This study approaches food insecurity among undocumented Mexican migrants not as an outcome of individual choice or cultural adaptation, but as the result of structurally constrained life conditions. Drawing on structural vulnerability (5) and deportability (6), it highlights how legal exclusion, labor precarity, and limited access to public institutions systematically shape migrants’ exposure to harm and constrain their ability to maintain healthy diets.

Undocumented status, in this framework, is not simply a legal designation it reorganizes everyday life, shaping how food is accessed, prepared, and consumed. Migrants must navigate low income, time poverty, fear of institutional contact, and exclusion from welfare systems, all of which reduce their actual food agency. Following the capabilities approach (7, 8), food agency here is understood not as formal choice, but as the real opportunity to achieve valued states of health, dignity, and cultural continuity under unequal conditions.

As Carney (9, 10) argues, undocumented migrants are not outside the state; they are conditionally incorporated into morally regulated systems like food aid and fragmented healthcare. This makes food practices a key site to observe how governance, exclusion, and care intersect in everyday life.

Migrant diets often transform drastically after migration. In line with nutritional transition theory (11–13), this shift involves moving from traditional, fresh, plant-based diets toward ultra-processed, calorie-dense foods. These transitions are shaped not by cultural loss alone, but by structural inequalities tied to trade policies, urban segregation, and the global food industry (14, 15).

Concepts such as food apartheid (26) emphasize how low-income and racialized communities face constrained food environments, dominated by fast food and lacking fresh produce. In these contexts, dietary change becomes not a matter of preference, but adaptation to limited and unequal options.

Migrants’ food practices, however, are not passive. As Carney and others (9, 10, 16) suggest, food remains a space of negotiation, care, and moral responsibility. Even amid scarcity, the invocation of traditional foodways signals a struggle for cultural continuity and dignity (2, 17).

To analyze migrants’ food agency under conditions of exclusion, this study draws selectively on the capabilities–aspirations framework (7, 8, 18), not as a predictive model but as a heuristic for understanding how aspirations for health, family care, and cultural preservation persist despite severe structural constraints. For many migrants, however, these aspirations collide with limited capabilities, resulting in compromised dietary practices and adverse health outcomes.

Economic precarity, limited access to fresh and culturally appropriate foods, and exposure to obesogenic environments often lead to increased consumption of inexpensive, energy-dense products, reinforcing patterns of obesity, diabetes, and hypertension documented in epidemiological research (19, 20). These dietary shifts are accompanied by psychosocial consequences, including guilt, stigma, and acculturative stress (21), highlighting that food practices are embedded in broader processes of social valuation and exclusion.

Crucially, this framework understands the body not merely as a biological outcome of dietary change, but as a site where structural exclusion is embodied over time. Building on Carney’s emphasis on food, care, and moral regulation, health outcomes such as weight gain, chronic fatigue, and metabolic illness are read as corporeal expressions of governance operating through everyday food practices.

This study introduces anticipatory governance of fear as its central analytical lens. Developed in critical dialogue with deportability (6) and structural vulnerability (5), this concept specifies the mechanism through which legal exclusion becomes operative in everyday life. While deportability captures the structural condition of being permanently removable and structural vulnerability highlights unequal exposure to harm, anticipatory governance of fear identifies how these conditions are enacted before direct state intervention. Rather than relying on constant surveillance or overt coercion, governance operates through the internalization of threat, leading migrants to regulate their own conduct in advance.

Applied to food practices, anticipatory governance of fear illuminates how migrants adjust where they shop, whether they access food assistance, how long they remain in public spaces, and which routes they take when procuring food. Food insecurity thus emerges not only from economic scarcity or spatial inequality, but from anticipatory self-regulation shaped by fear of exposure and enforcement. This perspective provides a conceptual bridge between structural conditions and lived experience, allowing everyday dietary practices to be read as responses to governance that operates before enforcement.

Importantly, this framework foregrounds the embodied consequences of anticipatory governance. Compromised dietary practices are accompanied by psychosocial effects such as guilt, stigma, and acculturative stress, as well as by physiological outcomes including weight gain, chronic fatigue, hypertension, and metabolic illness. Building on Carney’s work (9, 10, 22), the body is understood here as an archive of governance, where legal precarity, moral regulation, and nutritional constraint sediment over time. Dietary change and its health sequelae are therefore not merely biomedical phenomena, but corporeal expressions of structural exclusion.

