Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers: Mexican Women, Public Prenatal Care, and the Birth Weight Paradox

by Alyshia Gálvez

According to the Latina health paradox, Mexican immigrant women have less complicated pregnancies and more favorable birth outcomes than many other groups, in spite of socioeconomic disadvantage. Alyshia Gálvez provides an ethnographic examination of this paradox. What are the ways that Mexican immigrant women care for themselves during their pregnancies? How do they decide to leave behind some of the practices they bring with them on their pathways of migration in favor of biomedical approaches to pregnancy and childbirth? This book takes us from inside the halls of a busy metropolitan hospital’s public prenatal clinic to the Oaxaca and Puebla states in Mexico to look at the ways Mexican women manage their pregnancies. The mystery of the paradox lies perhaps not in the recipes Mexican-born women have for good perinatal health, but in the prenatal encounter in the United States. Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers is a migration story and a look at the ways that immigrants are received by our medical institutions and by our society

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology

230 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2011

Reviews

[Gillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This ethnography is, in many ways, a fantastic look into the lives of Mexican immigrants and their birth experiences in NYC. I absolutely do recommend it. However, Galvez’s work falls short because she chooses not to include the perspectives of women’s partners which is critical to understanding family structures and live, as well as superacion, in New York. Finally, stating that this is a multi-sited ethnography is a bit of a misnomer since Galvez spends very little time in Mexico. These perspectives could have enriched the text even more, making the themes more compelling and broadening the impact of the ethnography in the transnational conversation focused on reproductive justice and practices.

[toria · Rating 3 out of 5]

for class! great dive into the birth-weight paradox

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great ethnography to explain why Mexican immigrant women have such low rates of low-birth-weight babies when it is expected that their average low socioeconomic status would put them at a higher risk for worse birth outcomes. While other books and articles have addressed exactly how the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth operate in the US, this ethnography makes explicit links to how this medicalization discourages and marginalizes the beneficial practices and knowledge that Mexican immigrant women have of their own pregnancies.

It is also interesting to see how public health initiatives, which may sound good in theory, are actually enacted in real life (such as cultural sensitivity training for medical providers or prenatal care visits).

The author also suggests some changes in care for Mexican immigrant women, in order to provide them with meaningful care that does not disregard their healthy, beneficial traditional practices, such as replacing some prenatal care visits with collaborative workshops - an elegantly simple and more efficient means of making sure the women are receiving all the information they need.

This is a good book for insight into the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth in the US and how pregnant Mexican immigrant women navigate the medical system.