Gladys Vega of the Chelsea Collaborative told the Globe this spring that landlords were defying state rules and evicting tenants. She said she knew at least five people who returned home from COVID-19 hospitalizations to find themselves locked out, their possessions discarded by landlords who feared catching the virus from them.

I see an online comment below the story: “The lead paragraph of this story shows how bogus this story is. The story says it’s a family of ten. One would think 2 adults, 8 kids. You add up the numbers and there are seven adults and three kids. Not exactly a sob story that you were led to believe.”

Suddenly, it’s 1987 all over again: I am a lawyer and supervisor for Su Clínica Legal, a legal services program for low-income Spanish-speaking tenants in Chelsea. With attorney Steve Callahan, I represent tenants in Chelsea District Court and train students from Suffolk University Law School to do the same. We argue motions for injunctions to fix broken boilers and exterminate rats; we negotiate in the hallways of the courthouse with landlords and their lawyers, buying a few months or weeks before the tenants have to leave. One landlord is notorious for locking out tenants, piling clothes on the sidewalk.

In the winter, from my office, I hear the coughing in the waiting room. Nobody has heat. Everybody is sick. One day, a client’s young daughter spits white vomit on the floor of my office. He carries her to the toilet. I find myself on my knees, mopping up the puddle with a paper towel.

Many are fleeing El Salvador or Guatemala, refugees of war, anti-communist crusades orchestrated and funded by the Reagan administration, atrocities subsidized by my taxes. Some are migrants from Puerto Rico, like my father, a seasick boy stumbling off the boat in New York in 1939.

I take the 111 bus from Boston to Chelsea and back, the same bus that the “essential workers” of Chelsea take today — that invisible army of janitors, cooks, dishwashers, housekeepers, nurses’ aides, and day laborers, moving silently through hotels, restaurants, offices, and hospitals, making that machinery hum.

One day in the winter of 1990, after court, I jump into a cab. The driver asks me what the hell I’m doing in Chelsea, and warns me to be careful: “There’s a lotta Josés around here.” I say I’m Puerto Rican — I’m a José. I go to court with the other Josés. Our argument escalates. We cannot escape each other, stuck in traffic on the Tobin Bridge. Glaring in the rear-view mirror, he finally offers to jump off the bridge. Without saying the name, the driver is clearly evoking Chuck Stuart, a white man who had recently killed his wife, pinned the murder on an imaginary Black carjacker, and leaped from the bridge when his accomplice brother revealed the ruse.

I am a poet and teacher. I left Chelsea, and the law, in 1993. “José” is still there. Her name is Stephany Escobar. Escobar was described by the Globe, in May, as “a 26-year-old journalist who said she fled El Salvador three years ago after receiving death threats for her political coverage.” The wars in Central America left the social fabric of those countries in tatters for generations to come. Escobar is proof, along with other migrants escaping persecution, violence, and poverty. Some seek asylum. Some endure incarceration by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Some die. One year ago this month, two Salvadoran migrants, 25-year-old Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria, drowned crossing the Río Grande. A photograph of their entwined bodies appeared everywhere, generating an outcry — and denial.

ProPublica reported an anonymous comment posted on the page of the “I’m 10-15” Border Patrol Facebook group regarding the tragedy: “I HAVE NEVER SEEN FLOATERS LIKE THIS,” the commenter wrote, “could this be another edited photo. We’ve all seen the dems and liberal parties do some pretty sick things.”

“Floaters” is the term often used by Border Patrol agents for those who drown. I borrowed that slur for the title of a poem I wrote about Óscar and Valeria, earning the attention of a website called Counter-Currents, defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center as the home of “academic white nationalism.”

The true borders of Chelsea — the true borders of this country — are the borders of racism. Everyone dwells within those borders, from the migrants who drown crossing the Río Grande to the migrants who suffer and die from COVID-19 in Chelsea, from the white nationalists at Counter-Currents to their friend in the White House. The demonization of immigrants, perfected, but by no means invented, by President Trump, was the prelude to the pandemic, justification for the conditions where the disease could thrive: segregation, overcrowding, miserable wages, unemployment, hunger, and, always, fear of authority, discovery, deportation. People do not line up for food — in masks — when there is any other choice.

In 1993, I published a book of poetry, “City of Coughing and Dead Radiators” — not cold radiators as in no heat, but dead radiators, as in no heat forthcoming. Three decades later, I could yield to the temptation to say that nothing has changed.

Despair is a luxury for those who can afford it. Experience tells me that social change is not linear. Progress soars and plummets, spirals down and spirals up, swoops and dives and swoops again. We lose what we won; we win back what we lost. La lucha sigue: the struggle goes on. I am still learning. In Chelsea, they know.

Martín Espada is a poet who teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His next book of poems, “Floaters,” will be published in 2021.