In the aftermath of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), several quantitative studies detected declines in the welfare participation of Hispanics (Lofstrom and Bean 2002; Swingle 2000; Borjas 2001). Studies also confirmed that Mexican immigrants showed lowest participation rates when compared to other immigrants and natives (Bean et. al 2003). The current study, by focusing on the situational context within which welfare uptake decisions are made, aims to tease out the mechanisms that potentially explain welfare uptake patterns among low-income Mexican immigrants in a post-welfare reform climate. Since women are the decision makers regarding welfare (corroborated in current ethnographic data), the current study draws on a subsample of 18 low-income Mexican immigrant women in a high-poverty area in Chicago. The ethnographic data comes from the Three City Study: Welfare, Children and Family, a multi-method study designed to examine the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on low-income families in Chicago, San Antonio and Boston (Winston et. al 1999). The theoretically motivated situational contexts the study considers are women’s intimate unions (Cherlin, Burton, Hurt and Purvin 2004) and welfare-caseworker relationships (Haney 1996). The research questions are: How did these low-income immigrant women construct meaning around various program benefits? Why were women deciding to opt out of certain program benefits? Whether and how did the tenor of women’s relations with intimate partners and welfare caseworkers shape the decision-making process and outcomes relevant to securing benefits?

By integrating theoretical perspectives from family, migration and feminist literatures with emergent patterns in the ethnographic data, the researcher develops three typologies of strategic actions that describe women’s welfare uptake decisions -namely, selective consumption, symbolic consumption, and creative non-disclosure. The low-income immigrant women made evaluative choices that reflected a process of weighing the costs and benefits of accessing economic resources through exclusive reliance on either their caseworkers or their male partners. For the Mexican-immigrant women participants, making decisions about welfare uptake was not just an economic decision, but involved negotiations of their power and autonomy in both the context of their intimate unions and their client-caseworker relationships: The women were deciding (1) which benefits they would no longer accept and which ones they had to keep; (2) whether to rely on a tenuous relationship, in order to avoid dealing with caseworkers or meet program requirements; (3) or whether they would conceal their relationship in order to continue receiving benefits.

The findings suggest that decline in participation occurred only selectively: This means that women did not stop relying on welfare entirely, but selectively engaged in certain programs while refusing others. The most important situation that led to this selective participation in programs is the tenor of their welfare-caseworker relationships. The findings also suggest that while ineligibility based on relationship status was an important underlying issue for some of the women, decisions to withdraw participation were not primarily due to ineligibility. Similarly, the findings suggest that decline in economic and nutritional needs may not entirely explain decline in welfare uptake among low-income immigrant families.