In Landscapes of Care, Thurka Sangaramoorthy deftly traverses the winding creeks and hamlets of Maryland’s Eastern Shore in order to analyze “how care becomes conceptualized and enacted in rural settings among immigrants and nonimmigrant residents” (p. xiii). Moving among community health facilities, service organizations, work sites, and immigrant enclaves, the book traces the precarity of Haitian and Latinx immigrants laboring in agriculture, poultry, and seafood processing. Scholars of immigration will find this text particularly useful in its attentiveness to immigrant experience in the rural US in general—isolated areas that often go understudied—and the mid-Atlantic in particular.
Sangaramoorthy takes special care to connect her findings to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the US health care system’s most significant regulatory overhaul and expansion in half a century. Sangaramoorthy describes how many of her interlocutors in Maryland “felt that the ACA sustained inequitable neoliberal policies because it left the current, corporatized, for-profit...