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

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

Author: Alyshia Galvez
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 09/09/2011
Pages: 230
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.76lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.53d
ISBN: 9780813551425

Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2012

About the Author

ALYSHIA GÁLVEZ, an assistant professor at Lehman College of CUNY, is the author of Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Immigrants.