Gendered Governmentalities and Neoliberal Logics: Latina,Immigrant Women in Healthcare and Social Services

Structural Barriers, the “Chilling Effect,” and Institutional Responsiveness

Research has documented the various structural barriers that immigrants face when seeking health care and public assistance, as well as a “chilling effect” that compels even those eligible to avoid seeking benefits and care—often out of fear of the detection of their immigration status (Portes, Fernández-Kelly, and Light 2012; Capps, Fix and Henderson 2009; Heyman, Núñez, and Talavera 2009). ³ Meanwhile, scholars who have conducted research in “new immigrant destinations,” like Williamsburg, have focused analytical attention on the role that local institutions play in the incorporation of immigrant newcomers and the level of “responsiveness” of service-providing agencies to immigrants’ needs and interests (Clevenger et al. 2014; Marrow 2011, 2009). While generating important insights, these works tend to gloss over long-standing histories of U.S. health care and social welfare systems as sites of gendered and racialized state power and neglect theirnormative role in regulating family, sexuality, and women’s bodies (Gordon 1994).

Illegality and Deportability

Scholars of illegality have directed considerable analytical attention to the complex effects of state power as productive of immigrants’ vulnerability and exclusion. Constituted by an assemblage of institutional practices, discourse, and everyday interactions, illegality functions as a mechanism for the categorization and management of immigrant populations by marking as “other” those with particular phenotypes (i.e., brown skin) and cultural attributes (i.e., spoken Spanish), regardless of their citizenship status (Abrego 2014; De Genova 2004). In the institutional context of the health-care system, the classification of “illegal” immigrants as “undeserving” of care and services emerges as a powerful tool of exclusion that advances neoliberal imperatives of social disinvestment (Quesada et al. 2011, 341–2). Resulting profound and sustained exclusion produces “processes of depreciated subjectivity formation” among immigrants—an internalized sense of “unworthiness” that impacts their willingness to access medical resources (Quesada et al. 2011; Horton 2004).

Given its role in maintaining a marginalized group of low-wage laborers who are unentitled to citizenship rights and benefits and, thus, well-suited to function in a precarious economy; some immigration scholars have conceptualized illegality as reflective of neoliberal techniques of governance (Fassin 2011; McDowell and Wonders 2009–10).

Scholars argue that illegality as neoliberal governmentality produces particular “modes of being” as it is “lived through a palpable sense of deportability,” which compels immigrants to remain invisible and avoid public space (De Genova 2002, 439; Hiemstra 2010). It is manifest in the expanded reach of post-9/11 immigration enforcement strategies and their heavy reliance on pervasive forms of surveillance that police the spaces of immigrants’ daily life, permeating them with fear and risk (Coleman 2007).

Feminist researchers have turned attention to the gendered, racialized and classed dynamics of contemporary immigration enforcement strategies (Dreby 2015). Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo (2013) demonstrate how soaring deportation rates overwhelmingly target Latino men through their criminalization and racial profiling by police authorities. While the heightened policing of immigrants’ physical mobility in the “street” often results in men’s forcible removal, women are left behind to “pick up the pieces,” hold families together, and assume the role of breadwinner (Schmalzbauer 2014: 67–8).

While a significant body of work has focused on deportation and its links to masculine criminalities (Golash-Boza 2015; De Genova and Peutz 2010), there has been less scholarly attention devoted to the gendered ways in which immigrant women become subject to surveillance and policing. A major exception is work that demonstrates how immigration law creates vulnerabilities for immigrant women that constrain them in fulfilling socially prescribed expectations of motherhood (Abrego and Menjívar 2011). For undocumented mothers, the effects of such “legal violence” bring suffering to them through blocked access to life-sustaining services (Abrego and Menjívar 2011) and fears of making avail of benefits for their children that require identification (Yoshikawa 2011) or that might be construed as grounds for classification as a “public charge” (Park 2011).

The work presented here seeks to build on these diverse perspectives on deportability, and immigrant women’s survival strategies, situating them within a neoliberal political and economic order. By attending to the interactive mechanisms through which immigrant women become subject to disciplinary power within the arena of health care and social service-provision, this analysis draws attention to significant gendered dimensions of governmentality that form an integral part of a larger neoliberal project. As a theoretical construct, insecuritization elucidates contradictory inner workings of disciplinary power that cultivate immigrant women as neoliberal, self-reliant subjects while also harnessing anxieties about maternal duty and responsibility to their children. In Williamsburg insecuritization warded women away from social entitlements and formalized care, making them responsible for solving their own problems (Ilcan et al. 2007). In response to the signaled threats to their families’ well-being, mothers implemented individualized solutions to meet their families’ needs by turning to their informal networks and activating social ties both with other immigrant women and across lines of race-ethnicity and class.

