Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers

Price (paper): $24.95  
Price (cloth): $72.00  
Subtitle: Mexican Women, Public Prenatal Care, and the Birth-weight Paradox
Authors: Alyshia Galvez
Subject: Anthropology, Public Health, Latina Studies
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5142-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5141-8
Pages: 240 pages
Publication Date: October 2011
Series: Critical Issues in Health and Medicine

Praise for Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers:

"Alyshia Galvez challenges conventional wisdom on how Latinas plan families, making a very important contribution to understanding the Latino health paradox."
—Peter J. Guarnaccia, PhD, Department of Human Ecology and Institute for Health, Health Care Policy & Aging Research, Rutgers University

Description:

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.

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.

Receive special offers and book notices by email. Sign up for RU READING?
Price (paper): $24.95
Price (cloth): $72.00