Behind Many Masks: An Ethnographic Account of a Pandemic Borderlands
In June of 2020, four months into a global pandemic and a month after I graduated from college (via a YouTube livestream while sitting on the couch in my parents’ living room), I decided to apply to be a U.S. Census Bureau Enumerator. In college I’d learned the decennial count’s importance in determining state and local budgets and, as a bit of a geography nerd, had often used Census Bureau data in G.I.S. mapping projects. Applying felt like a way {+}