This project explores legal regulation and women's experiences in Mexico, contrasting two different states with different legal frameworks. Women can strategize about the law that affects them by going from their home state to Mexico City, with different legal rules. An ethnographic study will be conducted in advocacy networks in Mexico City and court archives in the adjacent state of Guanajuato, located to the west of Mexico City. The researcher will work with advocacy groups in Mexico City and women who access the groups, and with legal documents in archives. Advocacy groups located in Mexico City enable women to mobilize the law; this study will evaluate contrasts to address two central questions: 1) How are conflicting legal and moral discourses of kinship, obligation and autonomy entangled in neighboring jurisdictions with different legislation and 2) How do women negotiate the legal pressures generated by rivaling juridical regimes? With regard to intellectual merit, this research project will bring valuable insight into legal mobilization, legal advocacy, and implementation of new laws in different jurisdictions in Mexico, an area that is understudied and with legal frameworks that raise new challenges within law and social sciences. By combining archival research with ethnographic methods such as participant-observation and iterative open ended interviews, this investigation will contribute to knowledge on legal mobilization when there are differences in law in neighboring jurisdictions.
With regard to broader impacts, this project will allow the training of a graduate student, and provide feedback to community groups in Mexico concerning how women strategize when engaging legal regulation.
This project explored how women engage different frameworks of legal regulation in Mexico, where the regulation and provision of healthcare services varies widely between federal states. An ethnographic study was conducted through participant-observation in advocacy networks for healthcare access, public clinics and Court archives in Mexico City and Guanajuato. The research project was based in two central questions; 1) How do women negotiate the challenges generated by rivaling jurisdictions in their search for healthcare and 2) How are discourses about autonomy and obligation brought into conflict between national and federal state level jurisprudence on healthcare rights? The research has brought important insights into the politics of healthcare access in Mexico. It has provided material for an ethnographic account of intersections between law and politics in Mexico and women´s everyday experiences in healthcare services. The researcher engaged a Mexican law student for the legal archive study, which culminated in a collaborative graduate student course outline on Mexican law and the politics of healthcare access. Through collaborative work with local non-governmental organizations, the research project also generated resources for training workshops for advocates and healthcare professionals to better support women in their engagement with different frameworks of legal regulation in healthcare settings.
