Mexican Immigrants Research Articles

The Mexican‐American worker: Assimilation, bias, and discrimination, 1940–2019

AbstractObjectiveThere are two fundamental arguments about why Mexican Americans have failed to be assimilated. Human capital theorists argue that it is due to their inferior human capital. In contrast, other theorists argue that discrimination is the primary reason. Our proposition is that both arguments are better served if data parse out Mexican immigrants. Failure to do so creates statistical bias regarding the “true” status of Mexican‐American workers and thus the Mexican‐American population.MethodWe estimate an earnings function among three Mexican ancestry groups: Mexican‐American workers, Mexican immigrant workers, and a co‐mingled sample of Mexican‐American and Mexican immigrant workers over the period from 1940 to 2017.ResultsOur findings suggest important differences in the earnings process between Mexican‐American workers and Mexican immigrant workers. Moreover, we also find important differences in discrimination between both groups of workers.ConclusionIf the focus of future research is the labor market experiences of Mexican Americans, care should be made in parsing out Mexican immigrant workers from their sample; otherwise, results would be biased and conclusions inaccurate.

Effects of Familism, Parenting, and Family Cohesion on Child Internalizing Symptoms among Mexican Immigrant Families

Effects of Familism, Parenting, and Family Cohesion on Child Internalizing Symptoms among Mexican Immigrant Families

Portrait of Aging Father

Portrait of Aging Father Eduardo Martinez-Leyva (bio) Loose teeth. A small bout of depression.I can't imagine your heart as anything but a fist.No one to hold you back. You drank.The neighborhood. The city.Even the perfume bottles.Father of insulin and bad words.Dipping dead scorpions in bleach, you then set themablaze to prevent infestation. Saved the stingers.What else did you keep? Father of failedchild support payments. Born into the businessof suffering you said. Not blond. Superstitious.One glass eye. When you call, you do it anonymously.Father of syringe and black coffee. You oncetried to remove your tonsils with rusted pliers.The only gun you held was aimed at your head.Father of fits and minimum wage.Once, you begged for my tongue to dreamin another language. Soon you will be a ghostwithout enough to haunt. I help button your coatsand shirtsleeves, buckle your seat belt.I place your hand on the inside of my elbowwhen guiding you through places you deemtoo dark. Now, I'm just a blurred blemishyou can barely see. [End Page 129] Eduardo Martinez-Leyva eduardo martinez-leyva was born on the US-Mexico border to Mexican immigrants. His work has appeared in The Boston Review, The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He's received fellowships from CantoMundo, The Frost Place, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Copyright © 2022 Eduardo Martinez-Leyva

Through Their Cultural Lens: A Qualitative Approach to Understanding Mexican Immigrant Families’ Experiences with the Transition to School

Through Their Cultural Lens: A Qualitative Approach to Understanding Mexican Immigrant Families’ Experiences with the Transition to School

On Measuring Immigrant Income

This brief draws on the case of Mexican immigrants, the most populous and constant remitting immigrant group in the United States, to show how remittances are a blind spot for US agencies, like the Census Bureau and IRS. Failing to account for remittance expenses likely leads to the overestimation of income and under-estimation of poverty rates in Mexican immigrant communities. Income and poverty figures of other consistent remitting immigrant groups, like other Latin American and Caribbean immigrants, may also be misestimated. There are two accessible ways to capture the impact of remittances: 1. the Census Bureau should alter the Supplemental Poverty Measure to account for international medical and childrearing expenses and 2. the IRS should allow foreign-born people to claim foreign-bound transactions of any sum that support caretaking, healthcare and education as deductions and account for them when adjusting taxable income. These changes would create a better economic portrait of immigrant communities and facilitate access to safety net programs.

