Sarah B Horton
Biographic Data
| ID | 95171 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sarah B Horton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sarah B |
| FAMILY NAME | Horton |
| SIGNATURE | HORTON S B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado Denver |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1092-2976 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 374 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Strategies of containment
La limitada mala fe de la persona auténtica. Una perspectiva sartreana
Basándome en la explicación que hace Jean-Paul Sartre de la violencia, sostengo que no solo la mala fe es inevitable en la práctica, sino que una mala fe limitada es necesaria para la autenticidad. Aunque violar la libertad de otros es mala fe, es imposible no violar nunca la libertad de alguien. Además, y de manera fundamental, la estructura ontológica del para-sí implica que este solo puede ser auténtico en el modo de no ser auténtico. Tratar d…
Teaching in Immigration Court
Praying for More Time
Based on longitudinal research conducted with 21 Mexican immigrants between 2018 and 2021, this article examines the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic posed to undocumented immigrants in the United States attempting to provide care for aging parents in Mexico. As the United States excluded undocumented immigrants from pandemic support, the pandemic undermined their ability to provide health care for their parents even as the Mexican public health …
On Pandemic Privilege
This essay examines the experience of conducting a "home-bound pandemic ethnography"-one that toggles back and forth between the ethnographer's own experience of the pandemic while in quarantine and the very different pandemic experiences of her Latina immigrant essential worker interviewees. Maintaining a split gaze between one's own experience and those of one's interviewees, a home-bound pandemic ethnography lends itself to a kind of reflexivi…
Hard Graft? The Office Chair as a Site for Decorative Art Interventions
As everyday life increasingly conflates home and work, the boundaries between the domestic and the workplace become ever more blurred. The practice-led research presented here tested the ability of decorative art interventions applied to a series of ordinary office chairs, to spotlight and critique this complex relationship. The everydayness of the chair, its familiarity and its easy comparison to the body, make it an ideal site for the ‘wearing’…
Explaining Lead Poisoning among Refugee Children
United States children living in poorly maintained housing built before 1978 are at particular risk of lead poisoning, which harms their physical and cognitive development. Studies have shown that although refugee children may have been exposed to lead in their homelands, some experienced increased blood lead (BPb) levels after their resettlement in the United States. This study provides an insider's account of the resettlement process from the p…
Immigrant Communities and the Public Charge Rule
Anthropology in Unseen Spaces
They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields
They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields takes the reader on an ethnographic tour of the melon and corn harvesting fields in California’s Central Valley to understand why farmworkers die at work each summer. Laden with captivating detail of farmworkers’ daily work and home lives, this book examines uses ethnography to show how U.S. immigration and labor policies have made migrant farmworkers “exceptional workers.” It explores the deeply intertwined…
From "Deportability" to "Denounce-ability
The highly publicized 2008 Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) worksite raid in Postville, Iowa, signaled a new strategy in interior immigration enforcement. Rather than merely deport the unauthorized workers it apprehended, ICE arrested them on charges of working under stolen documents (aggravated identity theft) and invented Social Security numbers (Social Security fraud) and imprisoned them prior to their deportation. Drawing on interviews…
Ghost Workers
Based on interviews and fieldwork in a migrant farmworking community in California's Central Valley, this article examines the phenomenon of "identity masking" and its implications for workers' labor conditions. It shows that labor supervisors often take advantage of unauthorized migrants' and minors' legal ineligibility for employment by making their employment contingent upon working a set of loaned identity documents. In doing so, employers re…
Identity loan
Critical Anthropology of Global Health “Takes a Stand” Statement
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010—the U.S.'s first major health care reform in over half a century—has sparked new debates in the United States about individual responsibility, the collective good, and the social contract. Although the ACA aims to reduce the number of the uninsured through the simultaneous expansion of the private insurance industry and government‐funded Medicaid, critics charge it merely expands rather than reforms the exist…
