Global South cosmopolitans: the opening and closing of the USA–Mexico border for Mexican tourists

The US government has simultaneously increased efforts to close its border to unauthorized migrants, and opened the border to increasing flows of tourists from Mexico. In this paper I focus on the experiences of Mexican tourists who are able to freely cross the USA–Mexico border with US visas, given that their unique status as tourists from Mexico is an important element to consider because it organizes their daily lives, their moral understandings, and their experiences across the USA–Mexico border. I show how Global South cosmopolitans from Mexico benefit from class privilege in Mexico, but become legally vulnerable in the USA due to their racialization as Mexicans and lack of citizenship rights. This paper draws on ethnographic data and in-depth interviews collected in the border town of Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico between July 2009 and August 2010.     

Capitalism and US policy at the Mexican border

Does US policy at the Mexican border—heavily weighted toward immigration and drug law enforcement—help the capitalist system function in North America, and if so, how? And if not, what are the most likely drivers of such policies, and how do they interact with the capitalist context? Four topics are examined: inequalities of rights to border crossing into the United States from Mexico, and the role of such unequal mobility in the maintenance of various privileges in North America; a puzzle in capitalist–functionalist border policy–underinvestment in ports of entry compared to enforcement between such ports; enforcement against unauthorized migrants seen both as labor control and discriminatory politics; and border enforcement and militarization as a system of regional repression and control, addressed at the rapidly growing and important US–Mexico border region. The relationship between US border policies and the functional needs of capitalism is complex, not simple; the article rejects a perfect system view in favor of a richer view of capitalism as filled with contradictory social impulses and political outcomes, shaped in broad contexts of class relations and capital accumulation. The wider context of this essay is the question of how the territorial nation-state relates to capitalism, two fundamental features of our era. Some preliminary thoughts on that question are broached in the conclusion.     

American travel deaths in Mexico. Causes and prevention strategies.

About 3 to 4 million Americans travel to Mexico every year, yet their mortality experience has never been analyzed. Fatalities among US travelers to Mexico during the years 1975 and 1984 were examined using a previously unanalyzed data source. The leading cause of death to all US travelers to Mexico was injuries (51%), with 18% of deaths resulting from motor vehicle crashes. Of all travelers'' deaths, 37% were due to circulatory diseases and less than 1% were due to infectious diseases. While the proportion of all deaths from motor vehicle crashes was similar for US citizens traveling in Mexico and US residents, travelers had significantly higher proportions of injury deaths due to aircraft crashes and drowning. Injury, rather than infectious diseases, appears to pose the greatest risk of death to travelers to Mexico. Physicians and travel clinics need to place greater emphasis on injury prevention when giving advice to clients traveling to Mexico.     

The context of return migration: challenges of mixed-status families in Mexico's schools

As a result of US immigration and enforcement policies, Mexico has experienced the arrival of mixed-status families coming from the USA. We examine these families’ experiences of return to central Mexico through the lens of a ‘context of return’, by focusing on how the Mexican government, particularly schools, has received returned migrants. Based on in-depth interviews with thirteen mixed-status families who returned to Mexico in 2005–2010, we show how the citizenship and legal status of the various family members determine their incorporation in Mexico. As these legal statuses are shaped by both the US context of reception and the Mexican context of return, we argue that the two contexts are intimately related and shape the contours of the families and their incorporation upon their return.     

Genetic admixture, self-reported ethnicity, self-estimated admixture, and skin pigmentation among Hispanics and Native Americans

The relationship between ethnicity and biology is of interest to anthropologists, biomedical scientists, and historians in understanding how human groups are constructed. Ethnic self-identification in recently admixed groups such as Hispanics, African Americans, and Native Americans (NA) is likely to be complex due to the heterogeneity in individual admixture proportions and social environments within these groups. This study examines the relationships between self-identified ethnicity, self-estimated admixture proportions, skin pigmentation, and genetic marker estimated admixture proportions. These measures were assessed using questionnaires, skin color measurements, and genotyping of a panel of 76 ancestry informative markers, among 170 Hispanics and NAs from New Mexico, a state known for its complex history of interactions between people of NA and European (EU) ancestry. Results reveal that NAs underestimate their degree of EU admixture, and that Hispanics underestimate their degree of NA admixture. Within Hispanics, genetic-marker estimated admixture is better predicted by forehead skin pigmentation than by self-estimated admixture. We also find that Hispanic individuals self-identified as "half-White, half Hispanic" and "Spanish" have lower levels of NA admixture than those self-identified as "Mexican" and "Mexican American." Such results highlight the interplay between culture and biology in how individuals identify and view themselves, and have implications for how ethnicity and disease risk are assessed in a medical setting.     

