Sweatbaths, sacrifice, and surgery: The practice of transmedical health care by Mixtec migrant families in California

The transmedical health care of indigenous migrant farm worker families in California raises politically and socially significant issues concerning immigration, education, and health care policy making. Mixtec families from Southern Mexico who migrate to the commercial agriculture fields of California utilize local, state, and federal health care programs as well as indigenous practices to meet health care needs. Problems surrounding the utilization of institutional health care services for Mixtec families in California result from economic, linguistic, social and cultural factors that influence health care seeking behavior, health maintenance, and illness treatment. Two years of binational ethnographic research based on participant observation and the recording of case histories, as well as a health care questionnaire administered to Mixtec women in Madera, California, form the data base for the findings and analysis reported in this study. Under conditions of transnational migration, poverty, and sociopolitical marginalization, the Mixtec supplement the clinical emergency and pregnancy-related care provided by government healing methods and practices from their own medical culture, defying complete assimilation into the mainstream clinical medical system while generating treatment alternatives to it. The Mixtec rely heavily on self- and ethno-specific forms of treatment, such as herbs, sweatbaths, healers, religious healing ceremonies and store-bought pharmaceuticals, to treat chronic health conditions and to provide health treatment alternatives. The generation of health care alternatives by the Mixtec represents an ethnically-based self-defense strategy of economic and political value. Attempts to resolve problems require binational and cross cultural dialogue involving the U.S. and Mexican governments as well as Mixtec leaders, Mixtec healers, and especially migrant Mixtec mothers, who are the primary caretakers of health in the family.