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Over 800,000 Mexican agricultural workers are employed in California each year, of which approximately 400,000 are estimated to be undocumented immigrants. Previous studies have found President Trump to be distinct in his anti-immigrant rhetoric and explicit verbal attacks of immigrants and refugees, which predicts hostile community attitudes towards immigrants and minorities. We convened 19 focus groups (FG) in diverse regions of California to gather information from Latina/o agriculture workers on the potential impact(s) of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and immigration policy on this population. Widespread racism and discrimination were overwhelmingly noted in all FG sessions. Participants reported being the targets of increasingly hostile behavior, including hate crimes, that they attributed to anti-immigration rhetoric. Therefore, participants also reported an increasing sense of fear and psychological distress that led them to avoid community participation. Perceptions of racist and intentionally harmful policies contributed to reduced interactions with healthcare facilities and prompted both documented and undocumented participants to withdraw themselves and their children from public programs. For FG participants, the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and immigration policy severely impacted their community resulting in profound negative impacts on their economic well-being, education, and physical and emotional health.

This comparative analysis of Latina immigrant mothers’ experiences in “Squire Town,” a farmworker community in Northern California, and Williamsburg, a recent Latina/o destination in Eastern Virginia, employs a gender lens to analyze how these women make claims to place, belonging, and inclusion through their sustained individual and collective struggles to ensure the well-being of their families. In Williamsburg they created attachment to place through resilience in facing restricted access to services and housing and overcoming fear to navigate unfamiliar physical and institutional settings. Mothers in Squire Town made politicized claims to inclusion by advocating for services in their community. Women in both sites developed support networks to assist them in obtaining or collectively demanding resources and services for their families. These mothers’ responses to exclusionary conditions in these two contexts reveal gendered, place-specific dimensions of belonging and women’s contribution to its production.

Based on ethnographic and archival research, we explore how 10 students asserted their rights to belong and secure a space where they felt safe at UC Davis. We examine the activities and practices of 10 undergraduate Chicanxs and Latinxs students: members of “Radical Academics for Pedagogy” (RAP) and RESISTENCIA. Our interest lies on examining how they enacted cultural citizenship—a process by which they defined themselves, interpreted their histories, constructed their own symbols and political rhetoric, and claimed rights through speeches, actions, cultural discourses, and dialogues. We contend that the students challenged the definitions of belonging and citizenship at UC Davis.

We examine how the community-driven leadership (CDL) of farmworker mothers challenged deficit practices of the local school board, which decided to close the school in the community. CDL is the abi...

The COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020 as high school seniors were receiving their college admission notifications for fall. Many postsecondary institutions shifted outreach efforts to online formats. This qualitative study examines how virtual recruitment at an emerging HSI incorporates culturally responsive practices from the perspective of institutional agents (IAs) who were involved in these efforts. We also consider how IAs perceive the broader commitment of the institution to serve Latinx/a/o students. Our findings expose limitations in effectively recruiting Latinx/a/os in virtual formats due to the digital divide. The IAs identify ways in which the university was not equipped to overcome unreliable broadband access and technology. These agents maintain a critical lens to identify how the institution can expand capacity and ensure that the work of supporting Latinx/a/o students is a shared responsibility and not concentrated on a few staff. The findings further raise awareness of the continued language divide in disseminating information to families who do not speak English. Our study provides insights on how universities nationwide and across the world can transform recruitment practices to more intentionally support minoritized students and families as they make enrollment decisions into college.

In this article, we examine motherhood “scripts,” or cultural discourses, taught in prenatal classes in the US South. Our analysis revealed that these prenatal classes, all taught in the early 2000s, appear to have supported a model of “intensive mothering” that undermined women’s autonomy and power in pregnancy. In addition, the content and messaging of these classes appears to have contributed to a societal tendency to make pregnant women, especially poor women and women of color, invisible while privileging the fetus as a person rater than as a potential person.

In el nuevo South, the immigration of Latinas/os complicates our understanding of relations between races. Drawing on 18 months of participant observation, I explore how the employees of a community clinic decided to regulate health-care access and how race and the perception of ‘who is entitled’ figured into their practices. My study shows how racial conflicts influence access to public resources, such as health care, and how those conflicts stem from constructions of citizenship, social membership, and belonging. This article sheds light on race relations in a new immigrant destination, explores workplace conditions that might incite racial conflict, and highlights racialised constructions of citizenship and belonging. It concludes that the resulting stressful work conditions at the clinic, lack of resources, and threat from ‘the other’ fomented racial conflict between African-Americans and Latinas.

