Introduction: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has exacerbated longstanding inequities throughout the United States, disproportionately concentrating adverse social, economic, and health-related outcomes among low-income communities and communities of color. Inequitable distribution, prioritization, and uptake of COVID-19 vaccines due to systemic and organizational barriers add to these disproportionate impacts across the United States. Similar patterns have been observed within Orange County, California (OC). Methods: In response to COVID-19 vaccine inequities unfolding locally, the Orange County Health Equity COVID-19 community–academic partnership generated a tool to guide a more equitable vaccine approach. Contents of the OC vaccine equity best practices checklist emerged through synthesis of community-level knowledge about vaccine inequities, literature regarding equitable vaccination considerations, and practice-based health equity guides. We combined into a memo: the checklist, a written explanation of its goals and origins, and three specific action steps meant to further strengthen the focus on vaccine equity. The memo was endorsed by partnership members and distributed to county officials. Discussion: Since the initial composition of the checklist, the local vaccine distribution approach has shifted, suggesting that equitable pandemic responses require continual re-evaluation of local needs and adjustments to recommendations as new information emerges. To understand and address structural changes needed to reduce racial and socioeconomic inequities exacerbated by the pandemic, authentic partnerships between community, academic, and public health practice partners are necessary. Conclusion: As we face continued COVID-19 vaccine rollout, booster vaccination, and future pandemic challenges, community knowledge and public health literature should be integrated to inform similar equity-driven strategic actions.

This contribution to the “Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” intimately explores the domestication of toxicity through two pieces of material culture: a Bracero Program (1942–1964) identification card and a residential gardening business card. Both cards belonged to my father. I use these cards to tell how my father’s access to the domestic space of the nation’s agriculture fields and into the domestic exterior space of people’s gardens in Southern California was predicated on his availability to chemical exposure as a racialized body. In the wake of my father’s death from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, both images have been reworked and reimagined with a ghostly imprint of a saturating but barely visible history of toxic exposure. I have reworked each card by adding the chemical compounds for DDT and glyphosate. This entry seeks to query how the domestication of war and toxicity accumulates more for certain bodies and how these histories of exposure might also be reworked to imagine otherwise foreclosed forms of sociality and memory. This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.

This article offers an account of the relationship between “essential” and the category of labor by examining how reproductivity, as the foundation—what is essential—to all work, life, and sociality, is, as Kalindi Vora argues, rendered (and renders those who perform it) into racialized surplus, a condition of devaluation and disposability premised on the extraction and exhaustion of life. I draw on a year of ethnographic research with domestic worker activists following the 2014 implementation of California’s Domestic Worker Bill of Rights (AB 241). This breakthrough bill overturned domestic and at-home care worker labor exclusions grounded in New Deal labor legislation that shored up the rights (and category) of the industrial worker and offered major concessions for organized labor while legally cementing the exploitation and unfree labor conditions of the South’s Black women domestic workers. Rather than positioning California migrant women’s domestic worker activism as a compelling teleological and linear challenge and victory against Jim Crow–era exclusion, however, I tarry in the overlap and disjuncture that such tied fates represent under settler racial capital and demonstrate how this alternative tracing of reproductivity confounds notions of labor, value, and inclusion at the core of the U.S. racial liberal state. I contend that the conditions of New Deal industrial capitalism, shaped as they were by Jim Crow anti-Blackness and the afterlife of reproductive slavery, now form the originary knot through which current-day racialized migrant women’s reproductive labor and life is appropriated under the neoliberal reorganization of care in the United States. I term this atemporal modality of racialized extraction essentially surplus, a “racializing process” that subsumes the life and bodies of racialized migrant women as if they essentially occupy the same category of surplus life occupied by Black women domestic workers historically.

This article is a reflection on doing wildfire research aimed at shaping public policy in Orange County, California, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its focus is on the little-known efforts of fire mitigation by Latinx migrant workers. In this article, I discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic made me shift research focus from seeking to understand how workers’ ecological knowledge might shape fire mitigation policy to a prioritization of workers’ precarious “essential labor” on the “front” front lines of fire prevention. I discuss how the temporalities of the pandemic, wildfire, and research played out across the labor terrain of the Southern California wildfire mitigation efforts and within my own applied research. Specifically, I discuss how COVID-19 university research “ramped down,” and stay-at-home orders prevented me from being embedded with workers in the county’s canyons, as I had planned, and how I had to learn to adjust my funded research. The outcome required doing applied research by letting go of continuity, by dwelling in disjointed COVID-19 temporalities that settled over the county’s flammable chaparral where essential labor serves as an extension of a failing settler colonial fire management practice that requires worker vulnerability to inoculate the lives of those living in the county’s wildfire risk regions.

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