One Saturday last March, Gustavo, a thirty-nine-year-old single dad to three, went to work at a San Jose bar. “The next day,” he tells me, “the world shut down.”

This was Gustavo’s first time being unemployed since he started working at the age of sixteen. Both the health and economic realities of the pandemic came as a shock. “I had been hospitalized with pneumonia back in 2008, so I knew how scary it can get,” he explains.

Gustavo grappled with a lot of emotions during those months. “You’re taught to feel shame,” he recounts. “It reminded me of when I was a child, being in line at the welfare office with my mother, tears streaming down her face because she was embarrassed.”