Informational returnees: deportation,digital media,and the making of a transnational cybertariat in the Mexican call center industry

In recent years, the US government has intensified the deportation of undocumented Mexican migrants, some of them with long life trajectories in the USA. With weak family networks in their communities of origin and sometimes none at all, many deportees choose to stay in cities along the US-Mexico border, joining the army of underpaid, low-skilled, and informal urban workers. Some take advantage of their transnational experience to earn a better income; within this context, the call center industry is an economic sector that profits from the language facility and sociocultural skills deported populations bring with them from their years spent living in the USA. This paper addresses the working conditions among call center workers in Mexico, with a focus in Tijuana City in the Mexican Northwest. In particular, I explore how migration, deportation, and call center labor produces what I call informational return, a process in which the convergence of culture, deportation, and digital media plays a key role in the constitution of a transnational digital worker.     

Does bone mineralization reflect economic conditions? An examination using a national US sample

BACKGROUND: Bone density is the most important determinant of osteoporotic fractures, which lead to significant morbidity, disability and mortality for older persons, particularly women. Sensitive periods for bone mineralization in infancy, childhood and adolescence overlap with those for height attainment. After peak density is reached in early adulthood, there is age-related decline. We ask whether bone density, as height, reflects economic conditions. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Using the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a probability sample of the US population which over-sampled Blacks and Mexican Americans, we examine the associations between adult bone mineral content (BMC) adjusted for bone and body size and three economic indicators: education, height and the poverty income ratio (PIR). We compare four groups: US-born Whites, Blacks and Mexican Americans and Mexican-born Mexican Americans. RESULTS: Education is positively associated with BMC only for White women, although there are similar, non-significant associations for Black women and White and Black men. For women, BMC is more strongly associated with height for Mexican Americans, especially the Mexican-born, than for Whites. For men, the only significant association is a negative one with education for men born in Mexico. PIR is not significantly associated with BMC, although there is pattern of lower income being associated with lower BMC for Whites and Blacks and higher BMC for Mexican Americans. CONCLUSION: Bone density does not reflect economic conditions as strongly or consistently as does physical stature. However, for women there is evidence that lower economic status in childhood or adolescence is associated with lower bone density.     

Export agriculture,transnational farmworkers,and labor resistance in the Mexico–US borderlands

This article discusses the system of export agriculture in northern Mexico and its impact on transnational farmworkers employed in both sides of the US–Mexico border. Since the late 1990s, a transnational industry producing fresh produce for consumer markers in the USA has taken hold in the San Quintin Valley in Baja California, transforming the economic and social fabric of this border region. This industry has generated a new labor regime predicated upon the employment of a flexible and cheap source of indigenous workers from the poorest states in southern Mexico. I examine the contours of this regime, the forms of labor resistance it has elicited, and the new types of labor migration it has generated by Mexican workers to the USA. As I show, indigenous farm laborers engage in novel forms of labor and political protests to claim for their rights. These developments, I argue, speak of the class formation of transnational farmworkers who, mobilizing local and transnationally, combine traditional labor demands with wider claims for their civil and political rights.     

The role and meaning of susto in Mexican Americans' explanatory model of type 2 diabetes

This article examines the role and meaning of susto (fright) in Mexican Americans' explanatory model (EM) of type 2 diabetes. This analysis is based on a study of the health beliefs about type 2 diabetes mellitus among Mexican Americans living in El Paso County, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border. Susto was described as an event that could change the bodily state, causing a susceptible person to be more vulnerable to the onset of type 2 diabetes after some unspecified time. The study results illustrate the integration of multiple etiologies into Mexican Americans' EMs of diabetes and illustrate how the environment affects the way in which these explanations are manifested. Acculturation of biomedical system beliefs into the traditional Mexican health belief system has resulted in a synthesis of both systems and a blending of the participants' explanation of type 2 diabetes.     

Access to health services for immigrants in the USA: from the Great Society to the 2010 Health Reform Act and after

Abstract

Over the last fifty years the nature of the provision and financing of health services, and the composition of the foreign-born population in the USA have both evolved significantly. The rapid growth of Mexican immigration in the last fifteen years has created new challenges. Ironically, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, the sweeping legislation designed to ensure that almost all Americans can obtain health insurance, may reduce access to care for many immigrants by isolating them from the general, formerly uninsured, population. Bi-national and cross-border initiatives between the USA and Mexico along the lines of some developments in Europe are worth encouraging to help ease the current and future barriers to health care for immigrants.     

