DOI: 10.17603/ds2-rnz5-ek06
title: Part 2: Planning Documents for Semi-Structured Interviews with Service Providers
title: in Documenting the Undocumented: How Mexican Immigrant Women Navigate Long-Term Post-Disaster Housing Recovery and Cumulative Disaster Impacts

description: Preliminary fieldwork in 2019 focused on collecting data from service providers in community-based organizations that serve the Mexican immigrant community in Houston with post-disaster housing. In fall 2021, it was just over two years since I last interviewed representatives of the focal organizations in this study (and four years since Harvey). It was crucial to collect follow-up interviews given that tropical storms Imelda and Beta, winter storm Uri, and the COVID-19 pandemic have occurred since I last spoke to service providers. Based on informal conversations with providers and my own ties to my native city of Houston, many Black and Latine, particularly Mexican, households were still waiting for financial assistance for Harvey from city programs and/or were still living in damaged homes in 2021. It is imperative to understand how service providers were helping those that were still struggling with housing damage years after Harvey and in light of the multiple disasters that have unfolded since. The COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, has only exacerbated these challenges. For instance, many community members lost jobs, were evicted, or were told to shelter-in-place in a post-Harvey, mold-infested home. I asked providers about the cumulative effects of the tropical and winter storms and the pandemic to understand how they affected their ability to serve Mexican immigrant women who were still struggling to recover from Harvey four years after the storm. Further, given the number of years that passed since Harvey, I asked providers about the actions they witnessed Mexican immigrant women taking to facilitate their own recovery. Data is being deidentified and will be published soon.
description: Disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity. Much of the current disaster literature adopts a social vulnerability perspective, which considers how political, social, and economic factors influence pre-disaster preparation and post-disaster recovery. Even with this focus, however, there remains a dearth of literature on immigrant populations and their long-term recovery trajectories. As such, my dissertation is an intersectional, multi-level analysis of Mexican immigrant women and their disproportionate vulnerability in post-disaster recovery. Specifically, I will strive to answer four main research questions: 

1.	How does current U.S. disaster policy address issues related to gender, ethnicity, and citizenship status?
2.	How do service providers from community-based organizations navigate disaster recovery systems to assist Mexican immigrant women and their families in their long-term housing recovery, particularly in the context of cumulative disaster impacts?
3.	How are Mexican immigrant women navigating the system of disaster recovery to move forward in their long-term housing recovery?
4.	How does cumulative exposure to multiple disasters impact long-term housing recovery among Mexican immigrant women in disaster-affected areas? 

My dissertation data consists of three parts. For Part I, I collected organizational reports as well as current federal, state, and local disaster recovery planning and policy documents (n=172) in the U.S to understand the larger context of disaster recovery. In Part II, I conducted qualitative, semi-structured interviews with service providers in community-based organizations in 2019 (n=16) and again in 2021 (n=8) to assess the progression of Mexican immigrant recovery—with a specific focus on women’s experiences—in the four years since Harvey, particularly in the context of cumulative disaster impacts. For Part III, I conducted qualitative, semi-structured interviews with Mexican immigrant women (n=56) in 2022 to understand their recovery from their own point of view, with a focus on how gender stratification, ethnicity, housing tenure, and access to organizational assistance affect recovery trajectories.