Medical Returns as Class Transformation
Because studies of migrants' 'medical returns' have been largely confined to the field of public health, such forms of return migration are rarely contextualized within the rich social scientific literature on transnational migration. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with Mexican migrants in an immigrant enclave in central California, I show that migrants' reasons for returning to their hometowns for care must be understood within the class dis…
Reasons for Self-Medication and Perceptions of Risk Among Mexican Migrant Farm Workers
Everything that I thought that they would be, they weren’t
Medical returns
A Latino Oral Health Paradox? Using Ethnography to Specify the Biocultural Factors Behind Epidemiological Models
This article presents evidence of a "Latino oral health paradox," in which Mexican immigrant parents in California's Central Valley report having had better oral health status as children in Mexico than their U.S.-born children. Yet little research has explored the specific environmental, social, and cultural factors that mediate the much-discussed "Latino health paradox," in which foreign-born Latinos paradoxically enjoy better health status tha…
Stigmatized Biologies
Severe early childhood caries (ECC) can leave lasting effects on children's physical development, including malformed oral arches and crooked permanent dentition. This article examines the way that the ECC of Mexican American farmworker children in the United States sets them up for lasting dental problems and social stigma as young adults. We examine the role of dietary and environmental factors in contributing to what we call "stigmatized biolo…
"Stains" on their self-discipline
Histories of the role of public health in nation building have revealed the centrality of hygiene to eugenic mechanisms of racial exclusion in the turn-of-the-20th-century United States, yet little scholarship has examined its role in the present day. Through ethnography in a Mexican migrant farmworking community in California's Central Valley, we explore the role of oral hygiene campaigns in racializing Mexican immigrant parents and shaping the …
A Mother’s Heart is Weighed Down with Stones
Rural Latino Immigrant Caregivers' Conceptions of Their Children's Oral Disease
Conceptions of oral disease derived from the caregivers' own dental experiences, their conceptions of the body, and interactions with dental professionals. The fact that biomedical explanations dominate the list of causes of caries for both groups indicates that the caregivers' explanatory models of oral disease are powerfully shaped by interactions with health professionals. Immigrant caregivers' mistaking of the baby bottle's nipple as the sour…
Consuming Childhood
Consuming Childhood:"Lost" and "Ideal" Childhoods as a Motivation for Migration Sarah Horton In the introduction to her well-known edited volume, Children and the Politics of Culture, published in 1995, Sharon Stephens argued that fears of a "crisis" in childhood emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with a new, and more penetrating, phase of global capitalism. Media images suddenly brought affluent Westerners-who subscribed to an ideal of childhood as …
Toward an Ethnography of the Uninsured
Gay Becker's following article on the uninsured, submitted to Medical Anthropology before her untimely death in January 2007, was innovative in placing the issue of the uninsured squarely at the heart of her analysis of the U.S. health care system. Becker's novel contribution lay in examining the lack of universal health care in the U.S. as a mode of governance that produced certain subjects--subjects whom the system trained to view themselves as…
Different Subjects
This paper explores the public health system's differential construction of Mexican and Cuban immigrants' "deservingness" of citizenship benefits and its preparation of them for different roles in U.S. society. Civic institutions such as the public health care system are charged with inculcating normative behavior in immigrants and instilling in them different conceptions about their rights and responsibilities. Faced with limited resources under…
Medical returns
"Stains" on their self-discipline
Histories of the role of public health in nation building have revealed the centrality of hygiene to eugenic mechanisms of racial exclusion in the turn-of-the-20th-century United States, yet little scholarship has examined its role in the present day. Through ethnography in a Mexican migrant farmworking community in California's Central Valley, we explore the role of oral hygiene campaigns in racializing Mexican immigrant parents and shaping the …
The double burden on safety net providers
Stigmatized Biologies
Severe early childhood caries (ECC) can leave lasting effects on children's physical development, including malformed oral arches and crooked permanent dentition. This article examines the way that the ECC of Mexican American farmworker children in the United States sets them up for lasting dental problems and social stigma as young adults. We examine the role of dietary and environmental factors in contributing to what we call "stigmatized biolo…