Immigrant Women and Social Networks

Like their U.S.-born counterparts, for low-income, Latina immigrant women social networks make up significant survival strategies in the face of resource scarcity, prohibitive barriers to care, and fear of dangerous consequences of accessing life-sustaining services (Menjívar 2000, 2002; Stack 1974).

Social networks help women, often more than men, find work and access services and resources essential to their families’ well-being (Domínguez and Watkins 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). Poor women, including immigrants, create beneficial reciprocal ties with other women that they rely on for crucial material and emotional support; and their engagements with community organizations provide opportunities for network expansion (Menjívar 2000, 157-193). However, informal, immigrant networks also have drawbacks, as they can reproduce and exacerbate unequal power relations and even act as source of social control and abuse (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Menjívar 2000). The most beneficial networks tend to be heterogeneous and to transcend class lines, thereby providing diverse sources of information about opportunities (Domínguez and Watkins 2003). Immigrant mothers in Williamsburg expanded their networks beyond the immigrant community by activating such “weak ties” (Granovetter 1973) with professionals and other native-born residents whom they met through work, church and through their participation in family assistance programs, like PICH.

I make the case here that women’s deployment of informal networks to either “work around” barriers to care and services or avoid local institutions altogether not only aligns with neoliberal projects of social disinvestment, but also reveals a complex interplay between gendered forms of agency and disciplinary power. As a response to insecuritization, women’s development of these social ties was conditioned by neoliberal governmentality; however, it also involves the agentic formation of social connections that bridge race, class, and citizenship divides and could potentially challenge neoliberal logics (Hamann 2009).

Immigrant women’s experiences of insecuritization and responses to them were thrown into stark relief in Williamsburg in the early 2000s, as service and health care providers and early cohorts of immigrant newcomers encountered each other for the first time.

The Service-Enforcement Paradox and Insecuritization in Williamsburg

The increased integration of state agency functions that both enforce immigration policy and provide resources to immigrant families has meant that for immigrant mothers, the same state responsible for possibly deporting them (or their family members) also offers significant benefits to their families. And the recognition of this “service-enforcement paradox” generated significant distrust among immigrant mothers in Williamsburg about seeking health care services or applying for public benefits or other forms of assistance (Yoshikawa 2011).

Lydia, a program director at FCS, explained how such fears and distrust posed difficulties for the agency’s efforts to assist immigrant clients:

And I guess that’s the last barrier, just sort of that fear of identifying themselves, coming out from off the radar for some families [. . .] For example, the moms are fearful of identifying themselves because they don’t really understand the relationship between social services and immigration. Social services isn’t a direct. . .line to immigration, but we have many families who think that if they show up at social services to collect food stamps, that somebody is going to report them.

Carolina, a PICH caseworker, was frustrated with Marta who on the advice of her husband’s employer, refused to take her oldest son, who was born in Mexico to the safety net clinic, as she feared being labeled as a “public charge.” Instead, she paid off his emergency room bills in ten-dollar monthly installments; even though her husband’s earnings barely covered their expenses, and she was unemployed and pregnant with their third child. Eventually, however, Carolina persuaded her to apply for Medicaid benefits for her second child who suffered from severe asthma.

Mothers’ distrust was further incited by the detailed information they were required to provide on application forms and at health care and social service appointments. Mothers would frequently express fears that social workers would “put their names in the computer,” and alert the authorities about their status and whereabouts. Questions on long intake forms seemed to pry into all corners of their lives. For example, when they sought Medicaid benefits for their U.S.-born children, the application inquired as to the full legal name, age, earnings, and place of employment of all persons residing with the applicant—intimidating (and difficult) information to provide for immigrants who lived in crowded housing units. Pregnant women in the parent support group expressed concern about the application forms for Emergency Medicaid to cover the costs associated with childbirth. There was a space on the form to enter the applicants’ social security number. And they worried that if they left the space blank, it would alert the authorities to their immigration status. Caseworkers and staffers at PICH and FCS did not know how to advise or reassure them, fomenting mothers’ sense of insecurity.

In an interview, Julia, an administrator at a safety-net clinic that served the uninsured explained how she recognized that these bureaucratic hurdles kindled suspicion among Latino/a immigrant patients.