Performing the Nation: Unauthorized Mexican Migration and the Politics of Language Use and the Body along the US–Mexico Border

ABSTRACT

Given the harsh environment for Mexican migrants in the US state of Arizona, migrants must think carefully about instantiating their identities in White public space through clothing, bodily movements, and language. This article explores the ways some unauthorized Mexican migrants in Arizona perform belonging to the USA by performing Chicano. Performing Chicano means passing as a US citizen, and migrants’ well-being can depend upon the recognition of those performances. Other unauthorized migrants perform the Supermexicana, to pass as Mexicans who are shopping in the USA, and need to hide the fact that they clandestinely live there. This article examines how some migrants perform a commitment to the USA in public while privately disavowing it, and how others perform a commitment to Mexico that they simply cannot have. This analysis argues that the experiences of unauthorized migrants in the USA can be productively seen through the lens of national performativity.     

Contraceptive sterilization: A comparison of Mexican‐Americans and Anglos living in U.S. counties bordering Mexico

Abstract

Prior to the U.S.‐Mexico Border Survey of Maternal and Child Health and Family Planning conducted by the Centers for Disease Control in 1979, little information was available about the extent to which Mexican‐Americans in the U.S., relative to Anglos, were using male and female sterilization for contraceptive reasons. This paper compares Mexican‐Americans and Anglos for (a) prevalence of contraceptive sterilization; (b) social and demographic characteristics of users of contraceptive sterlization; and (c) tuning during the reproductive life cycle when contraceptive sterilization occurs. For both Mexican‐Americans and Anglos, contraceptive sterilization (male and female) was the second most prevalent method used. Anglos were more likely to use male than female sterilization (22.4 per cent and 19.5 per cent), while Mexican‐Americans were much more likely to use female than male sterilization (23.2 per cent and 5.8 per cent). Having an unwanted last live birth and/or high parity were important factors related to the use of female sterilization for both Mexican‐Americans and Anglos.     

Differential Impact of Obesity in Related Populations

To search for genetic and environmental determinants of obesity, we compared the prevalences and the impact of obesity in three populations from two cities: Mexican Amcricans (n=820) and non-Hispanic whites (n=1112)from San Antonio, Texas, and Mexicans from Mexico City (n= 1878). In the age range examined, 35–64 years, only Mexican men and women showed a significant increase in the prevalence of obesity with age. On the other hand, genetic ancestry, especially in women, made significant differences in the rates of obesity. Mexican Americans showed relatively high, and non-Hispanic whites low, rates of obesity. To discriminate between genetic and environmental influences mediating the impact of obesity on a set of hemodynamic and metabolic variables, we compared this impact between Mexican Americans and both non-Hispanic whites (same macro-environment, different gene pools), and Mexicans (same gene pool, different environments). We found that obesity always worsens the hemodynamic and metabolic profiles of individuals, but the magnitude of the effects may be variable. We showed that the levels of insulin concentrations for a given level of obesity were similar in Mexicans and Mexican Americans, suggesting that genetic influences predominate in determining insulin levels; the levels of triglycerides and HDL for a given level of obesity were similar in Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites, suggesting predominant environmental influences on lipid levels. On the other hand, the levels of glucose and systolic blood pressure for a given level of obesity were usually different between Mexican Americans and either of the other two populations, suggesting that these levels may result from genotype-by-environment interactions.     

Mexican Americans as a paradigm for contemporary intra-group heterogeneity

Abstract

Racialization and assimilation offer alternative perspectives on the position of immigrant-origin populations in American society. We question the adequacy of either perspective alone in the early twenty-first century, taking Mexican Americans as our case in point. Re-analysing the child sample of the Mexican American Study Project, we uncover substantial heterogeneity marked by vulnerability to racialization at one end but proximity to the mainstream at the other. This heterogeneity reflects important variations in how education, intermarriage, mixed ancestry and geographic mobility have intersected for Mexican immigrants and their descendants over the twentieth century, and in turn shaped their ethnic identity. Finally, based on US census findings, we give reason to think that internal heterogeneity is increasing in the twenty-first century. Together, these findings suggest that future studies of immigrant adaptation in America must do a better job of accounting for heterogeneity, not just between but also within immigrant-origin populations.     

