“Mom... you have homework”: an ethnographic approach to policies focused on health. Follow-up, intervention and control over practices of migrant women

Abstract

This work reviews the particularities of the daily management of health policy in a city in the Argentine Patagonia, where a focused and nonexplicit policy on migrant women from rural areas of Bolivia is evident. In a perspective of ethnographic knowledge and participant observation in different spaces of the public health system, the way in which health teams identify risk factors and implement monitoring, intervention and control logics is evidenced. In the meetings between migrant women and health workers, tensions over health practices are evident in a context crossed by multiple forms of inequality. In some situations, conceptions of risk emerge as a category that awards rights, where priorities for access to healthcare are evaluated according to the interpretation of health effectors. In this sense, the strategies of community workers in these meetings and in their labor relations, where they must respond with statistically evident results, are reviewed. Here migrant women organize ways to build health in contexts of inequality.