These dynamics unfold within food environments marked by profound inequality. Migrants’ reflections on their neighborhoods echo the food apartheid framework (15, 26), which highlights racialized and class-based segregation in access to nutritious foods. In such contexts, even when migrants aspire to eat healthily, their options are constrained by cost, availability, and time poverty. These constraints are intensified by labor precarity and undocumented status, which restrict access to social protection systems and deter engagement with health and food assistance institutions (6, 9).

The outcomes of these negotiations operate on two interrelated planes. On the one hand, physical and mental health are shaped by dietary change, chronic disease, and acculturative stress (20, 21). On the other hand, symbolic and relational well-being is affected through experiences of stigma, loss, resilience, and cultural reproduction. Community networks, informal markets, urban gardens, and food-based solidarities function as fragile infrastructures that can both buffer and reproduce vulnerability (23, 27). Together, this theoretical framework enables an integrated reading of how food practices among undocumented Mexican migrants constitute a field where structural exclusion is reproduced, negotiated, and, at times, resisted in everyday life. Figure 1 synthesizes the analytical framework of the study, showing how structural exclusion operates through anticipatory governance of fear to shape everyday food practices and embodied health outcomes among undocumented Mexican migrants in Los Angeles.

In sum, this theoretical framework brings together critical concepts of structural vulnerability, deportability, and the original lens of anticipatory governance of fear to explain how undocumented migrants’ food practices are shaped by both material constraints and anticipatory self-regulation. By integrating the capabilities–aspirations perspective, the study emphasizes how health, care, and cultural continuity are pursued under constrained conditions. This conceptual model foregrounds the temporal, embodied, and micro-political dimensions of food insecurity and positions food not merely as a nutritional need, but as a key site of governance, agency, and resilience. It sets the stage for analyzing how everyday dietary choices become entangled with the lived experience of legal exclusion in Los Angeles.

This study adopts a qualitative, phenomenological interpretive approach (28), complemented by insights from critical ethnography (29). We aim to understand migrants’ lived experiences of food and health as they are felt, narrated, and practiced in everyday life, while also situating these experiences within the broader power relations that shape them. This interdisciplinary design makes it possible to bring together an emic perspective capturing participants’ own meanings, interpretations, and narratives with an etic reading informed by critical social theory, attentive to structural conditions, inequality, and constraint. Methodologically, this design is suited to examining how governance and legal precarity become lived through mundane routines, such as shopping, cooking, avoiding institutions, and managing visibility, making it particularly appropriate for analyzing anticipatory governance of fear as an everyday mechanism rather than an abstract construct. The ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in Los Angeles, California, between January and August 2024. This timeframe represents a critical socio-political hiatus: the eve of the 2025 political shift. Although these data precede the subsequent intensification of ICE enforcement and the mass social mobilizations observed in 2025, the study captures a state of ‘anticipatory governance of fear’. At this threshold, migrants already operated under a self-imposed paralysis, demonstrating that the fear of visibility and the restriction of mobility were already deeply rooted as defensive mechanisms before the formal change in administration.

Throughout the article, we use the term migrant as an inclusive analytical category to refer to individuals who have moved away from their place of usual residence, without presuming permanence, legal status, or intentions of long-term settlement. The term immigrant is employed only when referring to formal legal classifications or when participants explicitly describe themselves using that label.

Thirty undocumented Mexican migrants (17 women and 13 men) residing in the Los Angeles metropolitan area participated. Inclusion criteria were being over 18 years of age, residing in the United States for at least 12 months, and employment primarily in low-wage sectors (cleaning, food service, urban agriculture, construction, or street vending). Sampling began through Latino community organizations and expanded via participant referrals, following theoretical and snowball logic (30). Sample size was determined by theoretical saturation (31), ceasing recruitment once new data no longer contributed to additional analytic categories. Interviews were in-depth and semi-structured, lasting approximately 45–120 min, and were audio-recorded when participants agreed; otherwise, detailed contemporaneous notes were taken. All interviews were transcribed verbatim in Spanish before analysis.

