During the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the migrant farmworker came to be deemed as ‘essential’ worker, thereby complicating discourses of ‘illegality’. This moment presents an ontological paradox, allowing means for examining the simultaneity of discursivity and materiality within the migrant farmworker as subject. Reflecting upon the ‘ontological turn,’ this article presents four lessons of ontology: post-representation, a focus on objects/artifacts, posthumanism and the politicizing of ontology, gained from interrogating the unraveling of discourse about the migrant-other in the time of coronavirus. These lessons coalesce in the entwining of the powers of discourse with the presence of the tangible, to understand the profound contradictions between a social structure that doesn’t want the migrant as neighbor and a capitalist economy that needs her as laborer. In closing, the article considers how shifting the gaze inward as consumers and then outwards unto our relationality can be a political act.

在2020年的冠状病毒大流行期间，移徙的农民工被视为“基本”工人，从而使“非法”的论述更加复杂。这一刻提出了一个本体论悖论，允许以手段来检验农民工作为主体的话语性和实质性的同时性。反思“本体论转向”，本文介绍了四个本体论课程：后表征，对对象/工件的关注，后人文主义和本体论的政治化，这是通过审视关于移民的话语散布而获得的。冠状病毒。这些课程结合了有形的，实在的话语权交织在一起，理解不想让移民作为邻居的社会结构与需要她作为劳动力的资本主义经济之间的深刻矛盾。最后，本文考虑了如何将凝视作为消费者向内转移然后再向我们的关系转移是一种政治行为。