Between Nostalgia and Exclusion: Structural Constraints and Dietary Resilience among Undocumented Mexican Migrants in Los Angeles, California

Pascual García-Macías^1*Nubia Barcenas^2,3

• ¹Universidad Tecnica Particular de Loja, Loja, Ecuador
• ²Universidad Autonoma de Zacatecas, Zacatecas, Mexico
• ³Universidad Autonoma de Zacatecas Unidad Academica de Medicina Humana y Ciencias de la Salud, Zacatecas, Mexico

This article explores how undocumented Mexican migrants in Los Angeles experience food, health, and fear in their everyday lives. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork including interviews, fieldnotes, and photographic diaries, it examines how migrants' diets are shaped not only by poverty and legal exclusion, but also by the constant anticipation of surveillance and immigration enforcement. Rather than seeing food choices as matters of personal preference or cultural loss, the study situates dietary change within the pressures of legal precarity, labor insecurity, and limited access to nutritious, culturally meaningful foods. We introduce the concept of anticipatory governance of fear to describe how fear, often without direct encounters with the state, governs what migrants eat, where they shop, and how they move through the city. Migrants adjust their routines to remain invisible, limiting their food options and compromising their health in the process. Yet, within these constraints, they also preserve traditional foodways, care for their families, and create pockets of resilience through cooking, community, and memory. The findings reveal how undocumented status becomes inscribed not only in policies or statistics, but in bodies through weight gain, fatigue, and chronic illness, and in daily acts of restraint and adaptation. By highlighting the lived, embodied, and anticipatory dimensions of food insecurity, this study offers a grounded, human-centered contribution to scholarship on migration, health, and social justice.