Mexican immigrant farm-worker mothers’ class, race, citizenship status, and jurisdictional status of their town in a Northern California community rendered them invisible. However, when the school board decided to close the elementary school the mothers mobilized. Drawing on these mothers’ fototestimonios we examine how they, as cultural citizens, resisted local practices of educational inequity. They wanted to ensure an education for their children. The fototestimonios reveal how farm-worker mothers: (1) negotiated as a collective with the school board; (2) sought negotiation and schooling alternatives; and (3) expressed cultural citizenship through collective efforts to be included within the US polity.

The film No Mas Bebes (No More Babies), directed and produced by Renee Tajima-Pena and produced by Virginia Espino, is an important intervention in the explicit marginalization of Latina and Chican...

Abortion is among the most stigmatized reproductive health issues faced by women in the United States. Using the reproductive justice framework, we discuss the numerous obstacles Mexican immigrant women and teens living in North Carolina face in seeking abortions and the ways in which the barriers experienced by these women are the product of intersecting forms of oppression based on race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, age, immigration status and linguistic abilities, among others. These struggles are depicted through ethnographic data as well as interviews with midwives, program directors, folk healers (curanderas/os) and Mexican immigrant women and girls making decisions about abortion. Their experiences are analyzed to highlight that Mexican immigrant women and teens are restricted by legal and medical institutions. The findings focus on how these women ultimately receive abortion services in the face of structural barriers to formal care and why women often seek abortion care outside of the formal health-care sector.

OBJETIVO: Identificar las percepciones y opiniones del personal proveedor de servicios de aborto en la Ciudad de Mexico, a tres anos de la implementacion de la reforma de la ley sobre aborto electivo. METODOS: Se realizaron 19 entrevistas en profundidad entre febrero y junio de 2010 al personal de salud adscrito al Programa de Interrupcion Legal del Embarazo (ILE) en una clinica y un hospital del Distrito Federal. Se recabo informacion sobre datos sociodemograficos, formacion profesional y experiencia con provision de servicios. RESULTADOS: Algunos participantes consideraron un acierto la gratuidad del servicio porque permite el acceso de mujeres de escasos recursos, en tanto que otros percibieron negativamente la exencion del pago, a diferencia de otros procedimientos ginecobstetricos del sector salud. La objecion de conciencia prevalecio entre el personal de salud de ingreso reciente, lo cual podria atribuirse a su desconocimiento sobre lineamientos legales y tecnicos del programa de ILE. Existe ambivalencia entre el personal por la no aceptacion de un metodo anticonceptivo post-aborto por parte de algunas mujeres, lo que se percibe como un factor de reincidencia importante en los servicios de aborto legal. CONCLUSIONES: El personal de salud ostenta opiniones divididas y ambivalentes respecto al derecho de las mujeres a interrumpir un embarazo. Analizar experiencias y opiniones del personal de salud sobre la ley de ILE permitira tener una linea basal sobre el tema y estudios futuros lograran documentar cambios y retrocesos en la aprobacion de dicha ley en Mexico.

OBJETIVO: Identificar las percepciones y opiniones del personal proveedor de servicios de aborto en la Ciudad de México, a tres años de la implementación de la reforma de la ley sobre aborto electivo. MÉTODOS: Se realizaron 19 entrevistas en profundidad entre febrero y junio de 2010 al personal de salud adscrito al Programa de Interrupción Legal del Embarazo (ILE) en una clínica y un hospital del Distrito Federal. Se recabó información sobre datos sociodemográficos, formación profesional y experiencia con provisión de servicios. RESULTADOS: Algunos participantes consideraron un acierto la gratuidad del servicio porque permite el acceso de mujeres de escasos recursos, en tanto que otros percibieron negativamente la exención del pago, a diferencia de otros procedimientos ginecobstétricos del sector salud. La objeción de conciencia prevaleció entre el personal de salud de ingreso reciente, lo cual podría atribuirse a su desconocimiento sobre lineamientos legales y técnicos del programa de ILE. Existe ambivalencia entre el personal por la no aceptación de un método anticonceptivo post-aborto por parte de algunas mujeres, lo que se percibe como un factor de reincidencia importante en los servicios de aborto legal. CONCLUSIONES: El personal de salud ostenta opiniones divididas y ambivalentes respecto al derecho de las mujeres a interrumpir un embarazo. Analizar experiencias y opiniones del personal de salud sobre la ley de ILE permitirá tener una línea basal sobre el tema y estudios futuros lograrán documentar cambios y retrocesos en la aprobación de dicha ley en México.OBJECTIVE: Identify the perceptions and opinions of people who provide abortion services in Mexico City, three years after implementation of elective abortion legal reforms. METHODS: Nineteen in-depth interviews of health workers assigned to the legal abortion programs at a clinic and a hospital in Mexico's Federal District were carried out between February and June of 2010. Information on sociodemographic data, professional training, and experience in providing services was collected. RESULTS: Some interviewees thought the provision of free services was beneficial because it allowed lower-income women to access this type of care, whereas others interviewed disapproved of the lack of fees, since other gynecological and obstetric health services have to be paid for. Conscientious objection prevailed among newly hired health workers, which can be attributed to their lack of knowledge about the legal abortion program's legal and technical guidelines. Some workers were ambivalent because they did not accept a postabortion contraception method used by some women, perceiving it to be a factor in significant repeated demand for legal abortion services. CONCLUSIONS: Health workers evince divided and ambivalent opinions with regard to abortion rights. Analyzing their experiences and opinions will facilitate the creation of a baseline on the subject, and future studies will be able to document changes in and any lessening of approval for this law in Mexico.

