Browse Exhibits (4 total)
Undocumented, Unseen, and Unwell: Accessing Healthcare in the US South Between 2010–2024
This exhibit is designed to contextualize and highlight the challenges that undocumented migrants have faced in accessing healthcare in the U.S. South over the past decade. Drawing from a wide range of materials—including oral histories, newspaper articles, and public records—it attempts to uncover the systemic, legal, and social barriers that shape migrants' encounters with the healthcare system.
Purpose and Importance
Access to healthcare for undocumented migrants in the United States remains unequal. Today, most undocumented people are excluded from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s coverage options, leaving them dependent on a fragmented safety net of emergency rooms, free clinics, and community health centers. These services vary drastically by region, and nowhere is this disparity more visible than in the U.S. South. In the South, state-level decisions, underfunded infrastructure, and political hostility toward immigrants have created some of the country’s harshest conditions for undocumented patients.
This exhibit will focus on the period from 2014 to 2024—a decade marked by shifting federal policies. This timeframe captures a critical juncture in healthcare access, public discourse, and migrant advocacy in the South.
Why the South?
The U.S. South is sometimes overlooked in national conversations about immigration and healthcare, yet it has become one of the fastest-growing destinations for migrant communities, particularly states like Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, and Alabama. At the same time, many Southern states have rejected Medicaid expansion under the ACA, increasing the risk of medical neglect for undocumented populations. The region’s rural geography and legacy of racial inequality make it a key place to study to understand how policy can shape healthcare access.
This project builds directly on our website's themes of marginalization, structural violence, and the historical roots of healthcare inequality. It serves as a case study that shows how the past can inform present-day disparities. This exhibit is aimed at an audience of academic peers, healthcare professionals, policymakers, and activists working towards more equitable healthcare solutions.
Call to Action
This is meant to be more than a digital timeline, it is an invitation to consider how law and society intersect to affect millions of people. By incorporating lived experiences and structural analysis, the exhibit challenges viewers to reconsider what it means to offer “care."
Hillbilly Highway Migrant Southerners: Places of Labor and Connection, 1920s- 1980s
For a full-screen view, follow this link.
As I first began to work on this project my goal was to find moments where migrants from the South travelled along Hillbilly Highway and found moments of joy and community despite desperate economic conditions. Hillbilly Highway is the term coined by Steven Earle in 1986 denoting the path Southerners and Appalachians took to Midwestern cities when looking for economic opportunities. With the mechanization of mines, hundreds of thousands of migrants came to the North to find work.
Without thinking twice, I stated that I only wanted to look for these moments of humanity or connection, away from workspaces, factories, or fields. However, along the way, I began to realize how I was negating the true experience of a working-class, Southern migrant. I was demanding them to work and survive in adverse conditions while documenting their lives in detail. I was asking too much of the historical actors I claimed to serve. With this realization, I began to reorient myself and what it meant to uncover moments of community when individuals were working seven days a week for twelve-hour days. To start, where have previous scholars found evidence of a working-class community? What were their findings, and how did they unveil the relationship between the workplace and community building?
I came upon Robin Kelley and his article, “We Are Not What We Seem:” Rethinking the Black Working Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South. Kelley is a Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his work theoretically grounds my entire project. In this article, Kelley builds upon Anthropologist James C. Scott’s infrapolitics concept. Infrapolitics or the daily struggle waged by subaltern groups “should be invisible… is in large part by design — a tactical choice born in prudent awareness of the balance of power.” The theory of infrapolitics challenges the researcher to not ignore tiny moments of resistance. In stealing moments for themselves and being proud of their identity, the migrants participated in infrapolitics and influenced the political world in which they were living. Daily actions by migrants had consequences for existing power relationships and shaped the communities they were a part of.
Rather than looking for huge parties, secret sex scandals, or migrants doubled over in laughter, I must look for the small moments.The moments where they snuck away from the production line, took a drag off a cigarette, and sang a song. These seemingly tiny moments are what I need to be looking for, and this is what I have found.
What makes a carpet-bagger?
This project explores the history and evolution of the term carpet-bagger and its inextricable links to mobility and the history of Reconstruction, as well as exploring the realities of the original carpet-baggers in the South of their time.
The 'carpet-bagger' was a divisive figure in post Civil War America. It referred to a Northerner who moved to the South, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, i.e. during Reconstruction. Many Northerners made this migration during this period, whether motivated by political aspirations, in pursuit of riches in the radically changed cotton farming industry, or simply seeking a better life. The term 'carpet-bagger' was quickly and firmly established into the social and political fabric of the period, exacting a variety of different responses from different groups. The term survives to this day, applied nowadays to politicians who seek election in areas to which they have no local connection.
An Incomplete History of Mexican Fort Worth
At the start of this project, I wanted to focus on the demographic development of Fort Worth's North Side neighborhood and why it became it a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, and what it can say about the city and immigration.
In researching for this project, I was not surprised to one, find Fort Worth history so focused on notable white residents and industries run by white people that shaped the city and two, discover a general lack in scholarship and history of the Mexican and Hispanic residents of the city. The sources that examined and documented the history of Mexican immigration and residents to Fort Worth were largely focused on the early 20th century. I wrote what I could find – and given more time, I am sure I can find satisfying post-World War II histories of Mexican Fort Worth that answer my questions about other largely Mexican parts of the city and what the demographic, economic, and social trends in the North Side say about the future of the North Side.
The pages in this project feature a look at Mexican immigration to Texas in the early 20th century, a general history of the city of Fort Worth and the North Side, the pull factors that brought Mexican immigrants to Fort Worth, how these Mexican immigrants settled in the North Side and in the city, and lastly, a reflection of the gaps in the research.
Note: Click on the photographs and maps to see their citations.