Fieldwork was conducted from January to August 2024 across several Los Angeles neighborhoods with large Mexican populations, primarily East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, Montebello, and South Los Angeles. We focused on East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights because these neighborhoods combine dense Mexican-origin settlement with highly visible street-level enforcement anxieties, and because everyday food provisioning involves navigating a mix of ethnic markets, discount retailers, and institutional food assistance sites within short geographic distances. Los Angeles constitutes a historically and structurally significant site for this study, as it is one of the largest destinations for Mexican-origin migration in the United States, a central node in agro-food labor circuits, and a city marked by deep urban inequality and uneven incorporation of undocumented populations. Its long history of migration, combined with intensified immigration enforcement and racialized food environments, makes it a key setting for examining the intersections of diet, fear, and structural vulnerability. The field team included the principal author and a bilingual Mexican migrant assistant (Spanish–English). Access to participants was facilitated through a local church, a trusted acquaintance, and a hometown association that served as community bridges. Informed consent was obtained from all participants after explaining the study’s objectives, assuring confidentiality, and emphasizing their voluntary participation and right to withdraw at any time. Pseudonyms were used, and any identifying data potentially revealing migration status were excluded. Interviews were conducted in Spanish (shared mother tongue) in locations chosen by participants for comfort and privacy, mainly homes, parish halls, parks, or sometimes on the street. A member-checking session was offered to those wishing to review preliminary findings, though fear of deportation limited participation in most cases.

Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (32) supported by ATLAS.ti 9. Coding proceeded iteratively from initial descriptive coding to more focused analytic themes, guided by iterative comparison across interviews, fieldnotes, and photographic diaries (31, 32), until analytic themes were sufficiently developed and refined. Transferability was ensured through thick description of context, participants, and observed situations. Dependability was maintained through detailed audit trails of transcripts, analytical notes, coding iterations, and methodological decisions, externally reviewed for consistency. Confirmability was achieved through continuous reflexivity and correlation of interpretations with textual evidence to ensure data-driven conclusions.

The study followed internationally recognized ethical principles for social research with vulnerable populations and complied with the ethical standards and data-protection regulations of the authors’ home institutions, including the Mexican Health Research Law (Article 13) and the Federal Law on the Protection of Personal Data in Possession of Private Parties (Article 8, Official Gazette, July 5, 2010). Participants gave express consent verbally. Confidentiality was maintained by using pseudonyms and non-identifying records. Given the potential legal risks of sharing migration-related experiences, no specific identification data were collected. Participants also received contact information for free legal and mental health support services. Each participant received modest compensation for their time. The research was conducted with deep respect for participants, who were regarded not merely as study subjects but as collaborators whose experiences formed the foundation of this work.

In this section, participants’ testimonies are not approached as illustrative accounts of predefined concepts, but as analytically productive narratives that allow us to interrogate, refine, and situate existing theoretical debates on foodways, migration, and inequality. Drawing on feminist food studies and critical migration scholarship, we treat everyday food practices as sites where agency, moral value, vulnerability, and belonging are actively negotiated under conditions of structural constraint (1, 4, 24). This approach enables us to move beyond descriptive readings and to foreground how migrants’ lived experiences contribute to broader discussions on food, work, and uneven incorporation.

Participants’ narratives revealed that economic precarity and marginalization permeate every aspect of life, including their daily diet. Most reported difficulties maintaining a nutritious diet, directly linked this to low income and job instability. Twenty-five out of thirty reported periods when food “wasn’t enough” or they had to choose lower-quality food to fill stomachs. “Sometimes there is not enough money for the week’s food; we buy what’s cheapest: beans, rice, bread […] meat is often a luxury” (Pedro, 38, day labourer). Common coping strategies included skipping meals, reducing portion sizes, or consuming high-calorie but low-nutrient foods (chips, sweet bread, instant noodles). These practices mitigate hunger temporarily but cause nutritional deficiencies and long-term health issues.

Migrant households also face tensions arising from cultural change and acculturation. One mother shared, “My kids want pizza instead of stew… it breaks my heart, but sometimes I give in so they’ll eat,” pointing to generational dynamics that complicate the preservation of traditional foodways. These experiences illustrate acculturative stress as a psychological tension between cultural continuity and adaptation. This dynamic connects with literature on identity negotiation in migration, indicating that food practices are sites of cultural negotiation that reflect broader processes of belonging and adaptation. A significant finding is the psychological tension created by food insecurity. Worrying about having enough to eat compounds labour stress and immigration insecurity. “It’s just constant anxiety[…] thinking how to stretch the paycheck for bills, rent, and sometimes for food,” said Sofía (29, cleaning worker). Mothers often sacrificed their own meals for their children. “I’d just have coffee and bread and save the best for my kids” (Lucía, 42), illustrating the gendered dimension of coping strategies. Food insecurity thus emerges as both a physical condition and an emotional vulnerability affecting dignity and peace of mind.

Dietary changes reflected increased consumption of cheap, highly processed foods. “When living alone, $5 would fill me up at Taco Bell or McDonald’s. I knew it wasn’t healthy, but it was easy and cheap,” said Luis (24, waiter). Many lived on hypercaloric but micronutrient-poor diets, high in refined carbs, sugars, and fats but low in fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins.

