COVID-19 and decreased asylum access: mother work, precarity and preocupación among Central American asylum-seekers in Los Angeles

Abstract

In 2020, the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the U.S. government’s increased legal restrictions on asylum-seekers acted together to increase social, economic and legal precarity in the lives of Central American asylum-seeking mothers in Los Angeles. In this context, these asylum-seeking mothers discussed their intersectional precarities through the idiom of distress “preocupación”, which signalled the concerns, worries, and fears they had in relation to the daily mother work of raising their children. Using ethnographic data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, I examine how the intersectional precarities Central American asylum-seeking mothers faced necessitated protecting their children from their own preocupación. Through this, I argue that by using the analytic of preocupación it is possible to see exactly how racial and legal barriers to care increase precarity in the lives of asylum-seeking mothers in the U.S., and the detrimental impact that intersectional precarities have on asylum-seekers’ mother work today.

The Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic “Crisis” on Unaccompanied Minors Navigating US Removal Proceedings

“…This paper makes an empirical contribution by adding to an emerging body of research documenting the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Latinx immigrants in the US, including recently arrived Central American asylum-seeking families and children (Siegel 2022;Sigmund 2022;Oliveira and Segel 2022). Existing work has focused on the pandemic's impact on immigrants' health outcomes and social vulnerabilities.…”