Health at the margins of migration: culture-centered co-constructions among Bangladeshi immigrants.

Increasingly, health scholars have been paying attention to the health experiences of immigrant communities, particularly in the backdrop of the increasing global flows of goods, services, and people across borders. In spite of the increasing public health emphasis on health outcomes of immigrants within the United States, immigrant communities are often constructed as monoliths and the voices of immigrant communities are traditionally absent from mainstream health policy and program discourses. The health experiences of immigrants, their access to resources, and the health trajectories through the life course followed by them and their descendants influence the deep-seated patterns of ethnic health disparities documented in the United States. It is against this backdrop then that the co-constructions of experiences of health among immigrants offer an entry point for understanding the intersections of migration and health, particularly as these intersections offer guidance for the development of culturally situated policies and programs. Based on the culture-centered approach, we seek to understand how low-income Bangladeshi immigrants in New York City, who live at the borders of mainstream American society, define, construct, and negotiate health issues through co-constructions of their localized experiences of health.