Suffering in the shadows: "undocumented" Latin American immigrants, inequality, embodiment and health

Abstract

This study utilizes the idea of embodiment to examine the social processes that “undocumented” Latin American migrants undergo and how these social processes affect their health. Embodiment refers to how our bodies and minds literally incorporate, from conception to death, the material and social world in which we live (Krieger, 2001b). The study uses a critical intersectional lens and an adapted grounded theory approach to analyze 31 original qualitative in-depth interviews with nationally diverse “undocumented” Latin American migrants from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area in order to create a theoretical framework that addresses: (1) how “undocumented” Latin American migrants experience structural violence and inequality through various pathways (e.g. labor exploitation, detention and deportation, gender based violence, racialized nativism, discrimination and othering, fragmentation of social ties, and internalized suffering), which results in differential exposure and susceptibility to poor health outcomes; (2) how “undocumented” Latino/a migrants respond to and contend with inequality; and (3) how structural violence and inequality becomes deleterious physical and mental health outcomes through multilevel pathways of embodiment.