Praying for More Time: Mexican Immigrants’ Pandemic Eldercare Dilemmas

Abstract

Based on longitudinal research conducted with 21 Mexican immigrants between 2018 and 2021, this article examines the challenges the COVID‐19 pandemic posed to undocumented immigrants in the United States attempting to provide care for aging parents in Mexico. As the United States excluded undocumented immigrants from pandemic support, the pandemic undermined their ability to provide health care for their parents even as the Mexican public health care system crumbled. Meanwhile, as the pandemic hastened their parents’ demise, it thwarted immigrants’ ability to time returns to see their parents before they died. While scholars have amply documented how spatial disparities exacerbated the impact of the pandemic among marginalized groups, few have examined the temporal disruptions caused by the pandemic. This article suggests that the pandemic provoked particular distress by desynchronizing the temporalities of family life across borders and preventing immigrants’ abilities to coordinate care for their parents in time. [COVID‐19, transnational families, eldercare, death, time]

Transnational Students Facing Multiple Crises: Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Oaxaca, Mexico

“…The pandemic has had a more significant impact in regions and countries already facing severe crises, such as Latin America (CEPAL-NU 2020) and Mexico (NU-México 2020), where it arrived at a time of increasing precarious employment and poverty and the onset of a health economic crisis (Hernández 2020, 21). In 2019, a year before the pandemic, the López Obrador government had cut the budget for health (Horton 2022), which resulted in a lower supply of medicine and medical supplies, a cut in health and administrative personnel, and a decrease in the supply and quality of health services (Lomelí 2020).…”

“…It is very stressful, I have many responsibilities, but I am managing. (Rose, 16 years old, immigrant, January 20, 2021) Finally, the lack of employment and access to economic aid for undocumented immigrants in the United States occurred at the same time that the pandemic worsened the situation of the Mexican healthcare system, already affected by the budgetcutting policies of the López Obrador government in 2019 (Horton 2022). Many working-class families, like those of the transnational students in this research, did not have the financial capacity to access expensive antiviral drugs when they contracted the coronavirus.…”

“…It has been one of the Mexican states most affected by Trump's immigration policies. Data from the Migration Policy Unit (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021) indicate an increase in the number of deportations; out of a total of 779,731 Mexicans deported, 69,835 were Oaxacans. In May 2020, when the United States had the highest number of COVID-19 infections and deaths worldwide, more than 4,000 Oaxacan migrants were deported (Cruz 2020).…”