A LATINO ORAL HEALTH PARADOX? USING ETHNOGRAPHY TO SPECIFY THE BIOCULTURAL FACTORS BEHIND EPIDEMIOLOGICAL MODELS

Abstract

This article presents evidence of a "Latino oral health paradox," in which Mexican immigrant parents in California's Central Valley report having had better oral health status as children in Mexico than their U.S.-born children. Yet little research has explored the specific environmental, social, and cultural factors that mediate the much-discussed "Latino health paradox," in which foreign-born Latinos paradoxically enjoy better health status than their children, U.S.-born Latinos, and whites. Through ethnography, we explore the dietary and environmental factors that ameliorated immigrant parents' oral health status in rural Mexico, while ill-preparing them for the more cariogenic diets and environments their children face in the U.S. We argue that studies on the "Latino health paradox" neglect a binational analysis, ignoring the different health status of Latino populations in their sending countries. We use the issue of immigrant children's high incidence of oral disease to initiate a fuller dialogue between U.S.-based studies of the "health paradox" and non-U.S. based studies of the "epidemiological transition." We show that both models rely upon a static opposition between "traditional" and "modern" health practices, and argue that a binational analysis of the processes that affect immigrant children's health can help redress the shortcomings of epidemiological generalizations.