Transnational Mother Blame: Protecting and Caring in a Globalized Context

ABSTRACT

Mexican women in both the United States and Mexico face uneven landscapes of benefits and discourses as they negotiate family members’ health. Building on two decades of ethnographic research, I explore how Mexican mothers navigate social and medical services, food provision, food preparation and health, and describe some of the ways that governments in each country abdicate responsibility for shaping structural constraints on citizens’ health. Transnational “mother blame” is a pattern that builds on tropes about the simultaneous responsibility and incapacity of women to ensure their family’s health, while offering new articulations of responsibility in neoliberal, globalized, transnational contexts in which flexible care arrangements are both necessary and denigrated.

SPANISH ABSTRACT

Las mujeres mexicanas en México tanto como en los Estados Unidos enfrentan una compleja gama de riesgos, beneficios y discursos al navegar la salud de sus familias. En base de dos décadas de investigación etnográfica, exploro las maneras en que las madres mexicanas navegan servicios sociales y médicos, provisión y preparación de alimentos, y la salud, y las maneras en que los estados de cada país niegan su responsabilidad al influir en los factores estructurales que afectan la salud de sus ciudadanos. “La culpa de la madre” es un patrón transnacional que descansa en ideas antiguas sobre la simultánea responsabilidad e incapacidad de las mujeres por asegurar la salud de sus familias, mientras se articulan nuevas formas de responsabilizar y promover el auto-cuidado en contextos transnacionales, globalizados, en los cuales los arreglos flexibles para cuidar a los miembros de las familias se ven a la vez necesarios y denigrados.

KEYWORDS:

• Mexico
• chronic disease
• gender
• immigration
• structural violence
• transnationalism

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• México
• enfermedades crónicas
• género; inmigración
• violencia estructural
• transnacionalismo

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the editors of this special issue, Daisy Deomampo and Natalí Valdez, as well as Medical Anthropology’s editor Lenore Manderson, Victoria Team, and the anonymous peer reviewers who gave me feedback. I am thankful for the Wenner-Gren funded workshop organized in New York City by Deomampo and Valdez that preceded this publication in February 2018, as well as Dana-Aín Davis who was a reader/commentator on early drafts. I am also grateful to the Consulate of Mexico in New York and the Institute of Mexicans Abroad (Instituto de Mexicanos en el Exterior, IME), both part of the foreign ministry (Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, SRE), and people there who connected me to officials in other government ministries including health and social welfare (Salud and Sedesol).

Notes

1. The name of the town and my interlocutors are pseudonyms.

2. All citizens receive a wealth of benefits and services from the state. Even those who receive no welfare “benefits” such as subsidized medical care or insurance, public education or food stamps, benefit from the state in the form of roads, bridges, 911services, use of a national currency, fire and police departments, and so on. But often only benefits that are means-tested are categorized as benefits, per se.

3. Since the Mexican Revolution, the state had assumed a robust role in ensuring its population’s well-being.

4. It is so far unclear how the new administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of the left-leaning PRD party, will amend the government’s anti-poverty programs.

5. Former Mexican president Vicente Fox (2000–2006) used this wording in his campaign in 2000.

6. It is also important to note that consumption of corn tortillas is not historically associated with adiposity.

7. Bridges (2017) describes enrolling in public benefits as coerced, not a choice, for low-income mothers. Lacking private health insurance and private means essentially obliges women to enroll in benefits for which they are eligible because “failure” to enroll can be grounds for charges of neglect and further, often more destructive, scrutiny and interventions by the state for “neglect.” While many participants in my study found these benefits to be generous, some also noted the constraints they entailed.

Additional information

Funding

Funding and other resources for the studies included here were provided by the City University of New York, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) and New York University.

Notes on contributors

Alyshia Gálvez

Alyshia Gálvez is a cultural and medical anthropologist and is a professor of food studies and anthropology at The New School in New York City. She is the author of a recent book entitled Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico (UC Press, 2018) as well as two previous books on Mexican migration, Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers: Mexican Women, Public Prenatal Care and the Birth Weight Paradox and Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Immigrants