“I Get to Be a Person Here”: American Immigrants in Spain and the Practice of (Health) Care

Studies of immigrant health care routinely center less-advantaged persons in Global North contexts; U.S. scholarship frequently examines Latin American immigrants navigating the U.S. health landscape. Little work considers the health care experiences of U.S. citizens as immigrants as they are rarely labeled, analyzed, and debated comparably to less-advantaged immigrants. Instead of naturalizing the American experience as the point of comparison for immigrants, we can invert that dynamic by attending to Americans’ experiences as immigrant patients abroad. This inversion generates insight into leaving behind familiar health practices, configurations, and ideologies. Americans in Spain move from an advantaged sending country to a less-wealthy context with superior health care access and outcomes. Through interviews with 41 U.S. citizens in Spain, I explore how Americans unlearn health care avoidance, experience novel possibilities, question internalized logics, and interpret doing care differently. Through studying Americans as immigrants, we see how migration facilitates the reexamination of health-related values, behaviors, and practices.