Understanding the Dialogical Experiences of Puerto Rican Women With Fibromyalgia: An Intersectional Analysis

Introduction: Fibromyalgia is a condition that is often misunderstood by the medical community. Misunderstandings are exacerbated when a patient is an ethnic minority, and recent literature suggests that ethnic minorities are shown to have a higher prevalence of fibromyalgia. Despite this information, many studies about fibromyalgia are conducted with Anglo-Americans while ethnic minorities are underrepresented. Methods: To address this research gap, this study uses qualitative interviews to discuss the dialogical experiences of Puerto Rican women with fibromyalgia through a combination of intersectional and rhetorical theory. These methodologies can reveal what having various identities can mean when communicating in institutional and cultural settings. Results: The data shows a significant level of gaslighting by providers, which led participants to more aggressively seek proper treatment. Cultural deference towards doctors was also noted as a practice that can backfire, especially when living with a condition that is often dismissed. Conclusion: The results indicate that when the body's truth is filtered through intersectional lenses, this truth can become distorted or lost.

Soy and Frequent Dairy Consumption with Subsequent Equol Production Reveals Decreased Gut Health in a Cohort of Healthy Puerto Rican Women

The U.S. Hispanic female population has one of the highest breast cancer (BC) incidence and mortality rates, while BC is the leading cause of cancer death in Puerto Rican women. Certain foods may predispose to carcinogenesis. Our previous studies indicate that consuming combined soy isoflavones (genistein, daidzein, and glycitein) promotes tumor metastasis possibly through increased protein synthesis activated by equol, a secondary dietary metabolite. Equol is a bacterial metabolite produced in about 20–60% of the population that harbor and exhibit specific gut microbiota capable of producing it from daidzein. The aim of the current study was to investigate the prevalence of equol production in Puerto Rican women and identify the equol producing microbiota in this understudied population. Herein, we conducted a cross-sectional characterization of equol production in a clinically based sample of eighty healthy 25–50 year old Puerto Rican women. Urine samples were collected and evaluated by GCMS for the presence of soy isoflavones and metabolites to determine the ratio of equol producers to equol non-producers. Furthermore, fecal samples were collected for gut microbiota characterization on a subset of women using next generation sequencing (NGS). We report that 25% of the participants were classified as equol producers. Importantly, the gut microbiota from equol non-producers demonstrated a higher diversity. Our results suggest that healthy women with soy and high dairy consumption with subsequent equol production may result in gut dysbiosis by having reduced quantities (diversity) of healthy bacterial biomarkers, which might be associated to increased diseased outcomes (e.g., cancer, and other diseases).

Latin music education in new york

This chapter details the longstanding formal and informal Latin music education settings and networks in New York City, as well as some of the ways in which the musicians benefited from them. It introduces three Puerto Rican women, from the 1920s through 1950s, who taught some of the greatest pianists to emerge from the New York scene. The chapter then presents a Panamanian pianist and a Cuban flautist who imparted musicianship, theory, and piano lessons to countless musicians who were influential performers, composers, and arrangers. The Afro-Latin folkloric music scene in New York was an incubator for musical innovation and preservation; musicians from across ethnic groups have studied, performed, and recorded ritual and folkloric genres. New York City, unlike sites within the Caribbean, offered a wide range of formal and informal study opportunities for musicians from throughout the Caribbean. It explores some of the institutions that served as meeting grounds for musicians, and provided both rehearsal and performance opportunities for aspiring musicians.

Queering Puerto Rican Women’s Narratives

While in the last decades there has been a proliferation of writings by Latina lesbians who theorize issues of intersectionality, missing still are the voices and analyses of Puerto Rican lesbians who articulate the specificity of Puerto Rican sexual, racial, national, and class dynamics. It is within this context that the author examines Memoir of a Visionary (2002) by Antonia Pantoja and The Noise of Infinite Longing (2004) by Luisita López Torregrosa; the article considers how these recent memoirs engage with intersecting issues in the lives of Puerto Rican women and suggest how shame implicitly conditions the articulation of Puerto Rican identity.

Caring for Labor History

This essay charts how the author’s interest in labor history and the history of care work were inspired by her own family history of migrations from Puerto Rico to the United States. It considers how her grandmother’s stories about being a child needle worker in Puerto Rico and a migrant domestic worker in New York led her to think critically about the connections and overlap between the home and workplace in the lives of Puerto Rican women. As a student, investigating her personal history led her to discover a rich tradition of Puerto Rican feminist labor history that raised questions about reproductive politics and caring labor that remain pressing in our contemporary moment.

Heterogeneity in Self-Reported Cognitive Impairment Life Expectancies Among Older Latino Subgroups in the United States

Research suggests the prevalence of cognitive impairment among older U.S. Latinos is increasing relative to the older U.S. population which has experienced and overall decline. This has been attributed in part to extended longevity, lower educational attainment, and a higher prevalence of diabetes and cardiovascular disease among older Latinos. However, less is known regarding the number of years and proportion of late life spent with self-reported cognitive impairment among this rapidly aging group and whether cognitive impairment life expectancy outcomes vary across U.S. Latino subgroups by country of origin. To fill this gap, our investigation uses data from the National Health Interview Survey (1997-2015) to estimate Sullivan-based life tables of cognitively normal and cognitively impaired life expectancies for adults 50 years and older. Results indicate significant heterogeneity among Latinos, with island-born Puerto Rican women spending the most years, and foreign-born Cuban men the fewest years lived with self-reported cognitive impairment.