LOS HUECOS DEL CONOCIMIENTO EN SALUD Y MIGRACIÓN

 Este es un placeholder CADA VEZ MÁS BONITO para el blog que debemos escribir en los próximos 10 días, si queremos estar a tiempo de sacar el observatorio antes de fin de mes.

   Si @César Infante está de acuerdo, este primer blog lo podemos escribir juntos, firmado por nosotros dos y/o por GAMyS, y hola ser el primer debería de presentar las razones de haber creado el observatorio, y quizá relacionarlo con la agenda de investigación de WHO. Hablar un poco de los cambios migratorios y cómo presentan nuevos retos a la salud pública en México, y cómo este observatorio responde a esa necesidad.

   Como estoy escribiendo este texto sólo para usarlo de placeholder, y habida cuenta que necesitamos ver cómo se vería un texto de unas 1,000 palabras, voy a copiar aquí texto de un artículo ya publicado a manera de ilustración.

Food choices (FC), as well as decisions about food provisioning, preparation, and consumption, are important for health, and they are also an expression of individual and relational identity. However, for people in socially disadvantaged circumstances all those choices are limited by constraints such as income, the geographical proximity of food sources, limited social networks, and having scarce time to purchase or prepare meals (Hammelman, 2018; Hough & Sosa, 2015).

   At the extreme of restriction in food choices, food insecurity (FI) is said to be present when a person or household lacks access to sufficient, nutritious and safe food (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)). FI is common among migrants, especially those displaced from their places of origin because of violence or disasters (Khuri et al., 2022; Logie et al., 2022; Talhouk et al., 2022). Among them, a group that seems to be particularly vulnerable to FI are migrants in transit (those who have left their countries of origin, without having reached their final intended destination). Migrants often travel with limited economic resources, are unable to work in the countries through which they transit, and can be separated from their social support systems. All of these results in severe limitations to their capacity to acquire and prepare food. FI among migrants in transit has seldom been studied, but the literature available reports extremely high prevalences among them, even when compared with other types of migrants (Orjuela-Grimm et al., 2021; WFP, 2023).

   In response to FI, individuals and households resort to changes in FC, as well as trying to obtain food or monetary resources to buy food in different (and sometimes dangerous) ways (Leung et al., 2020; Tsegaye et al., 2018). Migrants in transit have been reported to resort to begging in the street, collecting discarded food from markets and in the garbage (WFP, 2023), seeking support from governmental and non-governmental agencies, exchanging incidental services (such as cleaning or carrying groceries, among others) for food with the local population, and sharing food with other migrants (Deschak et al., 2022).

   On the other hand, most studies of FI among migrants and refugees, as well as food relief programs directed to them, tend to focus on either the general population, or on women and children (Saeedullah et al., 2021). The experiences of FI of adolescents have been less studied, and to our knowledge no reports so far address the case of adolescents in the context of in-transit migration.

   The lack of data about this population is of concern, given the possible impact of FI on health during this critical period of continued growth and development. Since the FC and practices of adolescents set the basis for those of adulthood, their impact is long lasting (Shaw et al., 2023). Eating practices are part of peer group socialization, and as such play a crucial role in the construction and expression of identity, and autonomy in FC during adolescence is part of the development of autonomy in other areas (Neely et al., 2014; Shaw et al., 2023). It is therefore not surprising that FI markedly impacts adolescents’ mental health, among both non-migrants and migrants (Ayotte et al., 2020; Bidopia et al., 2023; Pengpid & Peltzer, 2023; Smith et al., 2023), in addition to its association with a less nutritious diet (Barnett et al., 2022). Similar to adults, adolescents experiencing FI resort to multiple coping strategies, including street begging, performing incidental services, and more dangerous activities such as engaging in sex work, drug selling or shoplifting (Mmari et al., 2019).

   Every year, and increasingly in the past decade, adolescent migrants travel through Mexico and Central America, most of them aiming to reach the United States. In the first trimester of 2023, over 20,000 unaccompanied minors were intercepted by the Mexican migration authorities (Unidad de Política Migratoria Registro e Identidad de Personas/ Secretaría de Gobernación, 2023), and between January and June of the same year the United States’ returned almost 7,000 Mexican underage migrants who had crossed the border alone (Rojas, 2023). Added to this, thousands of adolescents move along the same route with their parents or other adults each year.

   In 2022-2023, we conducted a qualitative study, with the aim of exploring the food-related experiences of adolescents who were in-transit migrants in Mexico. For this article, our objective was to explore their experiences of FI, how it influenced their FC, and the ways they coped with FI.

   We recruited participants in two shelters for migrants, one receiving only minors, and the other families and adults of all genders and ages. The two shelters are in cities in Northern Mexico, close to the United States border. Further details are omitted to preserve confidentiality.