the RV industry, locals instinctively call it the “RV Manufacturing Capital of the World.” Seventy thousand people work directly and indirectly for the sprawling facilities that blanket the countryside. White motor homes line the roads like crops in a field, and workers shuffle in and out of the factories from the early hours of the morning to midnight.
Walking the floor of the plant even today, maskless Burmese immigrants sew RV furniture just feet apart from each other. In the vast warehouse of mattresses and upholstery, there is little regard for social distancing since so many workers have already been infected.
Despite early optimism, hopes have not even panned out that the pandemic is a boon for the RV business. Though 2020 RV shipments exceed last year’s numbers, shipments were declining before the virus and are now on track for their worst year in nearly a decade. The industry now faces a “depression-level decline,” said Michael Hicks, an economics professor at Ball State University. “Right now we’re on track to manufacture 325,000 [units] in 2020,” Hicks said. “We produced 500,000 in 2017. It is a substantive decline.”
The Latino initiative also tasked Radio Horizonte with delivering food to isolating families infected with the virus. Volunteers encountered one home in Elkhart with 19 family members infected inside, a grim reminder of how the virus can impact multigenerational homes. Volunteer Francisco Barrios said he cried after bringing pizza to another family.