I think the fear on the part of the patients is that if they do come and they tell us anything that they’ll get turned in or something bad will happen [. . .] We’re not going to do anything, but they don’t know that. I mean, bad things have happened to ‘em a lot. And here’s one more bunch of people wanting pieces of paper filled out. On the other hand we need the pieces of paper. It’s a very difficult thing.

Anxieties about the service-enforcement paradox were amplified by accounts circulated within mothers’ informal networks about incidents in which immigrants’ efforts to seek assistance resulted in deleterious and even frightening consequences. For example, mothers shared anecdotes about family members and acquaintances who lost their jobs after they requested that employers sign a wage verification form for a child’s application for Medicaid. A 2006 parent group meeting was abuzz with the story of a woman who called 911 after her husband had physically assaulted her, only to have the police take him into custody, leaving her with no way to support her children or send remittances to their family in Mexico.

And such anxieties only increased as news spread of police crackdowns and intimidation in Williamsburg and the passage of local immigration enforcement ordinances across the region. ⁵ At the first parent group meeting of 2007, I started the meeting by asking the mothers to share how they were feeling. Andrea, one of the most educated members of the group, who had worked for the Ministry of Education in Veracruz, Mexico and had come to the United States on an H2B visa (which she over-stayed) to work as a housekeeper in a hotel, spoke first: “I feel so worried, and it impedes me from living in the present. The laws that they are proposing worry me so much. I feel so much stress.” Lorena spoke of “el incertidumbre” (uncertainty) of the present moment and how she felt “insegura” (insecure), “because now the police will report us Hispanics to la migra.” No doubt thinking about her two U.S.-born children, Daniela added, “Sometimes you hear about how they will take away the papers of those who were born here.” When I shook my head in disbelief, Andrea reacted—quite prophetically—“Yes, maybe to you this sounds absurd, but the laws that they are proposing are also absurd and one doesn’t know what point they will reach.”

Most terrifying for mothers, however, was the prospect that if they were detained, their children would be taken from them. At a parent support group meeting mothers peppered FCS and PICH staff with questions about what would happen if they were apprehended by police—would they be allowed to call the babysitter? Their family members? How long would they remain in custody before they would know if they were going to be deported? None of the staff present had clear answers for them. Not long after this meeting Andrea from Mexico and Rosario from El Salvador traveled to their consulates to obtain passports for their children so that in the event that they were deported they could more easily send for them.

Staff and administrators at PICH and FCS struggled with how to address immigrant mothers’ fears. Consistent with neoliberal principles and in line with many agencies in the context of post-welfare reform in the U.S., PICH’s mission emphasized clients’ self-sufficiency (Morgen 2001). However, PICH staff also gradually became convinced that the insecurities stemming from their clients’ immigration status could not be overcome by simply learning to “advocate for themselves.” As they listened to the experiences of their clients and accounts relayed to them by social and health care workers in the community, they increasingly came to understand immigrant mothers’ efforts to seek support and assistance as involving significant risks. For example, news of an intake worker at a domestic violence shelter who interrogated a woman seeking entrance to the shelter about her immigration status and called the police garnered a horrified response from a group of PICH and FCS staff, who had gathered after a parent support group meeting and openly expressed concerns that women might drop out of the program.

PICH caseworkers and others at FCS who worked with immigrant families gradually began to temper their enthusiastic encouragement of their “moms” to exercise self-sufficiency by seeking services on their own. And they even began to warn them of the possible dangers associated with contact with the authorities. At a parent support group meeting Vanesa, the coordinator of the LSN (whose position was located at FCS), cautioned women about dialing 911. “You should be very careful. You should know that the police might ask you for documents, if you call.”

Tina, a PICH caseworker, called me to discuss her concerns about her client Berta whose 12-year-old niece had recently arrived from El Salvador. Neither Berta, nor her niece, possessed legal immigration status, and Berta did not have any identifying documents for the girl. Tina worried that enrolling the girl in school with no form of identification would raise questions about legal custody. “We don’t want CPS (Child Protective Services) to get involved!” she exclaimed, her voice registering her concern. Although unintentionally, the efforts on the part of PICH and FCS staff to balance the risk that their clients faced with the mission of facilitating families’ access to services, sent a mixed message and served to sustain insecuritization by signaling danger and uncertainty.

