Return Migration, Health, and Sexuality in a Transnational Mexican Community: Migración de Retorno, Salud y Sexualidad en una Comunidad Mexicana Transnacional

This volume provides the most recent snapshot of a vibrant, transnational Mexican community that has been the object of researchers’ attention since 1976. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2013 in Tlacuitapa, Jalisco, and in its U.S. satellite communities, the book examines both recent migration trends and the ways in which migration to the United States is shaping the health circumstances and experiences of migrants and those whom they leave behind. Building on previous research concerning the impacts of the Great Recession of 2007-09 on decisions to migrate and to settle in the United States, the researchers show how economic and social factors exert much greater influence on decisions to settle in the United States or return to Mexico than U.S. policy measures, such as border enforcement and the Obama administration’s program to suspend deportation of young undocumented migrants. Health-related issues explored in this book include access to health care on both sides of the border, chronic disease management, workplace health hazards, and migration-related factors influencing the risk of HIV transmission. These issues are hardly unique to Tlacuitapa; they broadly characterize other high-emigration communities in Mexico. What makes the most recent research done among Tlacuitapenses unique is that it is part of a sustained effort to document social, economic, and policy-related phenomena occurring in a specific migrant-sending community and its U.S. expatriate communities over nearly four decades, using a multidisciplinary, binational approach.