Undocumented Health Access
Articles
Living Barriers and the Emotional Labor of Accessing Care from the Margins
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the deeply entrenched inequalities and barriers in the U.S. healthcare system. Past research would suggest that extant barriers to care for undocumented immigrant communities, such as those pertaining to citizenship status, class, race, language fluency, and employment status as well as increased demands for documentation, fear of deportation, and general mistrust in the public healthcare system (Heyman, Nuñez, and Talavera 2009; Flores 2015; Hacker et al. 2015), would be amplified within the pandemic climate, making access to care even more difficult. Building from my research on undocumented motherhood and health access, I explore the emotional labor performed by undocumented communities in navigating multiple barriers to accessing public health services as a way to think more deeply about the struggles these communities may be facing during the current COVID-19 pandemic, but also as a way to imagine what kind of work might be required fundamentally to remove barriers to health and improve long-term access to care for the most vulnerable communities.
Undocumented Motherhood: Gender, Maternal Identity, and the Politics of Health Care
Abstract
Undocumented Mexican immigrants have had to regularly confront a prohibiting health care system despite alienation, marginalization, and the threat of deportation. In this article, I explore the impact of political exclusion and alienating discourses on the health habitus of undocumented Mexican mothers through the narrative of one mother, Marta Garza, who finds herself at the painful intersection of political and medical alienation. Marta’s narrative reflects an analytical framework that centers undocumented motherhood as a space of necessary resilience and strain, wherein she is forced to advocate for her children’s health despite prohibitive barriers and dangerous potential consequences.
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The Politics of Resilience and Resistance: Health care Access and Undocumented Mexican Motherhood in the United States
Abstract
This article explores the effect of an undocumented status in shaping narratives of resilience, emotional expression and maternal sentiment among undocumented Mexican mothers in the United States. Given the dominant narrative of maternal responsibility that I encountered while conducting ethnographic research among undocumented women in Houston, this work focuses on the cultural construction and narrative use of maternal sentiment as it is expressed in relation to the health practices and overall forms of survival and resilience of undocumented Mexican mothers and their children.
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