(Un)disciplined/(In)disposable Bodies: The Layered Patchworks of Care, Kinship, and Community Responses

In 2002 my great-grandmother, Inez Fuentes was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and her oldest daughter, my grandmother, Yolanda Cobos relocated to San Antonio to live with, and care for, her mother. This paper will focus... [ view full abstract ]

In 2002 my great-grandmother, Inez Fuentes was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and her oldest daughter, my grandmother, Yolanda Cobos relocated to San Antonio to live with, and care for, her mother. This paper will focus on the many forms of care that exist within homosocial domestic spaces, or patchworks of care. The exclusively Mexican American women’s sewing circle at my grandmother’s church produces items weekly to be sold at local church craft stores, from which portions of the proceeds go directly to supporting the residents of The Sarah Roberts French Home, a nonprofit, privately run eldercare group home, exclusive to women from a working class or impoverished socioeconomic background. A number of these residents suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. The home was endowed by San Antonio resident Sarah Roberts upon her death, which leads to a number of research questions that will inform this paper: Who are the residents of this elder women’s group home? What are the precipitating factors/circumstances that necessitate this private citizen’s endowment of this facility? What are the circumstances leading to residency, as well as employment in this particular facility? How do these homosocial networks of women in my grandmother’s sewing circle conceive of this facility’s importance in their community?
My primary research location is San Antonio, Texas where my interaction and observational fieldwork takes place. Most importantly, San Antonio is my great-grandmother’s home and it is where my grandmother and I live and cared for her, as well as one another. We reside in a city that represents both the history and future of the United States, and as a borderland between north and south, old and new, the ways in which social and political resources are allocated continues to be determined by racialized access to power and wealth. Thinking about San Antonio as a borderlands site and a critical space of U.S. nation building, through localized collective action, the patchworks of care that I will make visible become a crucial response to the increasingly individualistic and market-based decision-making processes guiding modern healthcare and labor policy that mark bodies as disposable.
In this paper, I show how these Mexicanas use their labor and biopower to produce artifacts and care for people, not for profit, but for care. Their labor does not directly benefit the state, but each other. In this sense, my grandmother and the women in her sewing circle labor for the human value they see in women like my great grandmother and the women residents of this exclusive group home. In this paper, I will examine the socio-historical context of marginalized black and brown communities relying upon community healthcare workers, caregivers, and services to thwart the state’s implied disposability of black and brown women’s bodies. I will expand on my conceptions of patchworks of care where human experience meets the state. I will explore cultural aspects of why my grandmother chooses to expend her labor in these ways, examining community connections to recipients of care when the self is visualized in another.