Eating and Feeding at the Margins of the State: Barriers to Health Care for Undocumented Migrant Women and the “Clinical” Aspects of Food Assistance

Abstract

In this article, I examine the various meanings of Mexican and Central American migrant women's utilization of private food assistance programs. I present findings from 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2011 with migrant women, public health workers, and staff and volunteers of food assistance programs in Santa Barbara County, California. I discuss the barriers undocumented women face in accessing formal health care and the social and moral obligations that underpin these women's role in feeding others. I also document the ways in which private food assistance programs are orienting toward a focus on health in service delivery, and how women depend on provisions from these programs to support feeding practices at home. I argue that these findings are significant for current engagement by critical medical anthropologists in studying framings of "the clinic" and cultural beliefs about "deservingness."

Neocolonialism and Health Care Access among Marshall Islanders in the United States

“…Willen and colleagues consider health‐related deservingness as operating within the dialectic between universalizing juridical arguments that promote legal entitlements to care on the one hand, and situationally specific moral arguments regarding the deservingness of specific groups to receive this care on the other (Willen et al. ; see also Carney ).…”

“…This perspective, in other words, is characterized in terms of health-related deservingness. Willen and colleagues consider health-related deservingness as operating within the dialectic between universalizing juridical arguments that promote legal entitlements to care on the one hand, and situationally specific moral arguments regarding the deservingness of specific groups to receive this care on the other (Willen et al 2011; see also Carney 2015). Common-sense notions of health-related deservingness by politicians, health providers, and the general public-and the legislation that codifies those who are considered worthy (and thus eligible) and those who are not-create politically, economically, and socially distinct constellations of vulnerability and social exclusion that impact immigrants' access to care (Spangler 2011;Willen et al 2011).…”

“Never had the hand”: Distribution and inequality in the diverse economy of a refugee camp

“…It has been well documented that refugees must demonstrate the need for humanitarian aid, which relies upon and generates a “bare life” condition, a destitute and helpless state of existence (Agamben ; Malkki ). Contrary to the prioritization of work, particularly “women's food work” as a sign of “deservingness” for food assistance in the welfare state (Carney , ; Dickinson ), work in the refugee camp is erased and rendered invisible. Economic activities are often framed as inconsistent with a refugee's personhood (see Malkki 1995 on the “problem” of “rich refugees”).…”

Embedded Narratives: Metabolic Disorders and Pentecostal Conversion in Samoa

“…For example, among Russian Jewish émigrés in the United States, “the prioritization of caring for the younger generations over themselves, their view of food as a vital necessity rather than an object of choice or desire” made biomedical self‐care difficult, despite the fact they “acknowledge[d] the necessity of self‐control in the abstract” (Borovoy and Hine , 6). In other cases, narrative express barriers to food access or health care services (Carney , ).…”