key: cord-0937617-33uvughm
authors: Muñoz Martínez, Rubén
title: Definitions, differences and inequalities in times of COVID‐19: indigenous peoples in Mexico
date: 2020-06-17
journal: Soc Anthropol
DOI: 10.1111/1469-8676.12875
sha: cbe04e1227a8059464de76d68cc6b08cff3ff70c
doc_id: 937617
cord_uid: 33uvughm

nan

Mexico, as a Global South country, faces several challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of them relate to the limitations of its public healthcare system, especially in primary healthcare and in rural areas, which is currently transforming into a new healthcare system (called INSABI), as well as to the social and economic inequality experienced by a large part of its population. Urban and rural Mexico has 7.3 million indigenous-language speakers, who are the most disadvantaged socio-economic population in the country. A significant part of this population experiences a differentiated impact (compared with the general population) on their health condition and in access to and care from the public health system. This is due to the inadequacy of the healthcare system for linguistic and cultural diversity, discrimination based on ethnicity and, among others, the 'hospital-centric culture' concentrated in the cities that leaves rural areas abandoned.

Some activist (Secretariado Internacional de Pueblos Indígenas frente al VIH/sida, la sexualidad y los Derechos Humanos (SIPIA)) and academics have been showing the dramatic specific impact of HIV on these populations (Ponce et al. 2017: 537-54) , in Mexico and Latin America, currently invisible in the decision making arena. In this context, there are social imaginaries about the 'immunity' of indigenous peoples to certain health problems, what I have called ethnic immunity (Muñoz in press), nourished by the racist matrix originating from Spanish colonisation, co-produced by various social sectors such as, among others, the official epidemiology. As a mirror reversal of so-called risk/vulnerable groups susceptible to certain epidemics, such as HIV, indigenous peoples are, under the local rationality of ethnic immunity, excluded from official interest in understanding and addressing the differential impact of the epidemic (because 'they are not modern, they are heterosexual, monogamous and linked to nature and one should avoid adding more stigmatization to what they already experience' (Muñoz in press) . Under the new pandemic of COVID-19, we wonder if the old and new definitions of risk-vulnerable groups and the stereotypical local representations of 'who indigenous peoples are and how they live' will lead to new and/or old inequalities resulting from an inadequate, non-existent or late response, with catastrophic repercussions for these populations who are already structurally vulnerable. The racialised imaginary that nurtures the aforementioned ethnic immunity may be linked with others stereotypes, already existing, in accordance with the (always cultural) epidemiological definition of this new threat and with repercussions

Pueblos indígenas ante la epidemia del sida. Políticas, culturas y prácticas de la salud en el Sur de México

Pueblos indígenas', VIH y políticas públicas en Latinoamérica: una exploración en el panorama actual de la prevalencia epidemiológica, la prevención, la atención y el seguimiento oportuno

on prevention/care/timely follow-up: for example, 'they are mostly young and naturally healthy/strong, do not frequent urban/cosmopolitan population centers and remain attached to their traditional ways of life, distrusting biomedicine' (Muñoz in press). Considering the above, we require a preventive response from decisions makers and timely attention -culturally and structurally adequate -regarding this population. We are still in time.