This article presents a large body of qualitative material on healthcare access and barriers for unauthorized immigrants living in the US-Mexico borderlands. The focus is on active sequences of health-seeking behavior and barriers encountered in them. Barriers include direct legal mandates, fear of authorities, obstacles to movement by immigration law enforcement, interaction of unauthorized legal status with workplace and household relations, and hierarchical social interactions in healthcare and wider social settings. At the same time, important resilience factors include community-oriented healthcare services and the learning/confidence-building process that enable the unauthorized to connect to such services. An important finding is that barriers are not discrete factors but rather occur as webs that make solution of challenges more difficult than individual barriers alone. Outcomes include incomplete sequences of care, especially breakdowns in complex diagnoses, long-term treatment, and monitoring of chronic conditions.

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Engagement with immigration goes beyond work directly with immigrants to include involvement in the immigration policy process. The chapter describes work on immigration and human rights policy grounded in issues facing the U.S.-Mexico border region. A policy coalition with regional and national presence, the Border and Immigration Task Force, combines an organized social movement with bases in immigrant communities with a diverse policy coalition whose members have varied skills, constituencies, and political connections. As applied social scientists in this coalition, we bring a number of skills, including effective writing, synthesis of secondary sources, teaching skills applied to public interaction and communication, and application of the sociological and anthropological imagination to understand the implications, on the ground, of detailed policy recommendations. Our work has not involved community-based primary research, but this form of practice is also mentioned for its relevance to policy formation and advocacy. The literature on public anthropology and public sociology needs to include discussions of engagement in practical policy processes.

A pedagogy of engagement links faculty and students to the needs of local communities while promoting academic success through higher retention and graduation rates in higher education. This work describes engaged scholarship and shares guidelines for documenting student engagement and critical reflection across the higher education curriculum. Insights and recommendations are based on 8 years of engaged scholarship efforts at a Hispanic Serving Institution serving students and community on the U.S.-Mexico border. ResumenUna pedagogía comprometida vincula profesores y estudiantes a las necesidades de las comunidades locales, y al mismo tiempo promueve éxito académico a través de retención y eficiencia terminal (graduación) en educación superior. Este trabajo describe erudición comprometida y comparte guías para documentar compromiso estudiantil y reflexión crítica a través del currículo en educación superior. Descubrimientos y recomendaciones están basados en 8 años de esfuerzos de erudición comprometida en una comunidad e institución de servicio a estudiantes hispanos en la frontera de México con EUA.

In few places are the costs of globalization more deeply felt than in the lives of those living in U.S. Mexican rural "colonias" that line the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Their physical and ecological disparities are similar to those suffered by migrating populations to cities all over Latin America 40 years previously but now extend into the United States as well. In fact, there are over 1,800 such communities that began in the early 1980's and now are inhabited by between 900,000 to a million Mexican-origin residents in the southwestern United States. These arise particularly in the border states of Texas and New Mexico, while emergent colonias exist in Southern California and Arizona. These populations suffer tertiary labor conditions at the minimum wage, without health coverage, legal protection, or promise of future employment. Seventy percent of households are engaged in the informal economy and others are forced into underground economies that create even greater anxiety, and insecurity for all members of already stressed households. 2 Yet these populations are a small part of a much larger demographic transition and increase of Mexican/Latino populations to the United States. And although the central focus of this work concentrates on the political and economic ecology of colonias the broader theoretical question that arises is the manner in which these population, and many other similarly situated Mexican/Latino(a) populations in urban and rural contexts, in fact subsidize their own lack of income, lack of infrastructures, community development, institutional support, and ecological inequities by engaging in far-flung social and economic practices that attempt to mitigate these disparities.We take a political ecology approach that basically is a method that is inclusive of the complex relations between polity, economy, and physical and environmental resource use. This approach recently articulated by Greenberg and Park (1994:8) states that "the environment ranges from the largely cultural. . .through the intensely political. . .to the natural" (unculturalized physical resources or even climate itself). This approach does have a variety of theoretical lineal ancestors including Marx and even the less revolutionary thinkers like Adam Smith and Richard Ricardo. They all share a common vision of the absolute inseparability of economics from politics since inevitably class interests emerge from the inequitable distribution of value and resources and such interests will pursue their own welfare. 3 The natural environment is a crucial exploitive 97