On becoming “essential”: Coronavirus lessons of ontology- from the migrant farmworker and us who consume the fruits of her labor

During the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the migrant farmworker came to be deemed as ‘essential’ worker, thereby complicating discourses of ‘illegality’. This moment presents an ontological paradox, allowing means for examining the simultaneity of discursivity and materiality within the migrant farmworker as subject. Reflecting upon the ‘ontological turn,’ this article presents four lessons of ontology: post-representation, a focus on objects/artifacts, posthumanism and the politicizing of ontology, gained from interrogating the unraveling of discourse about the migrant-other in the time of coronavirus. These lessons coalesce in the entwining of the powers of discourse with the presence of the tangible, to understand the profound contradictions between a social structure that doesn’t want the migrant as neighbor and a capitalist economy that needs her as laborer. In closing, the article considers how shifting the gaze inward as consumers and then outwards unto our relationality can be a political act.