Insecuritization and Interactions with Street-level Bureaucrats

In the daily lives of immigrant mothers, low-level clerical and eligibility workers in health care and social services exercised considerable authority as gatekeepers with a great deal of discretion to regulate immigrants’ access to resources and care. As scholars have noted, “street-level bureaucrats” occupy positions on the frontlines of service provision, which pull them in competing directions, often requiring them to both help and police clients (Lipsky 1980). As such, they embodied the service-enforcement paradox, and their interactions with immigrant women activated insecuritization. To illustrate these dynamics, I present two vignettes from the parent support group meetings. Notably, although in both these cases the social workers involved happened to be middle-aged, African American women, I observed similar interactions between immigrant mothers and eligibility and intake workers from a variety of ages and backgrounds—at county agencies, non-profits, and volunteer-staffed charitable organizations.

Beginning in 2003, PICH staff decided to invite representatives from different county agencies to support group meetings so that parents could ask questions and receive accurate information that would reassure them. Because mothers frequently expressed fears about their children’s being turned over to servicios sociales, PICH staff decided to host someone from CPS. They asked me to contact and invite Ms Barnard, a case manager at CPS and an African American woman in her mid-forties. On the phone she seemed eager to attend and told me, “A lot of people think that’s all we do is come to people’s houses and take their kids, but we are there to help families to take care of their children the way that law says that they need to be cared for. . .” She began her presentation with frank advice: “You need to know what to do so that social services doesn’t get involved with your family. As a mother, I wouldn’t want social services in my house.” She enumerated the ways to avoid this:

If your child is sick and you don’t take them to the doctor you can be arrested. Of course, kids get sick all the time with colds and stomachaches. But if the child is sick for an extended period of time, and you don’t take them to see a doctor, then you could have legal problems. And not speaking the language or not having transportation is no excuse. . ..You need to know what you can do so that we don’t come to your house. I want to tell you things so that we don’t open an assessment or an investigation. . .An investigation you really don’t want. Then you can get into trouble. If you need help caring for your children, then you should call us. We can help you.

Andrea raised her hand to respond: “But in this case [if we call], is there someone there at your office who speaks Spanish?” Ms Barnard became flustered, “No, I guess not. . .. No, but we do have a computer program that we type things in and it translates.” Andrea continued to press her, “But what if it is the weekend? We can’t call our social worker (PICH caseworker) (to give us a ride to the doctor’s office). If we call the number on the Medicaid card, then we can get a taxi, but the driver doesn’t speak Spanish.” Ms Barnard seemed stumped. “There is a hotline in Richmond. I think they have someone who speaks Spanish. I’ll check.” But she never provided the number.

By this time the mood in the room had turned solemn and tense. I reminded Ms Barnard that she had told me that in seven years she had never handled a case in which the children were removed from the home. “Yes,” she said. “That’s true. But many times I have had cases in which we have had to ask the parent who can take care of the kids while we work with them, since they can’t take care of them properly. The children are placed with family members or friends.” Andrea spoke up again, “In our cases many of us don’t have family here. Our parents are back in our countries.” Ms Barnard responded, “A friend will do. Now, if anyone comes to your house asking to take your children out of the house, you should make sure that they have an id badge like this one with the name on one side and a photo on the other. If they don’t, you should call the police.” She urged, “You need to know how to say enough phrases in English to protect your kids—how to say your address in English and explain how to get to your house.” After she provided a detailed description of the signs of sexual abuse in young children, Clara, a young mother in her early twenties from Peru asked shyly, “But you won’t take our children, right? If we are treating them well and really trying?” Ms Barnard replied flatly, “Not if you can show you are trying.” Clara looked at the floor, as did several of the mothers in the group. Others stared straight ahead—stony-faced.

In a session designed to reassure families and alleviate fears, Ms Barnard had, instead, clearly communicated the dangers of the service-enforcement paradox to those assembled. In so doing she invoked women’s caretaking role as mothers, explaining to the group in clear terms how the state could use it to target immigrant women for policing and even made a vague reference to the possibility of a stranger’s entering their home to take their children. Any reassurances that she may have intended by inviting the women to “call us, so we can help you” quickly rang hollow when it was followed by evidence that in, fact, the agency was not at all equipped to address the language and transportation needs of immigrant newcomers.

The aftermath of the presentation was subdued. I lingered to debrief with a few parents with whom I had close relationships. They were visibly shaken, and some seemed fairly resigned. “It’s better to be aware,” said Ernesto, a Mexican father of three children who happened to attend that day with his wife. “This is the reality.” He thanked Ms Barnard profusely for taking the time to present to the group. Andrea was less gracious: “She doesn’t understand anything about our problems or how hard it is not to speak the language or having to leave your children so you can work.” The younger parents in the group remained silent, but later confided to PICH staff that the presentation had terrified them. PICH staff were dismayed by the idea that such fear might cause parents to drop out of the support group.