Review: Latina Lives, Latina Narratives: Influential Essays by Vicki L. Ruiz, edited by Miroslava Chávez-García

Review: <i>Latina Lives, Latina Narratives: Influential Essays by Vicki L. Ruiz</i>, edited by Miroslava Chávez-García

Computational analysis of 140 years of US political speeches reveals more positive but increasingly polarized framing of immigration

We classify and analyze 200,000 US congressional speeches and 5,000 presidential communications related to immigration from 1880 to the present. Despite the salience of antiimmigration rhetoric today, we find that political speech about immigration is now much more positive on average than in the past, with the shift largely taking place between World War II and the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965. However, since the late 1970s, political parties have become increasingly polarized in their expressed attitudes toward immigration, such that Republican speeches today are as negative as the average congressional speech was in the 1920s, an era of strict immigration quotas. Using an approach based on contextual embeddings of text, we find that modern Republicans are significantly more likely to use language that is suggestive of metaphors long associated with immigration, such as "animals" and "cargo," and make greater use of frames like "crime" and "legality." The tone of speeches also differs strongly based on which nationalities are mentioned, with a striking similarity between how Mexican immigrants are framed today and how Chinese immigrants were framed during the era of Chinese exclusion in the late 19th century. Overall, despite more favorable attitudes toward immigrants and the formal elimination of race-based restrictions, nationality is still a major factor in how immigrants are spoken of in Congress.

A Pilot Group-Based Lifestyle Intervention to Promote Weight Loss Among Mexican Immigrants.

Mexican Americans are at increased risk for obesity upon immigration to the U.S., increasing their risk for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Our pilot individual lifestyle intervention culturally tailored for Mexican Americans, COMIDA (Consumo de Opciones Más Ideales De Alimentos) (Eating More Ideal Food Options), showed promising results. This paper presents outcomes from the group-based version of COMIDA. 129 overweight/obese Mexican Americans were enrolled in 'Group COMIDA'. Participants' weight (primary outcome), dietary intake and nutrition knowledge (secondary outcomes) were assessed pre- and post-intervention. Seventeen percent of participants experienced 5% weight loss at follow-up. Post-intervention, participants consumed more fruit and vegetables and fewer sweets and fried foods. A group-based, culturally adapted lifestyle intervention may be a more cost-effective approach than individual interventions to improve dietary behavior among underserved populations, though additional modifications may be considered to increase the intervention's effectiveness in promoting significant weight loss.

“Es Muy Tranquilo Aquí”: Perceptions of Safety and Calm among Binationally Mobile Mexican Immigrants in a Rural Border Community

Perceptions of community can play an important role in determining health and well-being. We know little, however, about residents’ perceptions of community safety in the Southwestern borderlands, an area frequently portrayed as plagued by disorder. The qualitative aim of this community-based participatory research study was to explore the perceptions of Mexican-origin border residents about their communities in southern Yuma County, Arizona. Our team of University of Arizona researchers and staff from Campesinos Sin Fronteras, a grassroots farmworker support agency in Yuma County, Arizona, developed a bilingual interview guide and recruited participants through radio adds, flyers, and cold calls among existing agency clientele. Thirty individual interviews with participants of Mexican origin who live in and/or work in rural Yuma County were conducted remotely in 2021. Participants overwhelmingly perceived their communities as both calm and safe. While some participants mentioned safety concerns, the vast majority described high levels of personal security and credited both neighbors and police for ensuring local safety. These perceptions were stated in direct contrast to those across the border, where participants had positive familial and cultural ties but negative perceptions regarding widespread violence. In conclusion, we argue that to understand environmental factors affecting health and well-being in Mexican immigrant populations, it is critical to examine the role of binational external referents that color community perceptions.

Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora

What does studying visual and print representations of Mexican masculinity in flux/transit do for scholars of Bracero-era and twentieth-century Mexican and US pasts? Historians such as Deborah Cohen, Lori Flores, and Mireya Loza have reshaped our understanding of the lives of Braceros, bringing gendered explorations to some of the millions of Mexican men who arrived to the United States after the Second World War for labor. Nicole Guidotti-Hernández's Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora continues those conversations, injecting a critical examination of intimacy, belonging, and masculinity through photographs and private archives. Moreover, the author inserts the necessary theme of diaspora into her study and states that scholars must consider “how the interstitial experience of being between nations as diasporic subjects created opportunities for new manifestations of gender” (p. 21).This “feminist cultural transnational history” utilizes archives in Washington, DC, the US Southwest, and Mexico to consider how Mexican men—some migrants and others political exiles—grappled with race and gender over the course of the twentieth century (p. 4). What makes this analysis singular is how the author seeks to illuminate gender transformations, contending that scholars must reflect upon the gender of Mexican men through “transnational masculine intimacies,” which highlight the role of emotional bonds between these men and their transnational kin networks (p. 5). Within two sections and fourteen chapters, Guidotti-Hernández's book reshapes our understandings of Mexican gender and race, which scholars in women, gender, and sexuality studies and American studies will want to read.If cultural historian Gail Bederman asks scholars to consider manhood as a gender script that changes in relation to new experiences, Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora shows us how gender and masculinities need to be studied not just in context, but over space and time. Furthermore, Guidotti-Hernández maintains that scholars must attend to how Mexican men's relation to gender was precarious, and that “fragility was a function of the intimacies that” migrant men forged to help make sense of their racial, social, and political statuses in the United States. (p. 2). If the author contends that scholars must study gender and intimacy in both space and time, then the organization of the book must include different objects of study over time in different locales, which it does. The first half of the monograph traces cultural objects regarding the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) and Enrique Flores Magón, while the second section explores configurations of emotion through examining photographs at Leonard Nadel's Bracero archive at the Smithsonian (p. 5).My favorite part of Guidotti-Hernández's second monograph is her study of queerness and alienation in the photographs of Braceros within the Leonard Nadel Collection. Through a series of pictures taken of faceless Braceros picking lettuce in Salinas, Guidotti-Hernández contemplates the relation between Mexican migrants and the food crops they cultivate in a space where Braceros are removed transnationally from family. The author asks the reader to consider the nuance of the relationships between Mexican migrant men. While she determines that Braceros may not have had social and political overlap with the Anglo gay domesticity of the US- or Mexico-based middle-class and upper-class homophile movement, one thing was certain: “they were parallel experiences that idealized friendship and intimacy among and between men” (p. 223). I think this is important, as further studies of Braceros should consider how race, gender, and sexuality shaped these homosocial spaces.Guidotti-Hernández's visual analysis of the Nadel Collection is masterful. Yet, although I appreciated her insertion of queer possibilities to help the reader rethink masculinities in diaspora, I also wanted to learn more about the histories of the men in the photographs. Flores's Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement utilizes not just photography, but also Monterey County newspaper and print media stories that piece together how Braceros encountered racial discrimination, worker exploitation, and everyday life in central California. I think that paring both monographs would demonstrate how a critical investigation of how Bracero men forged intimacy and friendship alongside how photographers and the state viewed Braceros.