As illustrated in Figure 2, informal street vending of fruit and snacks exemplifies both economic necessity and cultural continuity among undocumented Mexican migrants in Los Angeles.

This “diet of poverty amid affluence” mirrors studies showing that inexpensive foods are calorie-dense yet nutrient-poor. In sum, economic precarity translates into scarce and low-quality diets dominated by cheap calories, forming a vicious cycle where poor diet leads to health problems that remain untreated due to lack of resources.

Beyond material deprivation, participants’ narratives reveal that fear operates as a governing force shaping everyday food-related practices. Across interviews and field observations, migrants described how the anticipation of immigration enforcement structured decisions about where, when, and how to access food. Importantly, these behaviors were not triggered by direct encounters with police or immigration authorities, but by the possibility of such encounters.

Several participants explained that they avoided food banks, churches, or community distribution sites despite experiencing food scarcity. As one participant noted, “I did not go anymore, not because they were there, but because you never know if they might ask for papers.” Others described altering their shopping routines, making faster purchases, avoiding crowded supermarkets, or choosing stores perceived as more “hidden-anonymous,” even when prices were higher, or food quality was lower.

“I prefer to buy less food at the store than to risk going to places where they ask questions.” This anticipatory fear also shaped the research process itself. Fieldwork access to agricultural fields and public spaces was significantly constrained, as many potential participants declined participation due to concerns about visibility and exposure. Despite the absence of overt enforcement actions at the time of research, fear of deportation permeated everyday life, limiting both mobility and willingness to engage with institutions, including academic research.

Fieldnote, Boyle Heights: During some mornings of observation near a Santa Isabel church-based food distribution site, and during some community activities, the line shortened abruptly when a police vehicle passed nearby. Although no officers approached the entrance, several people quietly left the area, dispersing into side streets without collecting food. These accounts illustrate how anticipatory governance of fear operates as a micro-biopolitical mechanism that reorganizes food access through self-regulation. Food insecurity, in this sense, is not only experienced as hunger or dietary compromise but as a condition produced through restraint, avoidance, and constant calculation of risk. The cumulative effect of these practices contributes to stress, disrupted eating patterns, and long-term health vulnerability, reinforcing the embodied consequences of legal exclusion even in moments of relative material stability. These practices demonstrate that food insecurity is produced not only through material scarcity but through anticipatory governance that restricts access before enforcement occurs.

A second key finding concerns what we term dietary invisibilization practices: a set of strategies through which undocumented migrants deliberately modify food-related behaviors in order to reduce social and institutional visibility. These practices include accelerated shopping routines, avoidance of public eating spaces, delayed meal times, and a preference for food environments perceived as discreet or familiar, even when this entails nutritional compromise. Rather than being marginal or incidental, dietary invisibilization emerges as a patterned response to anticipatory fear, shaping how, where, and when food is accessed and consumed.

Across interviews, participants emphasized that “things are eaten differently here,” describing a post-migration shift toward the U.S. food supply driven less by preference than by necessity. Most reported increased consumption of industrial and ultra-processed foods alongside a decline in fresh, home-cooked meals. Approximately 60% reported noticeable weight gain after migration, often between 10 and 15 kilograms within the first two years, accompanied by diagnoses of hypertension or prediabetes. As Rosa (35) reflected, “They diagnosed me with prediabetes here […] I think it was all the burgers, pizza, and sodas I got used to.” Yet in the same breath, she explained how fear shaped her everyday food routines: “I go to the supermarket very fast. I grab what I need and leave. I don’t like to stay there.” Her account illustrates how dietary change is entangled with strategies of exposure management rather than with simple acculturation.

Ethnographic observation further confirms these patterns. Fieldnote, East Los Angeles: several participants described eating meals alone in their cars, in backyards, or waiting until late evening to eat at home. Public eating spaces, such as parks, food courts, or workplace cafeterias, were frequently described as “unsafe” or “too exposed,” despite the absence of formal surveillance. These practices amount to what can be described as a diet of exclusion, in which food choices and eating routines are reorganized around invisibility and self-protection rather than nutrition, taste, or sociality.

