We Got Your Back! Help Care Seeking and Caregiving in Mexican Indigenous Men With Ankylosing Spondylitis

This article presents a study on the care provided by 11 men from different ethnic, health, and socioeconomic backgrounds to two indigenous Rarámuri males with ankylosing spondylitis. This chronic muscular and bone disease is known to evolve progressively, causing disability and immense suffering to the affected individual. Through anthropological research involving ethnographic description and interviews conducted in an urban setting of the City of Chihuahua in the state of Chihuahua, caring practices performed by men that contest prior assumptions about how men relate to each other in relation to their health and masculinity were encountered. To interpret findings, a "caring of the self" framework, along with elements of the discussion of personhood and masculinities, was used; this led to an analysis made through the elaboration of meaningful coding of patterns of caring practices. The patterns identified in the ethnographic data were organized into four groups, all of which represented caring practices performed by these men. The first three groups involve access to food, money, and infrastructure goods, which have a material nature that holds a positive relation to the well-being of the two Rarámuri males in regard to the implications of their disease. The last group is unique in that it pertains to circumstantial factors that required improvisations in the forms of favors exchanged by these males that also positively related to their well-being.