Deportes: The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora

In mainstream US sporting discourse, the contributions of Mexicans and Mexican Americans are often ignored or underappreciated, whether as participants, fans, or journalists. In this work, José M. Alamillo examines the multidirectional development of the Mexican diasporic sporting culture that permeated both sides of the US-Mexico border in the first half of the twentieth century and continues to wield a significant impact on US sporting culture today.Deportes centers on the transnational development of Mexican sporting culture in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Alamillo focuses on the Mexican diaspora, also known in some intellectual circles as “Greater Mexico,” and how “Mexican origin” (3) athletes made use of their transnational networks to assert their dignity and place in a US society that often rejected and othered them as “brown.” These connections were bidirectional, however, as the Mexican government realized the potential of reaching out to México de afuera to develop the sports culture within Mexico. In the introduction, Alamillo clearly lays out his five foci, which include the role of US imperialism in creating a Mexican diaspora, the ways in which sports engendered solidarity and pathways to political power for ethnic Mexicans, the importance of understanding the role of the “brown” racial category within US sporting discourse, the impact of gender, and how hybridity helped create a Mexican diasporic sporting identity in the United States. Furthermore, Alamillo argues that the creation of Mexican American and Mexican identities in the United States were “simultaneous rather than sequential” (10).To substantiate his argument, Alamillo relies on meticulous research framed by a thorough investigation of the scholarly literature on Mexican sport, Mexican American sport and politics, US racial relations, and diaspora and identity. In addition, he has scoured several English- and Spanish-language periodicals from the United States and Mexico and employs archival evidence from the US National Archives and Records Administration, the Mexican Archivo General de la Nación, as well as smaller archives and private collections. This myriad of evidence results in a nuanced analysis that incorporates several perspectives on the creation of a Mexican sporting diaspora.Alamillo documents this process through an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. The first chapter centers on the development of “modern” sporting culture in Mexico and the use of sport to “Americanize” “problematic” Mexican immigrants up to the 1920s, with a particular focus on the YMCA and the Spanish-language press in both the United States and Mexico. The second chapter focuses on boxing in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the exploits of Bert Colima, Baby Arizmendi, and Rodolfo Casanova. The immigration issues the latter two encountered provide a completely new understanding of how race impacted ethnic Mexican sporting celebrity in the 1930s. Chapter 3 focuses on the development of a hybrid baseball culture among ethnic Mexicans in the 1920s and 1930s that included attempts to create cross-border solidarity and highlights women's agency through creating their own baseball teams. Chapters 4 and 5 both examine transnational outreach by governmental agencies, with the former analyzing attempts by the Mexican government to build a relationship with the Mexican Athletic Association of Southern California in the 1930s and early 1940s and the latter centering on the US Office of Inter-American Affairs’ efforts to promote sports like American football in Mexico in the 1940s. Chapter 6 examines Mexican American efforts to battle juvenile delinquency, build diasporic ties, and frame a civil rights agenda through sport during and after World War II.The strengths of this book are its thorough research, clear organization, accessible writing style, and balanced approach to the topic at hand. As a result, it offers a picture of Mexican diasporic sporting culture that incorporates the perspectives of sporting bureaucrats, political leaders, celebrity athletes, and lesser-known athletes, including women and youth. The analysis is further infused with a personal touch, as each chapter begins with a biography of a Mexican-origin sports figure or a personal anecdote, such as the author's experiences betting on boxing matches with his family or living through Fernandomania (the hoopla surrounding the exploits of Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela) in the early 1980s. These stories provide some background as to how the author can wade through Mexican American and Mexican historical processes so effortlessly. In addition, he draws special attention to women's participation, particularly in baseball and boxing, portraying them as active agents even if they faced significant racial and gender discrimination.Deportes is the product of an experienced and impassioned historian in tune with current trends in sport historiography. It is essential reading for anyone interested in sport, Mexican, Chicanx/Latinx, or US history and would work well if assigned in undergraduate and graduate courses on those subjects.

Wage inequality of Mexican immigrants by type of job qualification in the United States

The objective of this research is to analyze the characteristics of the labor market insertion of Mexicans by type of qualification and their wage differences in relation to native workers in the United States. The hypothesis is that there is a wage inequality between Mexican migrant workers and native workers, accentuated among skilled workers, due to a segmentation of the U.S. labor market. The methodology used to analyze each of the components that add up to the wage gap between Mexican and native workers is the Ñopo decomposition. The results showed the opposite of what is established by the human capital theory since the wage difference between Mexicans immigrants and natives by type of job qualification is mostly unexplainable from a statistical point of view and escapes modeling. This means that having citizenship and education does not eliminate the differences between Mexicans and natives. This allows us to accept the hypothesis, except in the case of low-skilled Mexican immigrants, since they have a wage differential in their favor.

