Undocumentedness and Liminality as Health Variables

The growing exodus of indigenous people from Mexico into the United States, especially from the multiethnic state of Oaxaca, is used as an exemplar of the global phenomenon of transnational migration and its effects on health. Lately, indigenous Oaxacan women have become a predominant part of this diaspora in the United States. Driven by economic desperation most arrive across the border as undocumented persons that configure them into multiple liminal spaces inimical to health and well-being. This article provides a venue for some of their voices to be heard, some major concerns understood, and for proposing links between postcolonial Mexico, neoliberal globalization, and immigration border policy as driving forces that undergird these conditions. An emancipatory praxis of nursing to promote health and reduce suffering within transnational migrants is proposed as a starting place for future nursing scholarship.