Structural Vulnerability and Health: Latino Migrant Laborers in the United States

Abstract

Latino immigrants in the United States constitute a paradigmatic case of a population group subject to structural violence. Their subordinated location in the global economy and their culturally depreciated status in the United States are exacerbated by legal persecution. Medical Anthropology, Volume 30, Numbers 4 and 5, include a series of ethnographic analyses of the processes that render undocumented Latino immigrants structurally vulnerable to ill health. We hope to extend the social science concept of “structural vulnerability” to make it a useful concept for health care. Defined as a positionality that imposes physical/emotional suffering on specific population groups and individuals in patterned ways, structural vulnerability is a product of class-based economic exploitation and cultural, gender/sexual, and racialized discrimination, as well as complementary processes of depreciated subjectivity formation. A good-enough medicalized recognition of the condition of structural vulnerability offers a tool for developing practical therapeutic resources. It also facilitates political alternatives to the punitive neoliberal policies and discourses of individual unworthiness that have become increasingly dominant in the United States since the 1980s.

Key Words:

• citizenship
• Hispanic health outcomes
• immigrants
• social inequality
• social medicine
• structural violence

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants DA010164 and AA01759201. Comparative and background data was drawn from NIH grants: DA027204, DA0227689, DA27599, and the California HIV/AIDS Research Program ID08-SF-049. The analysis presented does not necessarily represent the views of the funders; it is solely the responsibility of the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Quesada

JAMES QUESADA is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, USA. His critical medical anthropology research on political violence and transnational migration ranges from Nicaragua to California. He is currently engaged in an NIH/NIAAA research project on Latino day laborers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Laurie Kain Hart

LAURIE KAIN HART is the Edmund and Margiana Stinnes Professor of Global Studies and Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania, USA. Her research focuses on ethnicity, border conflict, and territorial segregation in the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the US inner city. She is the author of Time, Religion, and Social Experience in Rural Greece as well as of numerous articles on the long-term effects of civil war and ethnic displacement.

Philippe Bourgois

PHILIPPE BOURGOIS is the Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Family and Community Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He is the author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio and Righteous Dopefiend, as well as over 150 articles on drugs, violence, labor migration, ethnic conflict, homelessness, and urban poverty (http://philippebourgois.net).