Emerging Adulthood and Sexuality in Latin American Immigrants in Madrid

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The main idea of this paper is to discuss the sexual and reproductive health of Latin American immigrants in Madrid, briefly approaching three different questions: do they believe that there are differences about sexual and reproductive health issues between what they lived in their countries and Spain?; are they having different behaviors in Spain than in their origin countries and, if so, which ones?; and finally, what do they perceived about sexual health services and access in Spain?

Regular Latin American immigrant's sexuality in Europe has been rarely addressed by researchers. Even the known importance of irregular migration sexuality studies, because of the risks and vulnerability to which migrants are exposed, we should ask ourselves about what is happening with those regular migrants that fit into the emerging adult category, those who are emigrating to pursue college or postgraduate courses, those who have been living in their parent´s home until migration, and that in most cases they are not married, and do not have children.

First of all I want to make some methodological and theoretical considerations about the research from which this data come from:

From a qualitative background the sample focuses on regular immigrants, women and men that fit into the emerging adulthood category. Thirty-two in depth interviews were made in Madrid, addressing sexual believes and behaviours through life, especially during the migration process. My research includes interviews with Argentinean, Bolivian, Ecuadorian, and Mexican emerging adulthood. The exclusion criteria did not contain sexual identity, but the final sample only includes one man who identifies himself as gay, and one woman identified herself as lesbian...

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...ill focusing in those emerging adulthoods that has as a goal marriage and kids in the late 20`s. It is necessary to make a shift and work with the theory in other cultural groups as regular migrants that may have other life goals, at least in the near future. Is also relevant to focus on sexuality and migration concurrences where education, promotion, public health access, and social issues are present.

Finally the sexual studies that have been done mostly addressed vaginal sex as there is no other kind of sexual practices; heteronormative sexual practices are the only existence ones. The future question to address in this research would be: If literature is discussing about a Global Youth Culture, is there also a Global Youth
Sexual culture?5 Also there is the possibility of the participants creating an hybrid identity,13 as a part of a globalized society.

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