Transforming the Safety Net
In this article we examine the impact of Medicaid managed care on safety net organizations in New Mexico and their ability to maintain their traditional mission of charity care. We address two particular areas of concern that have arisen in the literature on Medicaid managed care. First, analysts have debated under what circumstances safety net organizations are better positioned to survive under market competition without abandoning their social…
Critical Anthropology of Global Health “Takes a Stand” Statement
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010—the U.S.'s first major health care reform in over half a century—has sparked new debates in the United States about individual responsibility, the collective good, and the social contract. Although the ACA aims to reduce the number of the uninsured through the simultaneous expansion of the private insurance industry and government‐funded Medicaid, critics charge it merely expands rather than reforms the exist…
Identity loan
Consuming Childhood
Consuming Childhood:"Lost" and "Ideal" Childhoods as a Motivation for Migration Sarah Horton In the introduction to her well-known edited volume, Children and the Politics of Culture, published in 1995, Sharon Stephens argued that fears of a "crisis" in childhood emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with a new, and more penetrating, phase of global capitalism. Media images suddenly brought affluent Westerners-who subscribed to an ideal of childhood as …
From "Deportability" to "Denounce-ability
The highly publicized 2008 Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) worksite raid in Postville, Iowa, signaled a new strategy in interior immigration enforcement. Rather than merely deport the unauthorized workers it apprehended, ICE arrested them on charges of working under stolen documents (aggravated identity theft) and invented Social Security numbers (Social Security fraud) and imprisoned them prior to their deportation. Drawing on interviews…
Ghost Workers
Based on interviews and fieldwork in a migrant farmworking community in California's Central Valley, this article examines the phenomenon of "identity masking" and its implications for workers' labor conditions. It shows that labor supervisors often take advantage of unauthorized migrants' and minors' legal ineligibility for employment by making their employment contingent upon working a set of loaned identity documents. In doing so, employers re…
Medical Returns as Class Transformation
Because studies of migrants' 'medical returns' have been largely confined to the field of public health, such forms of return migration are rarely contextualized within the rich social scientific literature on transnational migration. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with Mexican migrants in an immigrant enclave in central California, I show that migrants' reasons for returning to their hometowns for care must be understood within the class dis…
Everything that I thought that they would be, they weren’t
A Call to an Anthropology of Health Policy
On Pandemic Privilege
This essay examines the experience of conducting a "home-bound pandemic ethnography"-one that toggles back and forth between the ethnographer's own experience of the pandemic while in quarantine and the very different pandemic experiences of her Latina immigrant essential worker interviewees. Maintaining a split gaze between one's own experience and those of one's interviewees, a home-bound pandemic ethnography lends itself to a kind of reflexivi…
Praying for More Time
Based on longitudinal research conducted with 21 Mexican immigrants between 2018 and 2021, this article examines the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic posed to undocumented immigrants in the United States attempting to provide care for aging parents in Mexico. As the United States excluded undocumented immigrants from pandemic support, the pandemic undermined their ability to provide health care for their parents even as the Mexican public health …
A Latino Oral Health Paradox? Using Ethnography to Specify the Biocultural Factors Behind Epidemiological Models
This article presents evidence of a "Latino oral health paradox," in which Mexican immigrant parents in California's Central Valley report having had better oral health status as children in Mexico than their U.S.-born children. Yet little research has explored the specific environmental, social, and cultural factors that mediate the much-discussed "Latino health paradox," in which foreign-born Latinos paradoxically enjoy better health status tha…
Toward an Ethnography of the Uninsured
Gay Becker's following article on the uninsured, submitted to Medical Anthropology before her untimely death in January 2007, was innovative in placing the issue of the uninsured squarely at the heart of her analysis of the U.S. health care system. Becker's novel contribution lay in examining the lack of universal health care in the U.S. as a mode of governance that produced certain subjects--subjects whom the system trained to view themselves as…
