The Lazarus Effect: Decolonizing Social Death through Migrant Caregiving

Low-income undocumented immigrants predominately rely on the US health care safety net for their medical needs. Since the passing of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, however, this safety net has been shrinking, resulting in a range of adverse migrant health experiences that are – because of migrants’ increasing social death – rendered invisible. I explore how low-income undocumented migrants navigate this invisibility. Drawing on eleven months of ethnographic and interview research with migrant men at a community-based organization and informed by Irene Bloemraad’s theory of citizenship as a claims-making process, I find that migrant men challenge the terms of their invisibility through their care work for one another. When migrants provide broadly defined care for one another, care acts as (1) a service that addresses a range of urgent medical and non-medical needs and (2) a mechanism of “re-membering” that validates migrants’ social and legal personhood. First, care as a service addresses a range of needs medically and socially denied to migrants vis-à-vis the health care system, including direct medical provision and a sense of communal/familial belonging. Beyond service provision, however, care also operates as a decolonizing mechanism of re-membering – that is, reintegration into to the realm of mattering. Re-membering vis-à-vis caregiving allows migrant men to validate each other’s suffering, challenge the healthcare system’s colonialist structures of exclusion, and reaffirm migrant personhood – essentially, to perform a “Lazarus Effect” that brings migrants back from social death. Accordingly, I argue that decolonization and care work are intimately connected. Attesting to the importance of policy that supports immigrant community-building and contributing to the literatures on immigrant health disparities, citizenship, and decolonization, this research illustrates ways in which migrant caregiving can challenge socio-legal structures of exclusion and manifest new terms of social and legal belonging.