Heide Castaneda
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About Heide
Castañeda’s areas of expertise include migration; citizenship; and how legal institutions shape everyday experiences of immigrant communities. Her book; Borders of Belonging: Struggle and Solidarity in Mixed-Status Immigrant Families (2019); examines the impact of immigration policies and practices not only on undocumented migrants; but also on their family members; including US citizens. Recent studies examine mixed-status immigrant families; U.S./Mexico border enforcement; the experiences of immigrant youth; and transit migration to destinations in the United States and Europe. Castañeda has worked with community organizations including United We Dream; Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC); and La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE). http://www.heidecastaneda.com
Contributions
No Jargon Podcast
In the News
Publications
This article examines the experiences of Amazigh people (plural: Imazighen) and how they negotiate ethnoracial hierarchies in the United States. Imazighen are Indigenous peoples from North Africa. This article explores how a categorically ambiguous population grapples with everyday moments of racial appraisal and how they arrive at a sense of reflected race. Because the labels they are accustomed to (e.g. Amazigh or Berber) are illegible in the U.S., they become open to racialization processes, usually in conversation with notions of Arabness and Africanness. Simultaneously, they challenge norms of racial classification, particularly by introducing an Indigenous dimension.
Highlights the role of precarious legal status, focusing on undocumented immigrant young adults who grew up in the United States, to examine subjective experiences of place-making and belonging in situations of heightened visibility, deportability and vulnerability. Findings point to the importance of “co-legal status”. This extension of the concept of co-ethnicity references shared experience of illegality as it relates to place-making for legally precarious individuals.
This book offers a radical rethinking of the field by unsettling conventional ideas of mobility and borders to highlight the ways in which they produce health inequalities. It provides insight through a critical lens, and proposes areas for intervention along with an added emphasis on the need for future research to address the health inequities that affect migrants. It illustrates how a critical perspective can deepen our understanding of the relationship between migration and health, which remains a defining global issue of our century.
Investigates a pressing but previously unexplored aspect of immigration in America—the impact of immigration policies and practices not only on undocumented migrants, but also on their family members, some of whom possess a form of legal status. Heide Castañeda reveals the trauma, distress, and inequalities that occur daily, alongside the stratification of particular family members' access to resources like education, employment, and health care.
Documents the everyday experiences of individuals and families across the U.S. as they attempted to access coverage and care in the five years following the passage of the ACA. It argues that while the Affordable Care Act succeeded in expanding access to care, it did so unevenly, ultimately also generating inequality and stratification.
Explores the impact of border enforcement on undocumented youth in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, revealing how checkpoints and policing create spatial barriers that lead to confinement and social exclusion. Highlights how these practices affect sense of citizenship and social membership, as all residents must prove their identity, conflating "citizenship" with "authorization."
Presents results from a longitudinal , five-year ethnographic study of healthcare access in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Explores reasons why this region along the U.S./Mexico border has the highest rate of uninsured persons in the country and remains among the most medically underserved, despite some increases in coverage accompanying the Affordable Care Act. Argues that the convergence of healthcare and immigration policy, framed by a unique regional history and social environment, has had multiple direct and indirect impacts on health and healthcare access.