Ecofascism: An Examination of the Far-Right/Ecology Nexus in the Online Space

ABSTRACT With Patrick Crusuis’ 2019 attack that killed twenty-two people in El Paso, Texas, discussions of ecofascism were thrust into mainstream news outlets and magazines. In his manifesto, Crusius described himself as an “ecofascist” seeking to challenge the “environmental warfare” of immigration. His choice of target, a Walmart frequented by Mexican immigrants, reflects this ideological connection between ecological priorities and violent white supremacist ideology. In this paper, the authors provide a review of existing theoretical literature on ecofascism to identify its key characteristics, namely, its Romantic sensibilities, anti-humanism, and mysticism. The authors argue that these features distinguish ecofascism from what other scholars have deemed “far-right ecologisms.” Following this, the authors draw on a larger corpus of data gathered from Twitter and Telegram between November 2019 and November 2020 to identify common themes in ecofascist circles, including the thinkers they frequently cite. The dataset examined shows notable differences in the types of content shared in ecofascist groups compared to the far-right more broadly.

How Mexicans' Emotional Responses to Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease Can Help Inform Culturally Congruent Health Care.

This article aims to increase understanding of how Mexican immigrants respond to learning about non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), a spectrum disease with a heavy burden among Mexican-origin people. This article presents findings from qualitative interviews (n = 26) that formed part of a mixed-methods study of foreign-born Mexican immigrants carried out in 2019 to 2020 in southern Arizona to assess NAFLD awareness. We documented common experiences of surprise, fear, and hope during study participation, all of which motivated research participants to reduce their NAFLD risk by seeking additional information, sharing it with others, and making lifestyle changes. Understanding how these emotional experiences are tied to cultural and historical factors-including Mexico's high rates of liver disease, participant's limited access to health care, and the ability to address the NAFLD risk with lifestyle changes-may promote the development of more effective and culturally congruent care in this population.

The Business Ownership Patterns of Undocumented Immigrants in the United States: An Exploratory Study

When debating the effect of undocumented immigrants on the economy, scholars often presume that undocumented immigrants are wage laborers rather than business owners. This study imputes the legal status of Mexican and Central American immigrants (MCAs) in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) between 1996 and 2008 to evaluate how legal status affects business ownership patterns. From 1996 to 2008, the SIPP asked a series of questions about business ownership and migration history that make it uniquely suited to an investigation of undocumented MCA business owners. Instrumental variables regressions reveal that undocumented immigrants had a lower likelihood of owning a business than documented immigrants, but undocumented and documented business owners derived similar incomes from their businesses. A lack of legal status may hold back potential entrepreneurs. MCA business owners of both legal statuses clustered into similar low-paying, low-growth industries, however, so regardless of legal status, there are likely limits to how much business ownership can promote economic mobility among MCAs. All told, scholars should do more to acknowledge the existence of undocumented immigrant business owners, measure their impact on the economy, and examine their influence on immigrant incorporation patterns.

People in Cold Storage: The Cruel Limbos of Historical and Current Detainees in the United States

