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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Paula Worby, MPH, School of Public Health, University of California at Berkeley, Earl Warren Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, 510 848-4075, pworby@berkeley.edu

California Spanish-speaking immigrant day laborers that stand on urban street corners seeking employment are vulnerable to difficult working conditions, frequent injustices, and the stress of family separation. This research examines the drinking patterns of men at one such hiring site in Northern California. Through depth interviews and some 70 open-ended street interviews, day laborers describe drinking patterns including weekend binge drinking at home with housemates, rituals of drinking alone, and the role of bars in their social life. The respondents were also asked to link current drinking or ways of limiting drinking to their personal history, to perceived norms in their community of origin, and to the expectations and hardships they had experienced after migration. Attention is paid to the environments where drinking takes place and what social network and structural factors determine and shape these environments. For example, the findings discuss immigrant men's fear of being targeted by police or feeling at risk in their neighborhoods at night and how this drives drinking indoors. The perception of men at the “extremes”, those who are active abstainers or otherwise limit their alcohol use and men who have recently experienced severe consequences of alcohol use (like DUI charges) are also examined, in particular the resiliency and coping strategies of the former. Public health planners as well as health care providers can benefit from this detailed look at drinking patterns and motives for drinking or abstaining among this sample of recent immigrants tenuously employed in the urban labor market.

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