Maintaining traditional Mexican diets under these conditions proved especially difficult. Long working hours, time poverty, and limited access to culturally specific ingredients pushed meals away from home-cooked beans, corn tortillas, and fresh preparations toward bread, white rice, processed meats, and sugary drinks. Many participants associated these changes with feeling heavier, more fatigued, and less healthy. At the same time, moments of adaptive resilience and learning also emerged. Lucía (42) described removing sodas and junk food from her household following her husband’s hypertension diagnosis, replacing them with natural drinks. Rosa, similarly, learned to incorporate vegetables into every meal as her awareness of diet-related health risks grew. These experiences suggest that acculturation is not a linear trajectory of nutritional decline, but a contingent process in which health awareness and dietary innovation can emerge when minimal stability and information are available.

Following Abarca’s (1) notion of voices in the kitchen, domestic food practices, particularly women’s cooking, emerge as sites where cultural authority, care, and dignity are actively negotiated. Recurrent concerns about “chemicals” and “hormones” in U.S. food reflect deep mistrust of industrial agriculture and its effects on bodies. As María (42) explained, “They put too many hormones in the meat; my daughters developed too fast.” In response, some participants cultivated small herbs such as epazote, cilantro, and chilies in pots, seeking access to what they described as “clean” and “authentic” flavors. These practices reflect both resistance to and adaptation within the industrial food environment.

Read through this lens, cooking does not function merely as a nostalgic attachment to the past. Instead, it emerges as a situated practice of agency through which women reassert moral worth, cultural competence, and continuity in contexts marked by rupture and exclusion. By deciding what enters the household, how it is prepared, and when it is consumed, women actively counter experiences of social devaluation and invisibility. In this sense, culinary practice operates as a form of everyday resistance, echoing Abarca’s argument that the kitchen is not a space of silence but a space of voice.

A third key finding concerns the emergence of shortened food provisioning circuits, a pattern through which undocumented Mexican migrants restrict food procurement to a limited set of trusted routes, vendors, and commercial spaces perceived as safe. Rather than navigating the full range of food options available in the urban environment, participants described relying on a narrow and repetitive geography of provisioning shaped by familiarity, social recognition, and the minimization of exposure to perceived risk. These circuits are not merely matters of convenience; they represent adaptive responses to anticipatory fear and legal vulnerability that reorganize food agency in everyday life.

Interview data reveal how trust and predictability become central criteria in food access decisions. As Héctor (44, gardener) explained, “I always go to the same store. I know the people there. I don’t change.” Similarly, Sofía (29, cleaning worker) noted, “I buy what’s close, what I know. I don’t explore other places.” These accounts indicate that food choices are shaped less by price, quality, or nutritional value than by the perceived safety of familiar environments. Even when alternative food outlets were available, participants often avoided them due to uncertainty and fear of visibility. As Luis (24, waiter) reflected, “Sometimes it’s more expensive, but I feel calmer,” highlighting how emotional security is prioritized over economic efficiency or dietary diversity.

Ethnographic observation and photographic diaries further corroborate this pattern. Visual records consistently showed repeated purchases from the same small convenience stores or neighborhood shops, typically offering a limited range of fresh produce and a high concentration of ultra-processed foods. This occurred despite the physical proximity of larger supermarkets with broader and more affordable food options within walking distance. These micro-geographies of provisioning reveal how anticipatory fear contracts migrants’ spatial and nutritional horizons, producing routinized consumption practices anchored in safety rather than choice.

Analytically, shortened food provisioning circuits illustrate how anticipatory governance of fear reshapes food agency by narrowing the field of possible action. While these circuits reduce perceived exposure to surveillance or unwanted attention, they simultaneously constrain dietary diversity and reinforce reliance on inexpensive, energy-dense, and nutritionally poor foods. Food agency, in this sense, does not disappear but becomes strategically bounded, operating within circuits that privilege calm and invisibility over nutritional adequacy. These findings underscore that dietary outcomes among undocumented migrants are not simply the result of limited resources or individual preferences, but of governance processes that act in advance, shaping everyday practices through fear, anticipation, and self-regulation.

Taken together, these findings show that food insecurity among undocumented Mexican migrants in Los Angeles is not solely the outcome of limited income or constrained food environments. Rather, it is produced through a set of everyday practices shaped by anticipatory fear, including dietary invisibilization and shortened food provisioning circuits, which reorganize food access, mobility, and health over time. These patterns invite a broader analytical discussion of how fear operates as a mode of governance that mediates migrants’ relationships with the state and becomes materially and corporeally embedded in everyday life. In the following section, we situate these findings in dialogue with existing scholarship, particularly Carney’s work on food, governance, and embodiment, to examine how anticipatory governance of fear is lived, negotiated, and inscribed on migrant bodies.