People in Cold Storage:The Cruel Limbos of Historical and Current Detainees in the United States Lori A. Flores (bio) Elliott Young, Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xi + 280 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 The Oxford definition of limbo is "an uncertain period of awaiting a decision or resolution" or "a state of neglect or oblivion." Some synonyms are: unfinished, incomplete, suspended, put off, on ice, in cold storage, abandoned, forgotten. In the realm of immigration, the word and act of deportation have a sense of decisiveness to them. Yet half a million people are detained in the U.S. every year, and the conditions of detention are much more mysterious and liminal, and intentionally designed to be so (p. 18). In Forever Prisoners, Elliott Young homes in on case studies of communal and individual detention in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. He seeks to prove how the country's two vast systems of policing and immigrant detention have been inextricably linked during this entire time period, and not just in recent decades. Over the centuries, the United States has used different places to incarcerate immigrants—prisons, islands, insane asylums, hastily-constructed camps—and maintained an historical and consistent concern about detaining foreigners to the point that "[r]oughly the same proportion of immigrants were deprived of their liberty then as now" (p. 7). Young's book joins other recent works that tie carceral history and immigration history together, including Adam Goodman's The Deportation Machine (2020), Laura Briggs's Taking Children (2020), Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz's Boats, Borders, and Bases (2018), and Kelly Lytle-Hernández's City of Inmates (2017). Structurally, through "select granular experiences of detention" that cross time, space, and different foreign populations, Young shows readers how America "built the world's largest system for imprisoning immigrants" (p. 3). Beginning in the late nineteenth century at the height of anti-Chinese violence and xenophobia, the U.S. government held hundreds of Chinese people in federal prisons off the coast of Washington State, with unpredictable waits [End Page 217] before their deportations. Meanwhile, on the East Coast during the early twentieth century, the intertwined medical pathologization and criminalization of immigrants made insane asylums, hospitals, and "charitable" institutions the new detention centers for thousands of foreigners. Then, during World War II, the U.S. abducted "enemy aliens" from Latin America and Europe and placed them in immigrant detention/labor camps in Texas and New Mexico. The 1980s brought waves of darker-skinned and poorer refugees from the Caribbean, and the U.S. government held over 125,000 Cubans and 23,000 Haitians, prolonging determination on their cases to examine their criminal histories. A confluence of factors in the 1990s—greater militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, governmental expansion of the range of crimes for which immigrants could be deported, and courts' hyper-punishment of low-level offenses—amplified what Juliet Stumpf has termed "crimmigration," or the merging of criminal and immigration law in America (p. 12). With local police now given federal powers to arrest and detain immigrants, millions of people live, work, and parent in fear of being apprehended every day. Ending with the case of a Central American woman haunted by a crime in her California youth that triggered her deportation a decade later and the separation from her U.S.-born children, Young illustrates the plight of numerous mixed-immigration-status families in America. Chapter One drops readers two miles off the coast of Tacoma, Washington on McNeil Island, a territorial jail that opened in 1875 with just three prisoners but soon became "the western birthplace of immigrant incarceration" (p. 24). Angel Island has received more scholarly attention, but unauthorized Chinese, Mexican, Canadian, and other immigrants were sent to McNeil for several decades. The island joined a nationwide network of carceral institutions (jails, workhouses, prisons) that held a disproportionate population of foreigners at the turn of the twentieth century. By the 1920s, Young observes, illegal entry had fallen away as the primary recorded violation for immigrants in favor of...

More than just an immigrant: The semantic patterns of (im)migrant/predicate-pairings in news stories about Mexican and Central American (im)migrants to the USA. A corpus-assisted discourse study

In this paper we explore how some of the largest US-newspapers linguistically frame immigrants to the USA in articles about Mexican and Central American immigrants. Specifically, it is a corpus-assisted discourse study which examines the frequency of different semantic predicate-types with (im)migrant subjects and (im)migrant by-agents in the quest for underlying positive or negative biases. We wish to ascertain what activities (im)migrants are presented as taking part in, principally as agents. The analysis shows that more than half of the (im)migrant/predicate-pairings reflect the dictionary definitions of (im)migrant. However, immigrants are described as illegal 66% of the times that their location is mentioned with an immigrant/predicate-pairing. The non-definition-confirming pairings also show evidence of a negative framing of immigrants, but not of migrants. Furthermore, immigrants are more often than migrants cast as agents of activities that do not simply reiterate their status as (im)migrants. Finally, we found evidence of the Negation Bias in the immigrant/predicate-pairings.

