VivirLatino

For the latest Remembering Women’s History month post, I wanted to focus on this article I found about the health of Latina women in Arizona. As most of us know, Arizona is a notoriously unfriendly state for immigrants in general and immigrant women specifically. It is the state that has enacted some of the harshest anti-immigrant laws and, of course, has Sheriff Joe as well.

But all the anti-immigrant hysteria has led to some terrifying consequences for immigrant women. Namely in the form of their health. When a woman who is in the country without documentation gets cancer, what does she do?

In Arizona, the answer is rarely “she gets treatment.”

Undocumented women are more likely to forego treatment because of the costs involved with their care, said Mollie Williams, director of community health programs for Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a foundation that provides grants for services and education on cancer. “It is likely for these women to fall through the cracks.”

Williams said in some cases service providers who receive grants from the foundation have reported that women were able to cover the cost of their mastectomy and initial care using their state Medicaid emergency insurance. This type of coverage is available to anyone, regardless of immigration status.

But breast cancer is a complex disease that requires an assortment of specialists, expensive medicines and follow-up care. Treatment could extend for up to five years and cost between $20,000 to $60,000.

In some areas community clinics can only diagnose the cancer, but there is no follow up.

“We are able to screen them, but there’s not much we can do after that,” said Lucy Murrieta, an outreach community relations manager for the Sunset Community Health Center in Yuma County.

So–a few women can get a diagnosis–and even fewer women can actually get treated. And as usual, there seems to be little difference between “legal” and “illegal” woman.

In some cases the women have migrated legally, said Murrieta, but since they have been in the country for less than five years they’re ineligible for Medicaid coverage, available to low income people. When these women lose work after the farming season, they also lose their health insurance, making it difficult to obtain breast cancer treatment.

Similarly, there seems to be little difference between immigrants and citizens either. For example, what effect is this diagnosis and lack of treatment having on the generation of children who are US citizens and are watching their parents die from treatable and sometimes even preventable diseases? If we look toward the black community, we see that there is often a strong suspicion of doctors and the medical community–largely due to how the black community has historically been treated by the medical establishment (see: Mississippi Appendectomies and Tuskeegee Experiments among others).

What are we telling US citizens about their health when we’ll diagnose a disease but not treat it? What relationship with their health are we creating? And how does this unequal, terrifying and inhumane relationship with the medical establishment intersect with cultural based issues like: a Catholicism that often encourages a virgin/whore dichotomy that makes many Latinas think of their private areas as dirty and untouchable–something to be ignored until marriage or babies? Old school religious mothers that are the primary source of sexual knowledge for their daughters? “Good Girl” mentalities that teach girls (especially the oldest daughter) to be the caretakers of everybody else (the little mama) at the expense of themselves?

The consequences of all these factors mixing together cannot be understated. And if we look towards other Latina populations (the report is largely about Mexican women)–for example, Puerto Ricans–you can see how mother’s who were sterilized in the 70′s have raised daughters that often have not just a healthy suspicion of the medical establishment, but an outright fear of it. I know several Puerto Rican women–in their 30′s and 40′s–who have never once gone to see a gynecologist.

But how many studies are ever done on good methods to get Latinas back into the doctor’s office?

There is a desperate need for Latinas to begin our own studies, our own research and our own grassroots organizing to create our own clinics. The great news is that there are plenty of existing models on how to do this, including one that was started by Latinas.

If you know of other health clinics that cater to Latin@ populations specifically or women generally–please leave them in comments!