Latina activist on how her father's COVID-19 death inspired her to create change
Early on in the pandemic, Kristin Urquiza, now an advocate for family impacted by Covid, had a premonition for how the pandemic would impact the community where she grew up in Arizona. “When crisis and disaster hit, it hits in communities like Maryvale first, before in the more affluent, typically more white neighborhoods,” she tells Yahoo Life. “We are a predominantly Hispanic community. We're about 75% from a Latin heritage. We're about a third immigrant.”
After her father died of COVID-19 following the reopening of Arizone in June 2020, Urquiza penned an honest obituary calling out politicians for her father's death. “I used the last paragraph to say my dad should not have died by COVID. And like so many others, his death is due to politicians who continue to jeopardize the lives of brown and black folks with their terrible policy decisions, lack of leadership and lack of decisive action to mitigate the virus,” says Urquiza.
Urquiza didn’t think about the honest obituary as a political act, but soon she was getting messages from people with similar stories. This newfound community inspired her to create Marked by Covid, a nonprofit organization dedicated to truth telling, changing policies and empowering those who have lost a loved one during the pandemic.
Video transcript
KRISTIN URQUIZA: The state reopened, promising that it had the infrastructure to serve the community. People were left to die. The last conversation that I had with him, I said, do you feel betrayed? And he said, I do. And it broke my heart.
BRITTANY JONES-COOPER: Welcome to "Unmuted." I'm your host, Britney Jones-Cooper. And today, I'm talking with activist Kristin Urquiza. In 2020, her father died of COVID-19. She's been on a mission to lift up the stories of those we've lost, especially those in the Latinx community. I know you grew up in Maryville, Arizona. You had a premonition that Maryville would have kind of a negative reaction to the pandemic. Where did that come from?
KRISTIN URQUIZA: When crisis and disaster hit, it hits in communities like Maryville first. We are such a multicultural, international community, about 75% folks from a Latin heritage. In mid-May, Arizona became the worst place for COVID in the world. The governor did a really huge campaign spree pleading with people across Arizona to get back to normal life.
My dad was, despite my best attempts, the most proud Republican. He was excited that we had conquered the pandemic and took that disinformation and ran with it. And within a couple of weeks, he got sick.
BRITTANY JONES-COOPER: You wrote what you call an honest obituary, and it went viral. How did it feel to get that sort of reaction?
KRISTIN URQUIZA: When my dad died, the grief and mourning and pain but coupled with pure fury was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I wrote what I felt was the honest truth in my dad's obituary. And like so many others, his death is due to politicians who continue to jeopardize the lives of brown and Black folks with their terrible policy decisions, lack of leadership. You know, letting my dad have the last word and that he should still be here but then to have so many people reaching out to me and saying things like thank you for finally giving a voice to this pressed on me further of I'm onto something here and this really matters.
BRITTANY JONES-COOPER: I mean, the CDC has released data saying that during the height of the pandemic last year, there were higher hospitalization rates in communities of color, especially Latino and Hispanic communities. What do you sort of credit that to?
KRISTIN URQUIZA: We have, for all of the history of this country, not invested in our immigrant communities and communities that are predominantly people of color. There's a handful of people who are doing incredibly well, and it's at the expense of everyone else. And that's not the country my dad raised me to think that I was living in. So we decided to launch an organization called Marked by COVID. And so we wanted to create a space where people who were feeling all of the impacts of the virus could come together and call for accountability for failures of government.
Millions of people are in deep grief right now because of what they've lost. It is not always easy being from Latino descent in this country. You know, I think back to my dad and the entire beautiful Mexican-American family that I grew up in. My job is to pass on and be a good ancestor. That is the most important thing that I can do. How are we going to start to heal the pain of the generation? But also, how do we set up future generations to know the unvarnished truth so that we never make these same mistakes again?