Where is the "Mexican" in "New Mexican"? Enacting History, Enacting Dominance in the Santa Fe Fiesta
What are the implications of public commemorations of the Southwest's Spanish colonization, and do such celebrations sanction the conquest's continuing legacy of racial inequality? This paper examines such questions by way of an analysis of the Santa Fe Fiesta, an annual celebration of New Mexico's 1692 re-conquest from the Pueblo Indians by Spanish General Don Diego de Vargas. The Santa Fe Fiesta, which uses living actors to publicly re-enact th…
Teaching in Immigration Court
Maintaining Hispano Identity Through the Santa Fe Fiesta
This article focuses on the struggle between outside commercial interests and Hispano insiders to determine the significance and purpose of an annual community celebration, the Santa Fe Fiesta. In the hands of Anglo boosters, the first fiesta of 1919 appropriated Southwestern cultures to lure Anglo settlers and tourists to a developing new state. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, Hispanos have gradually re-appropriated the event …
Maintaining Hispano Identity Through the Santa Fe Fiesta
This article focuses on the struggle between outside commercial interests and Hispano insiders to determine the significance and purpose of an annual community celebration, the Santa Fe Fiesta. In the hands of Anglo boosters, the first fiesta of 1919 appropriated Southwestern cultures to lure Anglo settlers and tourists to a developing new state. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, Hispanos have gradually re-appropriated the event …
Where is the "Mexican" in "New Mexican"? Enacting History, Enacting Dominance in the Santa Fe Fiesta
What are the implications of public commemorations of the Southwest's Spanish colonization, and do such celebrations sanction the conquest's continuing legacy of racial inequality? This paper examines such questions by way of an analysis of the Santa Fe Fiesta, an annual celebration of New Mexico's 1692 re-conquest from the Pueblo Indians by Spanish General Don Diego de Vargas. The Santa Fe Fiesta, which uses living actors to publicly re-enact th…
Transforming the Safety Net
In this article we examine the impact of Medicaid managed care on safety net organizations in New Mexico and their ability to maintain their traditional mission of charity care. We address two particular areas of concern that have arisen in the literature on Medicaid managed care. First, analysts have debated under what circumstances safety net organizations are better positioned to survive under market competition without abandoning their social…
Different Subjects
This paper explores the public health system's differential construction of Mexican and Cuban immigrants' "deservingness" of citizenship benefits and its preparation of them for different roles in U.S. society. Civic institutions such as the public health care system are charged with inculcating normative behavior in immigrants and instilling in them different conceptions about their rights and responsibilities. Faced with limited resources under…
El tratamiento diferencial de los inmigrantes cubanos y mexicanos en el sistema de salud pública de Estados Unidos
Se examina la participación del sistema de salud pública de Estados Unidos en una construcción social más amplia, de los inmigrantes cubanos como dignos y de los mexicanos como indignos de los beneficios de la salud pública. Se muestra que la privatización acrecentó la preocupación sobre qué grupos sociales son "dignos" de los beneficios públicos. En particular, se expone la adopción por parte de Nuevo México de un sistema de salud privado para s…
A Call to an Anthropology of Health Policy
The double burden on safety net providers
Toward an Ethnography of the Uninsured
Gay Becker's following article on the uninsured, submitted to Medical Anthropology before her untimely death in January 2007, was innovative in placing the issue of the uninsured squarely at the heart of her analysis of the U.S. health care system. Becker's novel contribution lay in examining the lack of universal health care in the U.S. as a mode of governance that produced certain subjects--subjects whom the system trained to view themselves as…
A Mother’s Heart is Weighed Down with Stones
Rural Latino Immigrant Caregivers' Conceptions of Their Children's Oral Disease
Conceptions of oral disease derived from the caregivers' own dental experiences, their conceptions of the body, and interactions with dental professionals. The fact that biomedical explanations dominate the list of causes of caries for both groups indicates that the caregivers' explanatory models of oral disease are powerfully shaped by interactions with health professionals. Immigrant caregivers' mistaking of the baby bottle's nipple as the sour…
Consuming Childhood
Consuming Childhood:"Lost" and "Ideal" Childhoods as a Motivation for Migration Sarah Horton In the introduction to her well-known edited volume, Children and the Politics of Culture, published in 1995, Sharon Stephens argued that fears of a "crisis" in childhood emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with a new, and more penetrating, phase of global capitalism. Media images suddenly brought affluent Westerners-who subscribed to an ideal of childhood as …
