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Liminal Living: Everyday Injury, Disability, and Instability among Migrant Mexican Women in Maryland's Seafood Industry
Author(s) -
Sangaramoorthy Thurka
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
medical anthropology quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.855
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1548-1387
pISSN - 0745-5194
DOI - 10.1111/maq.12526
Subject(s) - liminality , disadvantaged , ethnography , everyday life , work (physics) , gender studies , sociology , double burden , wage , demographic economics , economic growth , political science , labour economics , economics , medicine , mechanical engineering , obesity , engineering , anthropology , law , overweight
Mexican women constitute an increasing proportion of labor migrants to the United States. They are segregated into a handful of low‐wage occupations, disadvantaged by global economic forces and the social construction of gender within employment relations. Drawing on ethnographic research from Maryland's Eastern Shore, I explore experiences of everyday injury, disability, and instability among Mexican migrant women who work in the commercial crab processing industry, which is increasingly dependent on the H‐2B visa program to fill seasonal, non‐agricultural jobs. By focusing on the daily lives of Mexican migrant women who are part of this labor force, their health and social needs, and the gendered dimensions of labor migration, I document how temporary work programs institutionalize liminality as permanent mode of being. I suggest that migrant women, amid the extraordinary uncertainty brought about by the processes of recurrent migration, reorient and recalibrate themselves through modes of conduct to make life more ordinary.