Dr. Kirstin Erickson

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Embodying the Borderlands Health Concerns in
Latino and Native American Communities in the
American Southwest

• Dr. Kirstin Erickson
• Department of Anthropology
• University of Arkansas

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(No Transcript)
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Key Health Concerns

• diabetes in borderlands
• heroin epidemic, northern NM
• environment and health concerns

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Paul Farmer

• critical anthropology of structural violence
  (Farmer 200528)
• By what mechanisms, precisely, do social forces
  ranging from poverty to racism become embodied as
  individual experience? (Farmer 200530)

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Cross-border migration

• Bracero Program (1942-1964)
• 1970s-80s
• Mexican economic downturn
• integration
• oil and corn
• neoliberal policy
• la crisis
• 1994 NAFTA
• 2000s maquiladoras closing

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Diabetes on the border

• Three theories (Montoya 2008, 2011)
• social origins
• fetal origins
• thrifty genotype hypothesis
• ecosocial perspective (Montoya 2011)

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Northern New MexicoHeroin and loss (Garcia 2010)
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Environment and Health

• Maquiladoras
• environmental contaminants (arsenic, lead)
• pesticides and groundwater
• air pollutants

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• Colonias
• water-borne illnesses
• Dengue Fever, Cholera, Hep A, dysentery
• airborne particulates
• burning garbage, dust
• ashma, bronchitis

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• To give medicines without food is tantamount to
  washing ones hands and then wiping them dry in
  the dirt (Farmer 2005149)

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Suggested Reading

• Farmer, Paul. 2005. Pathologies of Power Health,
  Human Rights and the New War on the Poor.
  Berkeley U of California Press.
• Garcia, Angela. 2010. The Pastoral Clinic
  Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande.
  Berkeley U of California Press.
• Kosek, Jake. 2006. Understories The Political
  Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico. Duke U
  Press.
• Montoya, Michael. 2011. Making the Mexican
  Diabetic Race, Science, and the Genetics of
  Inequality, Berkeley University of California
  Press.
• Montoya Michael. 2008. Diabetes. Encyclopedia of
  Race and Racism, John Moore (ed) The Gale
  Group/Macmillan Reference USA, Farmington Hills,
  MI.
• Stephen, Lynn. 2007. Transborder Lives
  Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and
  Oregon. Duke University Press.