The research examines how Hispanic women living in the US-Mexico borderlands build and use cultural health capital to navigate structural barriers while coordinating healthcare across US and Mexican service systems.

Key Takeaways:

• Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and online diaries, the researchers identify navigational, social, familial, and linguistic capital as resources women use to manage structural vulnerability in cross-border healthcare.
• Women strategically cultivate and deploy these forms of capital across three phases of healthcare shopping: pre-consumption, during shopping, and post-purchase.
• The findings point to a need for safer, better coordinated, and more culturally responsive healthcare pathways that recognize the informal labor and cross-cultural expertise supporting healthcare access in marginalized communities.

“Ultimately, the goal for service systems should not be to rely on vulnerable consumers to navigate healthcare more skillfully, but to reduce the need for such navigation by addressing structural barriers to safe, accessible, and coordinated care,” the authors write.

Read the full paper.