"Stains" on their self-discipline
Histories of the role of public health in nation building have revealed the centrality of hygiene to eugenic mechanisms of racial exclusion in the turn-of-the-20th-century United States, yet little scholarship has examined its role in the present day. Through ethnography in a Mexican migrant farmworking community in California's Central Valley, we explore the role of oral hygiene campaigns in racializing Mexican immigrant parents and shaping the …
A Latino Oral Health Paradox? Using Ethnography to Specify the Biocultural Factors Behind Epidemiological Models
This article presents evidence of a "Latino oral health paradox," in which Mexican immigrant parents in California's Central Valley report having had better oral health status as children in Mexico than their U.S.-born children. Yet little research has explored the specific environmental, social, and cultural factors that mediate the much-discussed "Latino health paradox," in which foreign-born Latinos paradoxically enjoy better health status tha…
Stigmatized Biologies
Severe early childhood caries (ECC) can leave lasting effects on children's physical development, including malformed oral arches and crooked permanent dentition. This article examines the way that the ECC of Mexican American farmworker children in the United States sets them up for lasting dental problems and social stigma as young adults. We examine the role of dietary and environmental factors in contributing to what we call "stigmatized biolo…
Reasons for Self-Medication and Perceptions of Risk Among Mexican Migrant Farm Workers
Everything that I thought that they would be, they weren’t
Medical returns
Medical Returns as Class Transformation
Because studies of migrants' 'medical returns' have been largely confined to the field of public health, such forms of return migration are rarely contextualized within the rich social scientific literature on transnational migration. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with Mexican migrants in an immigrant enclave in central California, I show that migrants' reasons for returning to their hometowns for care must be understood within the class dis…
Critical Anthropology of Global Health “Takes a Stand” Statement
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010—the U.S.'s first major health care reform in over half a century—has sparked new debates in the United States about individual responsibility, the collective good, and the social contract. Although the ACA aims to reduce the number of the uninsured through the simultaneous expansion of the private insurance industry and government‐funded Medicaid, critics charge it merely expands rather than reforms the exist…
Identity loan
They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields
They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields takes the reader on an ethnographic tour of the melon and corn harvesting fields in California’s Central Valley to understand why farmworkers die at work each summer. Laden with captivating detail of farmworkers’ daily work and home lives, this book examines uses ethnography to show how U.S. immigration and labor policies have made migrant farmworkers “exceptional workers.” It explores the deeply intertwined…
From "Deportability" to "Denounce-ability
The highly publicized 2008 Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) worksite raid in Postville, Iowa, signaled a new strategy in interior immigration enforcement. Rather than merely deport the unauthorized workers it apprehended, ICE arrested them on charges of working under stolen documents (aggravated identity theft) and invented Social Security numbers (Social Security fraud) and imprisoned them prior to their deportation. Drawing on interviews…
Ghost Workers
Based on interviews and fieldwork in a migrant farmworking community in California's Central Valley, this article examines the phenomenon of "identity masking" and its implications for workers' labor conditions. It shows that labor supervisors often take advantage of unauthorized migrants' and minors' legal ineligibility for employment by making their employment contingent upon working a set of loaned identity documents. In doing so, employers re…
Anthropology in Unseen Spaces
Explaining Lead Poisoning among Refugee Children
United States children living in poorly maintained housing built before 1978 are at particular risk of lead poisoning, which harms their physical and cognitive development. Studies have shown that although refugee children may have been exposed to lead in their homelands, some experienced increased blood lead (BPb) levels after their resettlement in the United States. This study provides an insider's account of the resettlement process from the p…
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Medicine (15 works) · Immigration (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Economic growth (9 works) · Economics (9 works) · Migration, Health and Trauma (9 works) · Nursing (8 works) · Health care (7 works)