Using the concept bureaucratic violence, this article explores how health care bureaucracy contributes to harm for pregnant immigrants on the United States-Mexico border. The term bureaucratic violence captures how even when laws and health policies are not targeting a specific group, bureaucracy can do this work instead, causing systematic harm. Prenatal care in the United States captures this dynamic. In many states, prenatal coverage is available for low-income women regardless of immigration status. Yet, the bureaucratic routes for gaining access to coverage create latent forms of exclusion and fear, leading women to delay or not seek prenatal care or to experience anxieties over seeking care. In-depth interviews with pregnant and postnatal immigrant women revealed that threats of changes to bureaucratic procedures via the likely public charge rule was shaping the use of pregnancy-related public benefits. Even when women applied for these programs, they faced bureaucratic barriers and described bureaucratic monitoring as a source of emotional distress. These patterns can have detrimental effects on maternal and infant health outcomes. Bringing attention to bureaucratic violence can emphasize to health practitioners the struggles immigrants face in seeking prenatal care and the need for additional measures to support pregnant immigrants.
This paper addresses the availability and use of mental health resources by Latina immigrants in rural western Pennsylvania. Findings suggest that few formal (i.e. counselors) or informal (i.e. religious figures) culturally sensitive resources for coping with depression are available to Latina immigrants in this area. When resources were available, informants often expressed a preference for seeking help from informal sources and many experienced obstacles when seeking help from formal sources. Drawing on findings, recommendations for making mental health resources more accessible to Latina immigrants in rural communities are discussed.
Drawing from an ethnography of HIV care in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, in this article I explore how the social imaginary surrounding gender relations shapes men's experiences of seeking care for and living with HIV. Popular understandings of gender relations, which draw heavily on the machismo concept, intersect with a global health master narrative that frames women as victims in the AIDS epidemic in a way that generates a strong sentiment of blaming machismo within local HIV/AIDS-related services. Statements such as, "it's because of machismo" are used to explain away epidemiological trends. Participant observation in the context of HIV care, coupled with illness narrative interviews, illuminate how blaming machismo shapes men's experiences of care and the ways that they feel excluded from various forms of support. Thus, the illness experiences of men with HIV problematize the machismo concept and how it is drawn upon in the context of care.
This article draws on interviews with pregnant and postnatal first‐ and second‐generation immigrant women in the US‐Mexico border region to explore the relationship among immigration‐related concerns, emotional distress, and birth outcomes. Maternal stress is associated with a range of maternal and infant health complications, making it important to understand how immigration‐related apprehensions shape the emotional experience of pregnancy. In analyzing women's narratives, this article expands on theoretical conceptions of embodiment to explore how a range of immigration‐related anxieties can shape women's emotions in ways they perceived as contributing to health vulnerabilities. In doing so, it examines emotional pathways of embodiment in relation to: (1) the embodiment of immigration‐related precarity, or how one's immigration status generates vulnerability; (2) corporeal kinship effects of migration, or the ways immigration concerns over family generate vulnerability; and (3) embodied histories of migration‐related vulnerability, or the ways past experiences of precariousness can mark one's physiology.
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