Patient citizens, immigrant mothers : Mexican women, public prenatal care, and the birth-weight paradox

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Chapter 1. Paradoxes and Patients: Immigrants and Prenatal Care

Chapter 2. Immigrant Aspirations and the Decisions Families Make

Chapter 3. Remembering Reproductive Care in Rural Mexico

Chapter 4. Becoming Patients: Birth Experiences in New York City

Chapter 5. Critical Perspectives on Prenatal Care

Chapter 6. Prenatal Care and the Reception of Immigrants: Reflections and Suggestions for Change

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.