Translocal and gender dimensions of frame alignment: Community mobilization and recruitment processes among women community health workers in Mexico

Abstract

The rise of working-class women's organizing, community work around health issues, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Latin America has been attributed to structural and cultural factors. Yet these factors fall short in explaining how women are recruited into community health work and NGOs. In this paper the author argues that the frame alignment is the mediating process that stands between structural and cultural factors and individual women to make community activism in health possible. The frame alignment is an interactive process constituted by the life stories women bring into their activism and the NGO into which they are recruited. Further, the frame alignment is shaped by translocal actors such as state and international institutions as they put frames and financial resources in circulation throughout the Third World, particularly via NGOs. This argument is developd in a case study of women community workers members of a Mexican health-oriented NGO. The author relies on women's and the NGO's narratives to explore how the frame alignment takes place in and through the recruitment of working-class women into community health work within this NGO.