Redes de apoyo para la atención a un padecimiento crónico en una comunidad transnacional.

Transnational support networks in chronic illness care are constructed in combination with the illness and migration experiences. Through these networks flows material and symbolic resources used as answer to perceived needs of ill people in their health-illness-care process. Transnational social networks would broaden the resources and the way ill people express their needs. In order to respond to this assumption, a qualitative study in a community with migratory tradition in Jalisco, Mexico, was carried out, from 2001 to 2003. Through semistructured interviews and ethnographic work, the experiences of fourteen participants with diabetes were analyzed. These were grouped as: transnational migrants, return migrants migrant’s mothers and non migrant neither migrant relative. In this study is analyzed the way the support networks are constructed, their size, the transnational space where these generated and the dynamics that maintains them. The networks size does not differentiate access to resources. It is the dynamics of them what does the difference. Dynamics were explored in two forms: functional and spatial, by the support actions and by the space where they are originated and towards they flow.