Drawing from ethnographic research in the Research Triangle of North Carolina and Williamsburg, Virginia, the authors build on Anzaldúa's conceptualization of “borderlands” to analyze how borders of social membership are constructed and enforced in “el Nuevo South.” Our gender analysis reveals that intersecting structural conditions—the labor market, the organization of public space, and the institutional organization of health care and other public services—combine with gendered processes in the home and family to regulate women's participation in community life. Enforcers of borders include institutional actors, mostly women, in social services and clinics who occupy institutional locations that enable them to define who is entitled to public goods and to categorize migrants as undeserving “others.” We reveal how a particularly configured matrix of domination transcends the spheres of home, work, and community to constrain women migrants' physical and economic mobility and personal autonomy and to inhibit their participation in their societies of reception.

Drawing on data from 18 months of participant observation and interviews at a community health clinic in North Carolina, the author illustrates how an intersectional perspective deepens our understanding of the construction of a moral identity. In this case, the author examines the moral identity of health care providers—all women—who provide family planning and contraceptive counseling for women clients. The author analyzes how maternity care coordinators—two whites and two Latinas—craft a moral identity by drawing on the cultural toolkit available to them, using gendered frames but also racial, class, and nationalist frames. An intersectional lens helps us better understand how maternity care coordinators' moral identities are shaped by their different locations within racism, classism, and nationalism.

The aim of this article is to identify the measurement challenges involved in obtaining sensitive health outcomes from Mexican women in both settled and unsettled segments of the United States population and to suggest how cognitive assessment techniques might be better employed to construct culturally and linguistically appropriate survey instruments. These objectives will be illustrated through a project with recent Mexican immigrants in North Carolina that constructs items to measure last menstrual period—an important indicator in gauging the gestational age of a fetus. Guidelines for conducting focus groups and cognitive interviews with this population are emphasized.

The sociological study of the mental health of racial-ethnic minorities depends on the measurement quality of the instruments used to evaluate mental health. A commonly used instrument in research on mental health disparities, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), has not been thoroughly validated for use in the multiethnic and foreign-born populations currently living in the U.S. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this analysis provides the first multiethnic evaluation and psychometric analysis of the CES-D by acculturation level among youth ages 12–20. Correcting for the measurement problems contained in the CES-D improves the ability to detect differences in depression across ethnocultural groups, and to identify relationships between depression and other outcomes.

