Bonnie Bade, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology
Anthropology/Border and Regional Studies
California State University, San Marcos
San Marcos, CA 92096
(760)750-4124
bbade@csusm.edu

Bonnie Bade is a Medical Anthropologist whose work focuses on farmworker health, health care, California agriculture and farm labor, transnational migration, and ethnomedicine and ethnobotany among peoples of both indigenous Oaxaca and indigenous Southern California. Dr. Bade has worked specifically with Mixtec communities in California, the San Diego/Tijuana border region, the San Joaquin Valley, and Oaxaca for over 15 years. Dr. Bade earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside in 1994. Her dissertation is entitled Sweatbaths, Sacrifice, and Surgery: The Practice of Transnational Health Care by Mixtec Families in California.

Dr. Bade’s ongoing research in California, Mexico and at the border examines health care patterns, specifically access and utilization problems and the alternatives generated by Mixtec women and farmworker families who are confronted with health problems.
Central to Dr. Bade’s research is the documentation of the use of indigenous forms of health care to supplement clinical forms available in health institutions on both sides of the border. She examines the interface between clinical health care and farmworker families, including patient/provider interaction and barriers that impact health service access and utilization. She has also conducted ethnomedical research in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she has been documenting illness etiologies, medicinal concepts and practices, and medicinal plant use with a Mixtec healer named Don Primo Dominguez Tapia for 15 years. She has also been working with the San Luis Rey Band of Luiseño Indians, in collaboration with the Visual And performing arts Department, to document cultural practices, ethnobotanical concepts, and political efforts related to the Band’s cultural survival. Recently she has worked closely with artist Deborah Small of the Visual and Performing Arts Department to produce an exhibition on Mixtec Medicine that has shown at Fresno’s Artes Americas gallery and the Escondido center for the Arts (April 2005). Dr. Bade teaches anthropology at California State University, San Marcos.