Perceptions of the Coronavirus and COVID-19 testing and vaccination in Latinx and Indigenous Mexican immigrant communities in the Eastern Coachella Valley

BackgroundA novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 (known as COVID-19), spread rapidly around the world, affecting all and creating an ongoing global pandemic. Across the United States, Latinx and Indigenous populations have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 cases and death rates. An examination of the perceptions and beliefs about the spread of the virus, COVID-19 testing, and vaccination amongst racial-ethnic minority groups, specifically Latinx and Indigenous Latin American immigrant communities, is needed to alleviate the widespread disparity in new cases and deaths.MethodsThis study was carried out from August 2020 to January 2021 and used community-based participatory research to engage community partners and build the capacity of community health workers (i.e., promotores de salud) and pre-medical and medical students in conducting qualitative research. The objective of the study was to examine the structural and social determinants of health on perceptions of the coronavirus, its spread, and decisions around COVID-19 testing and vaccination. Data collection included ethnography involving observations in public settings and focus groups with members of Latinx and Indigenous Mexican farm-working communities in the Eastern Coachella Valley, located in the Inland Southern California desert region. A total of seven focus groups, six in Spanish and one in Purépecha, with a total of 55 participants were conducted. Topics covered include perceptions of the coronavirus and its spread, as well as COVID-19 testing and vaccination.ResultsUsing theme identification techniques, the findings identify structural and social factors that underly perceptions held by Latinx and Indigenous Mexican immigrants about the virus and COVID-19, which, in turn, shape attitudes and behaviors related to COVID-19 testing and vaccination. Common themes that emerged across focus groups include misinformation, lack of trust in institutions, and insecurity around employment and residency.ConclusionsThis immigrant population is structurally vulnerable to historical and present-day inequalities that put them at increased risk of COVID-19 exposure, morbidity, and mortality. Study findings indicate a significant need for interventions that decrease structural vulnerabilities by addressing issues of (dis)trust in government and public health among this population.

A Study of a Culturally and Contextually Situated Multimedia Approach to Recruit a Hard-to-Reach Spanish-Speaking Population for a Randomized Control Trial (RCT).

Study designs involving randomization can be difficult to communicate to participants, especially those with low literacy. The literature on strategies to explain research concepts is limited, especially for non-English speakers. We measured the effectiveness of a culturally and contextually situated multimedia approach to recruit a cohort of 60 female Mexican immigrants (FMI) to a randomized control trial (RCT) to reduce social isolation and depression. This strategy was designed to explain the concept of randomization, explain what participating in the research study entailed, and ensure informed consent. Potential participants viewed a presentation explaining the study and a video including animation with voice-over explaining the concept of randomization. We administered a pre/post survey. Respondents (N = 59) reported an increase in their understanding of randomization, intention to enroll, and attitude towards participating in research. We conclude that a culturally and contextually situated multimedia approach is an effective model when recruiting underrepresented populations with low literacy for RCTs.

Age at Arrival and Depression among Mexican Immigrant Women in Alabama: The Moderating Role of Culture.

Mexican-born women in the U.S. are at high risk of depression. While acculturation is the primary analytical framework used to study immigrant mental health, this research suffers from (1) a lack of specificity regarding how cultural models of living and being take shape among migrants converging in new destinations in the U.S., and (2) methods to empirically capture the impact of cultural positioning on individual health outcomes. Instead of relying on proxy measures of age at arrival and time in the U.S. to indicate where an individual is located on the acculturation spectrum, this study uses cultural consensus analysis to derive the substance and structure of a cultural model for la buena vida (the good life) among Mexican immigrant women in Birmingham, Alabama, and then assesses the extent to which respondents are aligned with the model in their everyday lives. This measure of ‘cultural consonance’ is explored as a moderating variable between age at arrival in the U.S. and number of depressive symptoms. Results demonstrate that for those who arrived at an older age, those with lower consonance are at the highest risk for depression, while those who are more aligned with la buena vida are at lower risk.