An unprecedented moment

Growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. has brought renewed attention to immigrant experiences and mental health. María Piñeros-Leaño, Associate Professor in the School of Social Works at BC, studies physical and mental health inequities among Latin American immigrants in the U.S., especially women. Her work is largely informed by her own experience as an immigrant who came to the U.S. from Colombia at the age of 16, and the resilience she saw in her mother and grandmother. After earning her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Piñeros-Leaño joined the faculty at Boston College in 2018, drawn by its Latinx Leadership Initiative.

In an interview after the Feb. 11 “Climate Is Every Story” event on Forced Migration and Changing Communities, Piñeros-Leaño reflected on how her lived experiences have shaped her work and why her research matters in the current political climate.

You spent the first 16 years of your life in Colombia. How does your cultural background impact the research you do?

It has been really hard to separate that cultural background from the work I do. The passion that I bring for the work I do is predominantly informed by my own experiences. When I started my career, I focused on Latina immigrants, specifically mothers. Working with Latina immigrants themselves and seeing how resilient they were, you would never see them complain. Day after day, they would show up to work. They were just really grateful more than anything. You would see their appreciation for being here in this country. Seeing that resilience was really important to me. I saw it in my mom and grandma as well, that intergenerational resilience and what women have to deal with and how they do it so gracefully, was what instilled that passion in me. The work I do is exciting, I do it in the hopes that one day, we don’t have to be resilient. We don’t have to have such difficult lives and be so strong.

During the climate panel, you talked about your research on the mental health of Puerto Ricans displaced by the hurricane. Can you speak more about how receiving communities don’t always welcome people displaced by climate change and why that might be?

When we started doing this work, we thought that the communities would be very accepting, because we’re talking about communities that have been used to receiving immigrants, but not just immigrants, specifically Latino immigrants. We’re talking about South Florida, where we have this long history of Latino migration. But that wasn’t quite what we found. The more we talked to people, the more we started noticing this animosity between people that had already been established there and newcomers. The moment you start feeling this pressure of not having enough resources, of them being finite, then you start feeling that people are coming in to take [those] resources. We only interviewed the newcomers, not the ones that had been there for a while, but it was really interesting.

Recently, Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny has been in the spotlight for his Super Bowl performance, which featured a lot of cultural references and allusions to the hurricane. What are your thoughts on his cultural reach and influence at this moment?

I think it was huge. The moment we’re living in right now, I feel is unprecedented in the sense of how much you can just breathe that anti-immigrant feeling. Even experiences I had never had before in Massachusetts, I’ve been encountering uncomfortable moments. I speak Spanish with my partner, I speak Spanish with some colleagues at work, and you can just sense that. You can feel it. That’s one issue, but then we have Bad Bunny coming in with this amazing show, really reminding everyone that we’ve always been here. By we, I mean Latinos. We are not going anywhere and Spanish is a language spoken by millions of people in this country. [The performance] was simply beautiful, it was a moment where I think several Latinos felt that they belonged. Not only Latinos, I think it was more of this invitation to immigrant communities. They could have invited anyone else, but the fact that they did it right now and Bad Bunny decided to sing in Spanish, the messages he sent were just so powerful.

Is there one publication you’ve worked on that really stands out to you or was particularly insightful to study?

We did a study looking at how moms decided to feed their children, and what we found was there were several things that influenced how moms decided to feed their children. There was this inner battle that moms had, [struggling between] “I want to provide healthy food for my children, but I’ve also been deprived growing up of the things I wanted to eat, that I just want to give them everything.” There is this internal battle of wanting to feed them lots of vegetables and fresh food, but what happens when they ask me for a Happy Meal, which I could never have growing up. That was one of the more interesting and exciting studies I have found.