Cultural competency training and indigenous cultural politics in California

Abstract

This essay illuminates the challenges of using cultural competency training as an ethnicity-based political strategy for indigenous Mexicans struggling to gain rights and recognition in a transnational context. Through an analysis of the political and philosophical stakes in a cultural competence training delivered to social service providers by Mexican migrants, the essay interrogates the claim that these trainings, even when provided by linguistically and culturally competent facilitators, intervene in social and health inequities. The analysis is based on two and a half years of ethnographic research with a well-known indigenous Mexican migrant-led non-profit organization in California, Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño. Latino Studies (2015) 13, 316-338.

Ecologies of adaptation for Mexican Indigenous im/migrant children and families in the United States: Implications for Latino studies

“…Diverse Mexican Indigenous populations are one of the fastest growing im/migrant communities in the United States. California has the largest population of Indigenous Mexicans in the United States, but Indigenous Mexicans continue to migrate in large numbers to states like Nevada, Oregon, Texas and New York (Murillo and Cerda 2004;Murphy et al 2014;Hester 2015).…”

“…Much of the existing literature on Mexican Indigenous im/migrants focuses on the migration of male adults, including their adaptation to and reception from the receiving society (Fox and Rivera-Salgado 2004;Cornelius et al 2007) and adult transnational networks and identities (Kearney 2000;Stephen 2001). More recent work has documented Mexican Indigenous migrant farmworkers' health and experiences of discrimination (Holmes 2013;Murphy et al 2014) as well as health disparities and cultural competency Hester 2015). Relatively little research has focused on the migration experiences of children and families of Mexican Indigenous origin in the United States (Pérez-Rendón 2011; CornejoPortugal and Fortuny Loret de Mola 2012), and even less has focused on their cultural adaptation (Sanchez and Machado-Casas 2009;Casanova 2011) and language socialization (Velasco 2010).…”

The Resurgence of Medical Education in Sociology: A Return to Our Roots and an Agenda for the Future

“…These studies also reveal the limitations of this translational approach: Although the ideals undergirding the emergence of cultural competence and implicit bias regimes promise to ameliorate disparities faced by socially marginalized groups, their implementation has largely tended to reinforce biomedicine’s individualizing tendencies (Beagan 2003; Olsen 2020). Scholars have shown how these knowledge regimes tend to depict human difference as static and fixed rather than fluid (Hester 2015), emphasize geneticized or individualistic behaviors over structural and systemic processes (Metzl and Hansen 2014), and place patients as the focal point rather than reflecting on the profession itself (Fox 2005). To the latter point, Beagan (2003:613) notes the inadequacy of a curriculum that does not integrate power relationships in cultural competence training since “the experience of learning about ‘Others’ can be a type of voyeurism, stereotyping, exoticization, identifying the ‘deviant’ features of ‘those peoples’ [ sic ] lives.”…”

Lost in translation “en el Fil”: Actualizing structural humility for Indigenous Mexican farmworkers in California

“…The main criticism against these cultural-based models is that they tend to omit the economic, political, and social structural context that shape the exploitative conditions and racism experienced by Indigenous farmworkers (Hester 2016). Prevalent cultural competency models may perpetuate power dynamics that permit cultural differences to be regarded as deviant by people who have more power (Hester 2015(Hester , 2016. Because cultural competency mainly focuses on the synergy between a set of behaviors, attitudes, and policies that address cross-cultural communication, cultural competency can also be a passive point of reference rather than an active shift in attitude (Tervalon and Murray-Garcia 1998).…”

“…Most California farmworkers were historically and are currently Mexican immigrants (California Research Bureau 2013); 68 percent of California farmworkers migrate from Mexico, and one in three are Indigenous (Mines, Nichols, and Runsten 2010). Compared to other ethnic groups, Indigenous farmworkers experience higher levels of poverty and more prejudiced attitudes both within and outside the workplace (Hester 2015;Oaxacalifornian Reporting Team 2013). What is often overlooked is that Indigenous farmworkers are both a multi-ethnic and multilingual population.…”