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Abstract
In this article, we highlight findings from ethnographic research on dietary health interventions with low-income Latino im/migrant populations in the Central Coast of California. We discuss the assumptions underpinning different models of nutrition intervention and education, as well as what these assumptions suggest about common perceptions of Latino im/migrant dietary health and knowledge. We demonstrate how interventions contribute to further marginalization of Latino im/migrants by positioning them as either helpless, unknowing subjects or as freeloading dependents of the state. We argue that Latino im/migrants are systematically denied power as they are consistently beseeched to assume more responsibility for their own dietary health problems. We contend that the implications of these interventions reinforce extant structures of social exclusion encountered by Latino im/migrants, while also failing to offer lasting solutions to food insecurity in Latino im/migrant communities.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the University of California Multicampus Research Program on Food and the Body for providing the opportunity of an introduction and collaboration, as well as the research participants who were involved in each of the authors’ projects. We would also like to thank Lindsey Dillon and Clare Gupta, as well as Amy Bentley and Katherine Magruder and the two anonymous reviewers at Food, Culture and Society for their comments, recommendations and general improvements upon this piece. Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern's research was funded by The University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UCMEXUS), La Programa de Investigación de Migración y Salud (PIMSA) and the Health Initiative of the Americas, The Rosenberg Foundation, and The Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. We collapse “immigrant” and “migrant” into the more inclusive frame of “im/migrant.” For more discussion on this term, see the methods section.
2. We use the standard US Department of Agriculture definition of food security: access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life. This includes at a minimum: the ready availability of nutritionally adequate and safe food and an assured ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways (without resorting to emergency food supplies, scavenging, stealing or other coping strategies) (Nord and USDA Economic Research Service Citation2011).
3. We use the term “neoliberal logics,” as articulated by Aihwa Ong, who explains that, “neoliberal practices spread not out of necessity of universal reproduction, but through the vectors it [sic] carves through the global marketplace of ideas and practices” (Ong Citation2007: 5).
4. Additionally, food banks and other emergency food programs in the United States have a long history of being supply rather than need driven, and therefore not being developed with the particular context, culture or knowledge of those receiving this food in mind (Poppendieck Citation1999; Winne Citation2008).
5. Most participants in Minkoff-Zern’s research immigrated to the United States from rural backgrounds in Oaxaca, Mexico, where their livelihood consisted of small market and subsistence farms. Upon immigrating to the United States, many struggled to gain access to land and capital to start their own gardens and farms, but some have succeeded and are now providing their families with seasonal produce and some income.
6. Food security surveys utilized the standard US Department of Agriculture measuring tool for household food insecurity (See Carlson et al. Citation1999).
7. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act 1996 also limited documented immigrants’ use of federally-funded assistance programs for their first five years in the United States. This included barring them from food stamp eligibility until they become citizens, excluding political asylees and refugees (Levinson Citation2002).
8. Undocumented children are also eligible for access to free and reduced price meals under the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program.
9. Public charge is a penalty low-income immigrants applying for citizenship may receive if they utilize federal welfare benefits.