“No Te Tratan Bien Porque Eres Mexicana”: Intersectional Systemic Violence and Precarity in Latina Adolescent Life in the U.S. South

Abstract

Young Latina women (YLW) in Alabama are disproportionately affected by sexual health disparities. However, to access needed reproductive services, YLW must navigate a health care landscape that restricts access for youth. YLW also face racialized immigration enforcement in their communities, which is designed to attrition the region’s emergent Latina/o/x immigrant population. This paper describes the intersectional, structural forces that contribute to experienced systemic violence for YLW as they try to access sexual health care services. In 2017, we conducted semistructured qualitative interviews with 20 YLW and 24 key stakeholders (parents, providers, Latino/a/x community leaders, etc.) in west Alabama to examine attitudes and perceptions about sexual health and health care access among YLW in the region. We used purposeful convenience sampling and snowballing to recruit a community-based sample. That is, we purposefully recruited YLW, adjusting through the recruitment period for a diverse sample that represented the various voices that we were trying to capture in the study (i.e., younger and older adolescents, adolescents born in the United States, those born in other countries, etc.). Through a focus on YLW’s access to sexual/reproductive health care, we conclude that YLW experience systemic violence and resulting precarity because laws and health policies restrict access to evidence-based sexual health education and reproductive health care services. We discuss implications for future research and policy recommendations.