This study compares wealth ownership and mobility patterns among baby boomers and their parents to explore whether the baby boomers have fared as well during their working years and whether they will be as secure in retirement as their parents. Cohort comparisons using survey data indicate that baby boomers had accumulated more wealth as young adults than their parents had at a similar age. Estimates from a simulation model reveal that baby boomers had more wealth than their actual same-sex parents at every stage of the life course. The simulation model also reveals that baby boomers were considerably more likely than their actual same-sex parents to experience upward wealth mobility at each point in the life course. These results suggest that speculations that baby boomers may be the first generation to do worse than their parents are misleading. Key Words: baby boomers, intergenerational processes, social mobility, social stratification, wealth mobility, wealth ownership The baby boom generation has put pressure on social and economic resources at every stage of their lives. This cohort strained educational resources in the 1950s and 1960s as they filled classrooms to capacity, caused crowding in colleges and universities in their late teens and early 20s, and contributed to slow wage growth in the 1970s and 1980s when they entered the labor force (Sabelhaus & Manchester, 1995). In the 1990s, the changing age structure of the population, the financial condition of the social security system, and post-World War II declines in household saving have raised questions about whether this generation will have adequate resources to finance retirement (Levy & Michel, 1991; Longman, 1987). When baby boomers retire between 2010 and 2030, the percentage of the population aged 65 and over will increase from about 12% to about 20%70 (Manchester, 1993). There is evidence that the parents of this cohort have sufficient financial resources for retirement, but researchers suggest that the baby boomers may be less fortunate (Brown, 1997; Levy & Michel, 1991; Longman, 1987). Although academics and policy analysts alike have speculated about the resources baby boomers have for retirement, the wealth of this generation has received relatively little attention. Yet wealth is a critical component of well-being, particularly during retirement (Keister & Moller, 2000). Wealth is the value of the things people own. It is usually measured as net worth: total assets (such as stocks, savings accounts, and real estate) minus total debt (such as mortgages and credit card debt). Wealth provides economic security and can be used indirectly to gain advantages such as political influence, social prestige, flexibility, leisure, and improved advantages for one's children. During retirement, assets provide a reserve that can be drawn on as a source of regular income or to fund emergencies. In recent decades, retirees have increasingly turned to their assets to finance expenditures (Grad, 1992). Yet because wealth is extremely unequally distributed, not all retirees are able to draw on assets to the same degree. Indeed, in the mid-1990s, the top 1% of wealth owners owned 38% of net worth (Wolff, 1995). How this will affect the retirement of the baby boomers has yet to be determined. Our aim is to examine whether baby boomers have accumulated as much wealth during their working years as their parents did and subsequently whether they will be as secure in retirement as their parents. We follow Easterlin, MacDonald, and Macunovich (1990a, 1990b) and Manchester (1993) in defining baby boomers as those born between 1945 and 1965, because the first post-- Depression increase in births occurred in 1945, and births had fallen below 4 million by 1966. We focus on the wealth accumulation and mobility of two distinct cohorts of baby boomers and compare them to their parents at the same point in the life cycle. We draw on research on life course processes, gender, and social mobility to develop a set of expectations regarding the well-being of these cohorts (both within and across the cohorts). …

El objetivo de este estudio fue conocer la experiencia de mujeres mexicanas migrantes en California, Estados Unidos, en torno a la utilización de los servicios formales de salud para resolver problemas relacionados con su salud sexual y reproductiva. El diseño fue cualitativo, con enfoque teórico metodológico de antropología interpretativa. Las técnicas utilizadas fueron historias de vida con mujeres usuarias de los servicios de salud en California y entrevistas breves con informantes clave. Se encontraron tres tipos de barreras principales para el acceso al sistema de salud: condición migratoria, idioma y género. Los tiempos de espera, actitudes discriminatorias y costo del servicio se expresaron como características que más incomodaron a las migrantes. La percepción de calidad de atención estuvo relacionada con la condición de ilegalidad migratoria. La red de apoyo tanto en México, como en California, colabora en la resolución de enfermedades. Se debe incorporar la perspectiva intercultural en los servicios.

This study focuses on the experience of Mexican women migrants in California, USA, with the use of formal health services for sexual and reproductive health issues. The authors used a qualitative interpretative approach with life histories, interviewing eight female users of healthcare services in California and seven key informants in Mexico and California. There were three main types of barriers to healthcare: immigration status, language, and gender. Participants reported long waiting times, discriminatory attitudes, and high cost of services. A combination of formal and informal healthcare services was common. The assessment of quality of care was closely related to undocumented immigration status. Social support networks are crucial to help solve healthcare issues. Quality of care should take intercultural health issues into account.

Identify the perceptions and opinions of people who provide abortion services in Mexico City, three years after implementation of elective abortion legal reforms.Nineteen in-depth interviews of health workers assigned to the legal abortion programs at a clinic and a hospital in Mexico's Federal District were carried out between February and June of 2010. Information on sociodemographic data, professional training, and experience in providing services was collected.Some interviewees thought the provision of free services was beneficial because it allowed lower-income women to access this type of care, whereas others interviewed disapproved of the lack of fees, since other gynecological and obstetric health services have to be paid for. Conscientious objection prevailed among newly hired health workers, which can be attributed to their lack of knowledge about the legal abortion program's legal and technical guidelines. Some workers were ambivalent because they did not accept a postabortion contraception method used by some women, perceiving it to be a factor in significant repeated demand for legal abortion services.Health workers evince divided and ambivalent opinions with regard to abortion rights. Analyzing their experiences and opinions will facilitate the creation of a baseline on the subject, and future studies will be able to document changes in and any lessening of approval for this law in Mexico.

The last menstrual period is used to estimate gestational age. This paper examines sources of measurement error related to the recall of last menstrual period among Mexican immigrant women living in the United States. Qualitative analyses (focus groups and cognitive interviews) suggest that last menstrual period recall does not seem to be a large source of measurement error in the calculation of gestational age and the impact of this type of error on the misclassification of preterm births appears to be minimal. Questions for querying about last menstrual period in this population are offered.