Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses how Central American women become "good" mothers while navigating maternal health policy and migration status in the USA; while speaking to themes of forced migration, maternal decision-making practices, and the precarity of life for migrants with liminal legal statuses.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation, I will discuss the ways in which Central American women become "good" mothers while they navigate their role as migrants in the United States of America. As defined by Biehl and Locke (2010; 2017:4), "becoming" acknowledges the ability of people to transform themselves and their lives through small, mundane acts of resistance to multiple systems of oppression. For this analysis, I use the anthropology of becoming as a lens to view the daily, incremental actions of individual control that Central American migrant women take as they move within the larger political economy of the state in order to access maternal healthcare and become "good" mothers. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles, I discuss the ways in which California uses maternal healthcare policy to frame levels of belonging for undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. Further, I analyze the production and circulation of maternal healthcare information, with a focus on how Central American migrant women access, utilize and readapt this information to better fit their lives. Lastly, I explore the ways in which migrant women perform cultural citizenship and acts of resistance as they concurrently navigate the asylum and maternal health systems. Through the ways in which migrant women reframe their conceptions of "good" maternal care and motherhood to fit their precarious lives in the USA, broader themes of forced female migration, maternal decision-making practices, and the precarity of life for migrants with liminal legal statuses can be further examined.