The presentation by Ms Baker, a county social worker in her fifties, revealed similar dynamics. She told the assembled group of ten mothers that she wanted to reassure them that they should not be afraid to apply for social services. “We are not in the business of reporting anyone. . .You should not worry about your status if you are a legal or an illegal alien. Come in and apply for Medicaid and let experienced professionals decide if you are eligible.” She gave out cards with her name and the main phone number to social services and told the mothers that they could call with any concerns—although, like Ms Barnard, she quickly added that there was no guarantee that a Spanish speaker would be available to take their call.

As she continued, her tone shifted and took on a judgmental edge. She scanned the circle of mothers pointing at them with her finger, “Who here has her green card?” When the roomful of undocumented women cast their eyes at the floor, she reproached the group, “It is very important for you to get your green cards.” No one responded, as the mothers knew that it was fairly impossible for them to legalize their status, and some of them had “papeles chuecos”—falsifiedforms of identification..

Perhaps to disrupt the increasingly tense atmosphere of the room, Daisy, a PICH case worker and one of the few Latinas employed at the time in human services, intervened to raise a concern about parents’ applications for Medicaid benefits for their children. “Employers pay our parents under the table, so a lot of them don’t get pay stubs. They [employers] don’t want anyone reporting them to a government agency. I have begged and pleaded with these employers. What can I do?” Daisy translated Ms Baker’s response, “We will go to great measures to collect all the information we need—even if we have to contact the employers ourselves.” She paused for a moment. “Now we would never do anything to jeopardize anyone’s job. You tell your employers that they don’t have to be afraid that we are going to report that they aren’t paying taxes to the government.”

During the question-and-answer period a few mothers posed questions about Emergency Medicaid. Sofia asked, “What if I have problems with my pregnancy before the baby is born?” Ms Baker hesitantly repeated that services at birth were covered. “But what about complications with the pregnancy that happen before she gives birth if she has to be hospitalized?” asked Daisy. Ms Baker replied, “First of all we here in Williamsburg don’t make that decision. We send all the paperwork to Richmond, and they make the determination.” Once again, after the presentation the usual lively atmosphere of the parent group turned stony silent.

Particularly as they occurred in the “safe space” of the parent group, these sessions with service administrators conveyed a powerful message to the mothers, confirming the threats of the service-enforcement paradox as a harsh reality. Ms Baker’s ostensible reassurances that social workers would go to great lengths to contact employers conveyed the possibility that seeking assistance could endanger families’ economic security at a time in which most of them were relying on only one income. And her reference to local agencies’ sending applications for Emergency Medicaid, one of the few federally funded programs for which undocumented women are eligible, to high-ranking decision-makers in the state capital—reaffirmed women’s fears that, in fact, information about them would be shared with other powerful, regulatory institutions. The clear message was that applying for benefits involved subjecting themselves to state surveillance.

As these vignettes demonstrate, through insecuritization immigrant women received clear messages about the risks associated with their engagements with service and health-care providers. Cultivated and conditioned to “fend for themselves,” they made difficult and constrained choices about how to continue to meet their families’ needs (Farfán-Santos 2019). In the ensuing years, some women did drop out of PICH, and after having grown steadily for five years, by 2009 the safety-net clinic reported (and staff clearly noticed) a significant decline in “Hispanic” patients. However, the urgent needs associated with childbirth and their maternal obligations to meet their families’ needs compelled immigrant women to continue to confront systems of care and public services, despite their fear and marginalization. They did so by developing and deploying their social networks as a source of survival and support (Dominguez and Watkins 2003).

Social Networks and Insecuritization

In the early 2000s immigrant women’s support networks in Williamsburg were quite incipient. The isolation that early cohorts of immigrant mothers experienced as they remained at home to care for young children created obstacles to network cultivation and expansion (Deeb-Sossa and Bickham Mendez 2008). Despite these difficulties, immigrant mothers slowly began to build support networks that enabled them to pool resources and share information about opportunities. As immigration streams continued from Latin America, mothers connected their newly arrived family members and acquaintances with PICH caseworkers and the coordinator of the LSN. They cultivated and developed networks in church groups, at apartment complexes, as well as at the parent support group. Mothers in the support group began to pool childcare, and those who drove offered rides to children’s medical appointments and to newly acquired jobs. They employed these networks to circulate information about jobs and other opportunities, like charitable organizations that did not require state-issued forms of identification for food assistance and a nearby clinic run by a faith-based organization that charged no fees, required no documentation, and where staff were reportedly more caring and friendly.

