Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers: Mexican Women, Public Prenatal Care, and the Birth Weight Paradox (Critical Issues in Health and Medicine)

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 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. In Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers, Alyshia G̀lvez 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 book is both a migration story and a look at the ways that immigrants are received by our medical institutions and by our society Introduction Immigrant aspirations and the decisions families make Allá en el pueblo : the changing landscape of reproductive care in rural Mexico Becoming patients : birth experiences in New York City Soy fuerte, yo puedo : critical perspectives on prenatal care Conclusion : prenatal care and the reception of immigrants why it's important to listen to Mexican immigrant women talk about their pregnancies. According to the Latina health paradox, Mexican immigrant women have less complicated pregnancies and more favourable birth outcomes than many other groups, in spite of socioeconomic disadvantage. This 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. Discusses the apparent advantage of mothers, who have recently immigrated from Mexico over their counterparts with similar risk profiles in terms of low-birth weight babies.