Service Provision, Latina Immigrant Mothers, and Insecuritization in Williamsburg, Virginia

• In Event: 032 - Section on Latino/a Sociology Paper Session. Criminalization, Violence, and Social Harm Affecting Latino Communities

Abstract

This paper draws from five years of qualitative research conducted in Greater Williamsburg, Virginia during the early years of a wave of Latino immigration. I examine the formal and informal barriers to access to healthcare and social services that Latina immigrant mothers and their advocates in a family assistance agency confronted and navigated in the context of a new immigrant destination as it underwent a localized anti-immigrant moral panic. I seek to explore what these formal and informal barriers reveal about the dynamics of institutional exclusion and the effects of illegality in this newly emerging Latino destination. My research uncovers the process through which a climate of fear among immigrants was sustained by the effects of informal barriers erected by agency gatekeepers. I argue that the barriers that immigrant mothers confronted in meeting their social reproductive needs produced gendered forms of vulnerability, which were sustained by the effects of informal exclusionary practices on the part of service providers and gatekeepers surveillance, triggering fear and distrust in immigrant mothers. I forward the concept of “insecuritization,” which I define as the process through which exposure to risk, uncertainty and insecurity is heightened through diverse formal and informal mechanisms across institutional domains. Shifting analytical attention to the dynamics of exclusion and control that play out in the institutional arena of service provision reveals how the punitive “arm” of the state operates in a diffuse and indeed, incoherent manner exerting social control through a variety of formal and informal institutional mechanisms and structural effects.

Author

• Jennifer Bickham Mendez, College of William & Mary