Paper short abstract:

Clinicians who work with asylum seekers along the Mexico-US border face the dual challenge of the refugee crisis and the coronavirus pandemic. I examine their experience of improvisation, attending to basic needs, and rapid development of communications networks.

Paper long abstract:

The first crisis of concern in this paper is the crisis of refugees and asylum seekers at the western edge of the border between the United States and Mexico, where Tijuana and San Diego face one another. Since March of 2020, another crisis has emerged within that crisis – the coronavirus pandemic. The two crises are both highly political and politicized, and I will discuss them from the perspective of our ongoing study entitled “Tracing Asylum Seekers’ Experience and Trajectory” (TASET). Interviews with clinicians who work with asylum seekers show them pivoting to face the challenge in a way that includes improvisation in acquiring medical supplies, attending to basic needs such as food and shelter, and rapid development of communications among governmental, non-governmental, and university groups amidst the failed national coordination of effective policy and action.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines child and adolescent experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in an already precarious social, political, and economic setting in the U.S.-Mexico border zone.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines child and adolescent experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.- Mexico border zone. We build upon our ongoing longitudinal research study on adolescent mental health at a Southern California middle school where we have been working with students (ages 10-14), their families, and school personnel for the past three years. In an ethnically diverse context where the majority of adolescents live in low-income settings and where many families labor primarily in what has been termed as “essential” workplaces, we recognized the urgent need for ethnographic attention to the mental health impacts of the pandemic in an already precarious social and economic setting. Thus, in accordance with safety protocols, we conducted follow-up interviews over the phone and via Zoom with a subset of our adolescent participants and their parents. In this paper, we present the most salient problems raised by adolescents and their families in relation to the pandemic, which notably include fear and insecurity. Recognizing that the pandemic and its sequelae continue, this ongoing study emphasizes the urgent need for ethnographic attention to lived experience and cultural meaning in relation to adolescent mental health and wellbeing, as well as an increased attention to socio-structural adversities that exacerbate mental health challenges in precarious social, political, and economic settings.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores essential services as experienced through the body among Brazilian immigrants from Minas Gerais (Mineiros) in Massachusetts. It does so in a sociopolitical moment and global pandemic that has revealed and exacerbated the risks of this labor, particularly for migrant workers.

Paper long abstract:

The Metro-West, a suburban region of Massachusetts, has among the highest concentration of Brazilian immigrants in the US. It began as a key site for Mineiros, Brazilians born in Minas Gerais, in the 19th century when Portuguese speaking communities from Azores and Portugal migrated to labor in textile mills and cranberry production. In the 1980s, changes in Brazil’s sociopolitical landscape from an authoritarian to a democratic government, high unemployment, and hyperinflation led to the devaluation (desvalorização) of many white-collar professions. Formerly trained Mineiro professionals traded in their dentist coats and briefcases to work in the Massachusetts service sector. Into the present, Mineiros in the Metro-West remain the dominant ethnic minority and are overrepresented in essential services.

In this paper, I explore the experiences of Mineiros who have aspired for a career that they feel they can no longer pursue and work in the service sector. I ask how this reconfiguration of aspiration broadly, and labor in services specifically, is experienced through the body. Considering the body as phenomenologically experienced, I examine how generational shifts in occupation from professions to services invoke reformulations in gender, race, and class and related changes in occupational mental health. In this way, my paper asks how the service sector, what is often termed “affective” or “immaterial” labor, becomes experienced through and marked onto the body and how it influences embodied experience. It does so in a sociopolitical moment and global pandemic that has revealed and exacerbated the risks of essential services, particularly for migrant workers.

Paper short abstract:

Our research examines responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in rural New England. We have documented shared experiences of vulnerability and attunement to the consequences of economic precarity and social isolation. Countervailing forces have prioritized and protected vulnerable populations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on ongoing research examining responses to the COVID-19 pandemic within health systems and communities in rural New England. Launched in mid-March as the region braced for an expected surge of COVID-19 cases, our research has engaged with participants (N=72) from rural hospitals, primary care clinics, mental health and substance use settings as well as social services, mutual aid groups, and town/city governments to trace in real-time the impact of the pandemic within rural Vermont and New Hampshire. Our research has documented shared experiences of vulnerability and attunement to the consequences of economic precarity and social isolation. Within this context, there is deep concern about increasing mental health needs coupled with an awareness of the fragility of rural health systems to meet these needs. Yet amid such concerns, we have documented a countervailing force that we characterize as a rural ethos -- a constellation of compassion, solidarity, and pragmatism—that manifested in rapid mobilization and the prioritization of vulnerable populations, including the elderly, persons experiencing housing and food insecurity, and those living with mental illness and/or addiction. Robust community efforts were bolstered by strong state-level responses in Vermont whereas the sentiment “we’re on our own,” prevailed in the most rural regions of New Hampshire. We explore the consequences of these divergent policy and cultural responses for health equity and for shaping possibilities for meaningful long-term recovery in rural areas.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines experiences of precarity and care among Latinx immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on how cultural narratives around health disparities have exacerbated social suffering and on innovative policy and programmatic responses that have helped address the crisis.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we compare observations from engaged ethnography and participant observation with Latinx immigrants in Colorado and Oregon during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on lived experiences of structural vulnerability, as well as the ways in which COVID-related disparities have become internalized as stigma and have amplified immigrants’ experiences of stress, anxiety, and “aislamiento,” or isolation. Indeed, Latinx immigrants in the US—especially those without legal status and those in mixed-status families—face a range of exclusions, discourses of blame and (un)deservingness, and forms of precarity that have contributed to disproportionate risk, suffering, and fear as the pandemic has unfolded. At the same time, by laying bare blatant injustices and racist exclusions, the pandemic has prompted some Latinx immigrants in our research and advocacy sites to enact new forms of resistance and contestation. We detail the range of ways which, in efforts to stay healthy and to challenge discriminatory portrayals of themselves as either disease carriers unlikely to heed public health warnings or as “public charges,” they insist upon their own rights, worth, belonging, and dignity. Finally, we conclude by discussing some of the ways in which these two U.S. states—and the health and social service organizations working with Latinx communities within them—have attempted to address coronavirus disparities among Latinx communities, showing how particular approaches can assuage short-term suffering and improve access to healthcare and other social supports, while others may create a new set of barriers to access for already marginalized communities.