Converging Space and Producing Place: Social Inequalities and Birth Across Mexico

Abstract

This article combines ethnographic research of the professional midwifery model in Mexico with concepts gleaned from an interdisciplinary literature in order to illustrate how different types of spaces converge in the process of place-making. From October 2010 to November 2013, I conducted a twenty-eight-month research project, in which I interviewed employees from government bureaus and public health programs, and observed how the professional midwifery model unfolds in distinct contexts. I also carried out interviews as well as participant observation with CASA midwifery students and alumni. Moreover, I “shadowed” professional midwives and obstetricians as they engaged with pregnant women in a hospital setting. Based on ethnographic examples, this article points to five different types of space: contested, geopolitical, transnational, gendered, and embodied. Furthermore, it argues that these different spaces map onto socioeconomic and geo-racial grades in ways that produce wholly distinct places for individuals with contrasting positionalities in society. Given the ethnographic data presented in this article, to what extent health models can be successfully applied to different local contexts? This research concludes that it is impossible to cleanly extract health models from one local context and implement them in another. Greater attention to how contested, geopolitical, transnational, gendered, and embodied spaces are mapped onto one another to create unique places can productively inform public health policy, and lead to more appropriate place-based programs.