"Becoming American": Exploring Exposure to the US and Health Among Latina/os

Abstract

Increasingly the field of public health and scholarship on racial/ethnic health inequities has shifted upstream by developing frameworks and research that elaborate how race and racialized societies impact health. However this upstream view of race has been missing in the preponderance of research on the health of Latina/os in the United States, and scholars studying Latino health inequities have largely ignored structural racism factors that shape Latinos’ lives and their health. This dissertation aims to addresses this gap by interrogating the Latino Health Paradox, a research finding that suggests that the health of Latina/os declines with more time in the US and across generations. Paper 1 reviews literature on the Latino health paradox and builds an interdisciplinary conceptual model to outline how structural racism, the perpetuation of deeply embedded systems of racial inequities, may shape these health patterns among generations of Latinos. Paper 2 employs data from the Mexican Family and Life Survey (MxFLS) to investigate differences in cardiovascular health among Mexico-US migrants and non-migrants, and specifically explores how exposure to the US shapes cardiovascular health. Finally, Paper 3 conceptualizes how immigration policy contributes to the racialization and stigmatization of Latinos in the US, the psychosocial “surround” Latinos navigate as result, and the implications of these processes for health. The paper then taps into Twitter data collected after the passage of immigration policies in the US to explore the psychosocial and material benefits and constraints of these policies on Latino lives and health.