Poster #128 - The Uptake of WIC amongst Linguistically Isolated Latinx Households

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

About 4% of US children live in “linguistically isolated” (LI) households, homes where no one over the age of 14 speaks English. This figure jumps to 13% for Latinx children and nearly doubles for Latinx children living in poverty. Past work has shown that LI depresses social service access, but has focused on its impact on elderly immigrants. However, LI is far from exclusive to the elderly. It impacts the lives of young families, especially in the case of Latinx immigrants, a group that is younger than the general US population. I posit that LI can inhibit social safety net access for young Latinx families—stopping them from accessing even programs that are specifically aimed at supporting young families, like Women Infants and Children (WIC). This project’s objective is to further scholars’ understanding of how LI shapes Latinx households’ WIC uptake as well as how this acute form of linguistic marginalization interacts with race and place. To meet these goals, I have created a community advisory board of Latina WIC-eligible mothers from the California Central Coast (my university locale) to help inform this project’s analytical choices. I am drawing on: the insight of the community advisory board, the American Communities Survey (ACS) 1-year samples for 2014-2019, and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) tools to conduct an analysis that examines how linguistic isolation relates to program uptake for families who are WIC-eligible. I hypothesize that: 1. LI Latinx households will have lower WIC uptake than their counterparts 2. LI will have a stronger negative influence on uptake for Afro-Latinx households due to racialized assumptions of who requires Spanish-language support and 3. LI will have a stronger negative influence on uptake for households in states with lower proportions of Spanish speakers due to less available Spanish-language support. Today 1 in 4 children in the US are Latinx. To build a healthy future citizenry, researchers must investigate how this isolation impacts Latinx households’ social safety net access. This is especially true for WIC, a program that has a long-standing record of building healthier members of society.

Author

• Kimberly Higuera, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
  Presenting Author