UC San Diego

Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, share a volatile history of fostering structural systems that sustain extreme violence against women, sanctioning the normalization of gender-based violence. Given the precarious environmental conditions of women fleeing the Northern Triangle regions, contextualization of their lived experiences as they navigate the duality of caretaker and survivor during the migration decision-making process is of the utmost importance in ensuring mental health wellness. Therefore, understanding trauma exposures during the migration journey, pre, during, and post flight periods, also known as the triple trauma paradigm, is necessitated. Through an in-depth literature review and synthesis of existing qualitative data, this thesis provides a conceptual framework to further understanding of how structural violence towards women increases their exposure to trauma throughout their lives, subsequently, increasing the probability of intergenerational trauma. Although the available literature documents migrant experiences, current research lacks an emphasis on migrant women’s experiences of structural gender-based violence, unresolved compounded trauma, and how those experiences influence their mental health outcomes. The appropriate contextualization of migrant women’s mental health encumbrances has both immediate and long-term implications on the establishment of appropriate intervention strategies explicitly tailored to the diverse mental health care needs of migrant women. As the number of women migrating to the U.S.-Mexico border region increases, it becomes increasingly critical to highlight the rising global mental health challenges they experience, which have societal and public health implications for migrant women’s life trajectories, and influence their ability to endure the challenges of transnational migration and resettlement in the U.S.