Pregnant and Socially Undocumented
This chapter employs the tools of ethnography and philosophical analysis to develop a descriptive account of female, socially undocumented embodiment. It explores the first-person narratives of “pregnant border-crossings” offered in ethnographic interviews conducted with many Mexican women who, while living in Mexico, crossed the Mexico-U.S. border to seek prenatal care and give birth in the United States, thereby securing U.S. citizenship for their children. It argues that for pregnant, socially undocumented people, the embodied, class-based elements of socially undocumented identity are particularly (and perhaps even inescapably) pronounced. For even a pregnant, middle-class, socially undocumented body seems indicative of what Bourdieu described as laisser aller—“letting oneself go”—causing pregnant, middle-class socially undocumented women to be “read” by immigration enforcement as belonging to a lower class-bracket. Thus, it is argued that the pregnant, socially undocumented women may be the most “illegalized” of all socially undocumented subjects in the United States.