Between nostalgia and exclusion: structural constraints and dietary resilience among undocumented Mexican migrants in Los Angeles, California

Undocumented Mexican migrants in the United States navigate everyday life under conditions shaped not only by economic hardship and legal exclusion, but also by the persistent anticipation of surveillance and immigration enforcement. While existing research often frames dietary change in migration as a result of cultural loss or individual choice, less attention has been paid to how legal precarity and anticipatory fear actively govern migrants' food practices, health, and mobility. This study examines how undocumented status becomes embodied through everyday food decisions, contributing to broader processes of health vulnerability and structural inequality. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among undocumented Mexican migrants in Los Angeles, California. Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews, participant observation recorded in fieldnotes, and photographic diaries documenting everyday food environments and practices. This qualitative approach enabled an examination of how migrants experience, interpret, and navigate food, health, and fear within their daily routines, capturing both material constraints and subjective meanings. The findings reveal that migrants' dietary practices are shaped not only by limited income and restricted access to nutritious and culturally meaningful foods, but also by what we conceptualize as the anticipatory governance of fear. Even in the absence of direct encounters with immigration authorities, migrants modify their routines to minimize visibility, avoiding certain public spaces, shops, and travel routes. These adaptations often reduce access to healthy foods, contributing to weight gain, fatigue, and chronic health conditions. At the same time, migrants actively preserve traditional foodways, sustain family care through cooking, and create spaces of resilience grounded in memory, cultural continuity, and community ties. These findings demonstrate how undocumented status operates not only as a legal category but as an embodied condition that shapes health outcomes through everyday practices of adaptation, restraint, and survival. By highlighting the anticipatory and lived dimensions of food insecurity, this study challenges individualistic and culturally reductionist explanations of dietary change. Instead, it situates migrant health within broader structures of legal precarity, labor exploitation, and surveillance. This human-centered and ethnographically grounded analysis contributes to critical scholarship on migration, nutrition, and health by revealing how governance, fear, and inequality become inscribed in bodies, diets, and everyday life.