Christina Marisa Getrich Ph.D.

Dr. Christina Getrich’s research is focused on the health and well-being of Latino immigrant families and their incorporation into U.S. society. She is particularly interested in how immigration enforcement policies and practices shape the lived experiences of immigrants and their children, as well as how they, in turn, maneuver these constraints as active participants in their communities.

Dr. Getrich’s most recent research has addressed health disparities among Latino populations in the U.S. Southwest. First as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a research scientist in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of New Mexico, she was a qualitative researcher on multidisciplinary teams conducting projects on cancer prevention and screening, behavioral health, and primary care health service delivery. As a critical medical anthropologist, she has explored how unequal health care access for Latinos is shaped by social, economic, and political factors such as discrimination, underemployment, and immigration status. Her research underscores the need to understand intra-ethnic variability in health care access and utilization; it has been oriented towards promoting health equity by finding culturally concordant solutions to improve health care, such as the use of patient navigators and promotoras (community health workers) in primary care.

Dr. Getrich is a scholar of migration more broadly, with a second research trajectory focused explicitly on immigration and citizenship. Supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the American Association of University Women, her dissertation examined how second-generation Mexican teenagers in San Diego forge their identity and sense of social belonging in an increasingly anti-immigrant U.S. society. Specifically, she explored how social membership is dialectically determined by the U.S. nation-state and its inhabitants, ultimately by a mix of the state’s formal pronouncements and the actions of members of the nation-state to articulate and assert their belonging. Articles arising from her dissertation chronicle how the second-generation youth actively engaged with the immigrant rights movement by organizing and orchestrating protests in 2006 and how they deploy everyday strategies of resistance to contest the immigration enforcement practices that negatively impact them and their communities.