Women’s Narratives of Sufrimiento and the Stigmas and Fears Brought by Illegality

The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders
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The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders
Question 1: Invisible adjustments described in the women’s narratives of sufrimiento and how these adjustments make neoliberal policies socially possible.
The narratives of sufrimiento reveal how migrant women experience suffering both in Mexico and in the United States (Carney, 2015). The women struggle while adjusting to life in the U.S. as they are caught between the new living conditions and what they lost. The narratives reflect on the conditions of women’s migration and their everyday struggle for survival in the United States. Among the problems they face are material scarcity, social isolation in the U.S., nostalgia, and longing for home, and encounters with structural violence. The food was at the center of all the narratives as women assume multiple responsibilities both within and outside the home. Chronic food insecurity due to the neoliberal capital policies forced the women to migrate, but the problem persists in the U.S., particularly with the “illegality” that severely limits these women to cater to their families. The most notable effects of neoliberal ideology are the suppression of social suffering where the women come to internalize and accept the conditions of their existence as natural and deserved. Neoliberal economic policies and structural adjustment programs harm the society as they involve dramatic increases in basic commodities, wage cuts, and job losses among others. Women shoulder these negative consequences by making “i...