This dissertation examines food insecurity in the context of displacement and transnational migration of women from Mexico and Central America to the US. Drawing upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2011 in the coastal region of Santa Barbara, California, I advance and contribute to several arguments. In presenting the lived experience of "food insecurity", I analyze the everyday forms of structural violence that shape the experience of migrant women, particularly in terms of food, health, and bodies, and I critique interventions to food insecurity and "diet-related health problems" implemented by state and nonprofit agencies. I argue that through their everyday struggles and interactions with groups providing assistance, migrant women navigate power differentials rooted in distinctions of race, class, gender, and legal status while also negotiating and performing new modes of citizenship.

Using data from participant observation, surveys, semi-structured interviews, life history interviews, and focus groups, I seek to answer the following research questions: What is the lived experience of food insecurity among Mexican and Central American migrant women in the US, and what are the structural forces contributing to this experience? At the local level, how do nonprofit entities and public health practitioners engage in the discourse and practice of food security, particularly as it affects migrant women? And, what do the lived experience of food insecurity and interventions by state and non-state actors reveal about changing notions of rights and citizenship and about the production of class and structural violence? The answers to these questions help inform my engagement with and contribution to four primary bodies of scholarship: political economy of food and migration; political ecology of food and health; ideas of power, the state, and hegemony; and critical approaches to race, class, gender, and citizenship.

In engaging with the core themes of this dissertation---food, health, and citizenship---I analyze the dialectical relationship between structural conditions and individual agency. I use the rhetoric of "the other side" ( el otro lado), a phrase invoked by migrant women to reference life outside of the US (specifically on the other side of the US-Mexico border), to underscore the variety of borders that limit access to livelihood resources for unauthorized migrants living in the US.