Surviving HIV/AIDS in the Inner City - How Resourceful Latinas Beat the Odds (Paperback)

"In this original and interdisciplinary book, Chase illuminates the unequal treatment faced by the Puerto Rican women she studied and creates compassion for the hardships they faced." -Michele Tracey Berger, author of The Intersectional Approach Surviving HIV/AIDS in the Inner City explores the survival strategies of poor, HIV-positive Puerto Rican women by asking four key questions: Given their limited resources, how did they manage an illness as serious as HIV/AIDS? Did they look for alternatives to conventional medical treatment? Did the challenges they faced deprive them of self-determination, or could they help themselves and each other? What can we learn from these resourceful women? Based on her work with minority women living in Newark, New Jersey, Sabrina Marie Chase illuminates the hidden traps and land mines burdening our urban health care system. For the women she studied, alliances with doctors, nurses, and social workers could literally mean the difference between life and death. By applying the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to the day-to-day experiences of HIV-positive Latinas, Chase explains why some struggled and even died while others flourished and occasionally thrived under difficult conditions. These gripping, true-life stories reveal the strategies utilized by the chronically ill among us who depend on the health care "safety net." Through her exploration of life and death among Newark's resourceful women, Chase provides the groundwork for transforming our ailing urban health care system. SABRINA MARIE CHASE is a medical anthropologist specializing in family medicine and racial and ethnic health care disparities. She is a health care researcher at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. A volume in the Studies in Medical Anthropology series, edited by Mac Marshall