Drawing on data collected through clinical practice and ethnographic fieldwork, this study examines the experience of injury, illness and disability among undocumented Latino day laborers in San Francisco. We demonstrate how constructions of masculine identity organize the experience of embodied social suffering among workers who are rendered vulnerable by the structural conditions of undocumented immigrant status. Theoretical concepts from critical medical anthropology and gender studies extend the scholarly analysis of structural violence beyond the primarily economic to uncover how it is embodied at the intimate level as a gendered experience of personal and familial crisis, involving love, respect, betrayal and patriarchal failure. A clinical ethnographic focus on socially structured patriarchal suffering elucidates the causal relationship between macro-forces and individual action with a fuller appreciation of the impact of culture and everyday lived experience. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Hispanic Structural violence Central American immigrants Gender Mexican Undocumented Migrant Workers Occupational health injury

information processing anthropology immigrant Wounds and Injuries human injury violence work economic aspect Occupational Diseases manual labor Mexico gender identity Hispanic Americans masculinity San Francisco United States North America family Humans Hispanic worker California male labor migration social problem occupational exposure theoretical study Article adult gender love disability Transients and Migrants Anthropology, Cultural illegal immigrant documentation