Victor Garcia and his team published two journal articles and a book chapter on findings from an NIH-funded research project examining juramento use among Mexican immigrants in southeastern Pennsylvania.
The juramento is a Catholic religious practice that consists of making a pledge to a saint, often Our Lady of Guadalupe, to abstain from alcohol and other drug use.
The two journal articles are "Developing the Juramento into an Evidence-Based Brief Intervention: A Brief Report," published in Hispanic Health Care International (2020), and "Grassroots interventions for alcohol use disordersinthe Mexican immigrant community: A narrative literature review" (2020) in the Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse. A book chapter, "TheJuramento:Secondary and tertiary preventive benefits of a religious-based brief alcohol intervention in the Mexican immigrant community," was published in AddictionsDiagnosis and Treatment (2021). The co-authors are Alex Heckert, Department of Sociology; Emily Lambert, master's student in the Department of Counseling (also an anthropology minor as an undergraduate at IUP); Nahomy Hidalgo Pinchi, alumna of the Spanish Department; and Katherine Fox, medical anthropology PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University.Fox, an IUP alumna of the Anthropology and Spanish departments and the Cook Honors College, is currently completing her dissertation on well-being and resilience of LGBTQ+ Latinx immigrants in California during the COVID-19 pandemic.