Why COVID-19 Caused so Many Deaths in the Latinx Community? A Conversation with Dr. Reanne Frank by Jessica Rivera, PhD
Education Studies
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his past spring, I came across an article on the OSU home page titled Many Hispanics died of COVID-19 because of work exposure. I knew the impact of the pandemic had significantly affected the Latinx community, but I didn’t know the extent of this impact. Although it was upsetting news to read, I was hopeful that a professor on campus was conducting research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Latinx community. Here is my interview with Dr. Reanne Frank, a professor in sociology at OSU. How did you become interested in sociology? I grew up in Detroit in the 70’s and 80’s when the city was being gutted -the auto industry was in crisis and there was continued white flight out of the city. I was observing firsthand how racism operates and how devastating its effects can be on such a large scale. That set me up with a sociological frame of mind. When I started to learn about sociology in college it helped me understand the underlying structural issues of what I had observed as a child. What sparked your interest to do research on immigration and the Latinx community? I also became interested in immigration when I was young. The Detroit public school I went
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to, had an international component. There were smaller immigrant populations in my school’s neighborhood back then but some of my classmates were new Americans. The particular neighborhood my school was located had the small pockets of immigrants, alongside internal migrants such as low-income White people from Appalachia, and a large established Black population, which made for an interesting demographic mix for Detroit at the time. After college I attended the University of Texas at Austin and because of my interest in immigration, I ended up working in the population center. That’s where I discovered demography and really liked that it gave me the tools to describe population level processes. When we’re trying to understand really complicated issues like societal inequalities and racism, you need to spend time to describe the population that these inequalities are affecting and how they’re being affected. For me this was very illuminating and ever since then I defined myself as a social demographer. Can you tell me a little more about your COVID study on Latinx deaths? I previously worked with my collaborator D. Phuong (Phoenix) Do on work around racial residential segregation. At the beginning of the pandemic, she started downloading various databases. It was tricky publishing during