Population structure and genetic diversity of New World maize races assessed by DNA microsatellites

Because of the economic importance of maize and its scientific importance as a model system for studies of domestication, its evolutionary history is of general interest. We analyzed the population genetic structure of maize races by genotyping 964 individual plants, representing almost the entire set of ～350 races native to the Americas, with 96 microsatellites. Using Bayesian clustering, we detected four main clusters consisting of highland Mexican, northern United States (US), tropical lowland, and Andean races. Phylogenetic analysis indicated that the southwestern US was an intermediary stepping stone between Mexico and the northern US. Furthermore, southeastern US races appear to be of mixed northern flint and tropical lowland ancestry, while lowland middle South American races are of mixed Andean and tropical lowland ancestry. Several cases of post-Columbian movement of races were detected, most notably from the US to South America. Of the four main clusters, the highest genetic diversity occurs in highland Mexican races, while diversity is lowest in the Andes and northern US. Isolation by distance appears to be the main factor underlying the historical diversification of maize. We identify highland Mexico and the Andes as potential sources of genetic diversity underrepresented among elite lines used in maize breeding programs.     

Y-chromosome diversity in Native Mexicans reveals continental transition of genetic structure in the Americas

The genetic characterization of Native Mexicans is important to understand multiethnic based features influencing the medical genetics of present Mexican populations, as well as to the reconstruct the peopling of the Americas. We describe the Y-chromosome genetic diversity of 197 Native Mexicans from 11 populations and 1,044 individuals from 44 Native American populations after combining with publicly available data. We found extensive heterogeneity among Native Mexican populations and ample segregation of Q-M242* (46%) and Q-M3 (54%) haplogroups within Mexico. The northernmost sampled populations falling outside Mesoamerica (Pima and Tarahumara) showed a clear differentiation with respect to the other populations, which is in agreement with previous results from mtDNA lineages. However, our results point toward a complex genetic makeup of Native Mexicans whose maternal and paternal lineages reveal different narratives of their population history, with sex-biased continental contributions and different admixture proportions. At a continental scale, we found that Arctic populations and the northernmost groups from North America cluster together, but we did not find a clear differentiation within Mesoamerica and the rest of the continent, which coupled with the fact that the majority of individuals from Central and South American samples are restricted to the Q-M3 branch, supports the notion that most Native Americans from Mesoamerica southwards are descendants from a single wave of migration. This observation is compatible with the idea that present day Mexico might have constituted an area of transition in the diversification of paternal lineages during the colonization of the Americas.     

On euthanasia: exploring psychological meaning and attitudes in a sample of Mexican physicians and medical students

Euthanasia has become the subject of ethical and political debate in many countries including Mexico. Since many physicians are deeply concerned about euthanasia, due to their crucial participation in its decision and implementation, it is important to know the psychological meaning that the term 'euthanasia' has for them, as well as their attitudes toward this practice. This study explores psychological meaning and attitudes toward euthanasia in 546 Mexican subjects, either medical students or physicians, who were divided into three groups: a) beginning students, b) advanced students, and c) physicians. We used the semantic networks technique, which analyzed the words the participants associated with the term 'euthanasia'. Positive psychological meaning, as well as positive attitudes, prevailed among advanced students and physicians when defining euthanasia, whereas both positive and negative psychological meaning together with more ambivalent attitudes toward euthanasia predominated in beginning students. The findings are discussed in the context of a current debate on a bill proposing active euthanasia in Mexico City.     

Financial Strain, Religious Involvement, and Life Satisfaction Among Older Mexican Americans

The purpose of this study is to see if financial strain affects the religious involvement and life satisfaction of older Mexican Americans. In the process, an effort was made to explore the factors that promote financial strain in this ethnic group, including immigration status and English language use. The data come from a nationwide survey of older Mexican Americans. Support was found for the following core relationships in the study model: (1) older adults who were born in Mexico will have less schooling; (2) less education will be associated with less frequent use of English; (3) less frequent use of English will be associated with greater financial strain; (4) greater financial strain leads to less formal involvement in the church; (5) older people who are less involved in the church will have a diminished sense of religious meaning; and (6) older adults with a lower sense of religious meaning will be less satisfied with life.     

The biological standard of living in 19th century Mexico and in the American West

During the mid-19th century, the United States acquired Texas and large parts of Mexican territory with the vast Mexican-born population. This paper considers the biological standard of living of the part of this population that was incarcerated in American prisons. We use their physical stature as a proxy for their biological welfare. These data confirm earlier results which showed that adult heights tended to stagnate in Mexico during the late-19th century despite considerable social and political turmoil. While there is some evidence of a decline in height among youth, the decline is slight (<1 cm). As in other 19th century samples, farmers were the tallest. Americans were taller than Mexican prisoners by about 2 cm.