Emotional Pathways of Embodied Health Vulnerability: Maternal Health Risk and Emotional Distress among First‐ and Second‐Generation Immigrants on the US‐Mexico Border

Abstract

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.

Toward a phenomenology of politics: Vulnerability, autonomy, and the making of “hard” corporeal selves in Chile's migrant campamentos

“…Most of this work has focused on how structural forces negatively impact people's relational commitments. Anthropologist Kristin Yarris (2011) has examined, for example, how Nicaraguan women embody the pain caused by family relationships broken in conditions of hardship, including in contexts of migration (see also Heckert, 2021). Others have similarly examined how women negotiate moral projects of motherhood when conditions of poverty make it difficult to meet cultural models of what it means to be a good mother (e.g., Lowe, 2018;Rubin, 2018), or the difficulty of keeping promises made between women kin amid "conflicting responsibilities and punishing demands" (Garcia, 2014, 52).…”

“…Work in psychological and related fields within anthropology on moral experience and ordinary ethics has highlighted how intersubjective and intercorporeal relationships both sustain and expose us to loss, abandonment, and harm—a condition that Zigon and anthropologist Jason Throop (2014, 9) term “the vulnerability of [the] relational‐being.” Most of this work has focused on how structural forces negatively impact people's relational commitments. Anthropologist Kristin Yarris (2011) has examined, for example, how Nicaraguan women embody the pain caused by family relationships broken in conditions of hardship, including in contexts of migration (see also Heckert, 2021). Others have similarly examined how women negotiate moral projects of motherhood when conditions of poverty make it difficult to meet cultural models of what it means to be a good mother (e.g., Lowe, 2018; Rubin, 2018), or the difficulty of keeping promises made between women kin amid “conflicting responsibilities and punishing demands” (Garcia, 2014, 52).…”