At a support group meeting in 2005 Andrea and Daniela were all smiles, as Daniela proudly described how over the weekend her three-year-old daughter had suddenly fallen ill and refused to eat. Her PICH caseworker was unavailable, and she could not call the pediatrician (as there was no interpretation service available after hours). Daniela, who was home alone with the girl with no access to transportation, described feeling desperate but then scanned the phone list of support group members tacked to her refrigerator. She recounted, “And I thought, ‘I’m going to call her.’” Andrea recognized the child’s illness as treatable with over-the-counter medication and drove to Daniela’s house to pick her up and take her to the drugstore. Daniela said, “I didn’t know what to do, but then I called Andrea and she supported me.”

Mothers also actively created “leverage networks” (Briggs 1998) by engaging social ties with sympathetic advocates (myself included) to accompany, assist, and advocate for them at medical appointments, parent-teacher conferences, and visits to social services and state and county offices. To access resources like legal and counseling services, and housing opportunities, they activated ties that crossed lines of class and race with professional women whom they met at church or through contacts at PICH as well as co-workers at their places of employment.

When their 12-year-old son was suspended for throwing a stink bomb at school, 38-year-old Marta who had brought the boy as a toddler with her from Puebla, Mexico to join her husband Ernesto in Williamsburg, was terrified when the school resource officer asked about his and his parents’ immigration status and contacted the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE). She enlisted the assistance of a neighbor, a U.S.-born college student who spoke Spanish and who reached out to members of the LSN to advise the family and gather information about how to support them. Fortunately, ICE did not intervene. Years later, when the same son was arrested for under-aged drinking, Marta contacted two law students whom she had met at church, who recommended a law firm where attorneys took the case for a discounted rate and were successful in having the charges dropped and filing for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) status for the teen.

When 32-year-old Rosario’s family was notified that they had to vacate the apartment that she, her husband and two pre-schoolers shared with her sister’s family of four, she enlisted my help in her search for housing. Rosario’s intimidation about using her limited English was compounded by the prospect of contacting property owners who she feared might at best require credit checks and identity verifications and at worst contact the police. Most landlords were reluctant to even show their properties to a family with four small children, let alone to suspected “illegals.” The extended family was finally able to secure adequate housing when a long-time supervisor at the restaurant where Rosario worked put her in contact with an acquaintance who owned a small house and who was willing to forego credit checks and rent to them.

In employing their own networks mothers often skirted local institutions. Apprehensive that they would become pregnant again and faced with various hurdles at the local safety-net clinic, including expensive fees, transportation difficulties, and requirements that they bring their own interpreters to appointments, women, like Estrella, a young mother in her twenties, sent for injectable contraceptives from their mothers and sisters in El Salvador. Others relied on transnational networks to procure natural remedies and prescription medications sent from their home communities and instead of seeking treatment in Williamsburg, contacted physicians there for medical advice.

When her husband was prescribed an array of expensive medications to treat his recurring seizures, none of which seemed to work, Rosario, the mother described above, tapped her informal networks to arrange for him to visit a Catholic priest (who performed an exorcism) and, later, a curandero (traditional healer). When her husband’s seizures continued unabated, Rosario contacted a physician in her community in El Salvador who diagnosed him over the phone with a parasitic brain infection (common in the rural hamlets of El Salvador at that time) for which with the help of a PICH caseworker he was later able to obtain surgical treatment in a nearby city.

As demonstrated in other studies of economically disadvantaged women of color, informal local and transnational networks acted as a source of material and emotional support for the immigrant women of this study (Domínguez and Watkins 2003; Menjívar 2002). I argue that women’s development of and reliance on networks also reflects a significant response to neoliberal governmentality through which women took on the burden of care for themselves and their families, “filling [. . .] gaps of vulnerability left (or created) by the state” (Williams and Massaro 2017, 88). At the same time, immigrant mothers’ development of varied social ties that transcend divisions of citizenship, class and race also reveal the construction of social connections reflective of modes of being outside the framework of atomic neoliberal subjects responsible only for themselves. And, in this sense, they are suggestive of social spaces with the potential to challenge neoliberal logics.