Borders, Laborers, and Racialized Medicalization Mexican Immigration and US Public Health Practices in the 20th Century

Abstract

Throughout the 20th century, US public health and immigration policies intersected with and informed one another in the country's response to Mexican immigration. Three historical episodes illustrate how perceived racial differences influenced disease diagnosis: a 1916 typhus outbreak, the midcentury Bracero Program, and medical deportations that are taking place today. Disease, or just the threat of it, marked Mexicans as foreign, just as much as phenotype, native language, accent, or clothing. A focus on race rendered other factors and structures, such as poor working conditions or structural inequalities in health care, invisible. This attitude had long-term effects on immigration policy, as well as on how Mexicans were received in the United States.

Racialized im/migration and autonomy of migration perspectives: New directions and opportunities

“…Migration scholarship, AoM approach/migration scholarship, AoM approaches contest sovereign constructions of "illegals aliens," demystify grandiose technological displays of the "border spectacle" by highlighting how illegality and deportability facilitate subordinate inclusion, and ultimately withdraws from hegemonic investments in nationalist assimilation. While undertheorizing the role of race, relational racialization and racial ordering in borderscapes of differential inclusion, the AoM approach is nevertheless consistent with literature that takes seriously the racial and class dimensions of im/migration and the continuous reformulation of racial capitalism (Bonacich, Alimahomed, & Wilson, 2008;Gleeson, 2010;Gomberg-Munoz, 2012;Gonzales, 2014;Lowe, 1996;Melamed, 2015;Molina, 2011;Ponce, 2014;Robinson, 2000;Robinson, 2006;Roediger & Esch, 2012). In particular, Golash-Boza's (2015) work on how mass deportations form a critical part of global neoliberalism and circuits of neoliberalism and Gonzales's (2014) neo-Gramscian treatise on the contested nature of anti-migrant hegemony provide unique openings to think through both racialized im/migration and AoM in ways that account for racial domination and migrant resistance.…”

Immigrant Health Inequities: Exposing Diversions and White Supremacy

“…This ideology portrayed white Americans as superior to Mexicans and American Indians. Those promoting this ideology argued that Mexicans and American Indians would not survive because they were not biologically fit (Gómez 2018;Molina 2011). Manifest Destiny aligned with eugenicist logic and biological determinism, or the belief that human behavior is controlled by an individuals' genes.…”

“…Mexican immigration to the US increased, driven by US labor needs, coupled with people fleeing the Mexican Revolution during the 20th century (Markel and Stern 1999;Molina 2011). Mexican sojourner men became the ideal migrant laborers, who traveled temporarily for work but returned to Mexico after work was over.…”

Plasma donation at the border: Feminist technoscience, bodies and race

“…Mexican bodies have a series of complex and multiple histories within this space. Mexican bodies and labour have often been highly desirable to US capital and industry in the borderlands, which have relied upon the travel and migration of Mexicanas/os and cross-border trade flows, both of which are vital to the maintenance of both border and national economies (Coleman, 2005; Gilbert, 2007; Lugo, 2008; Molina, 2011). Simultaneously, Mexicanas/os have also long been subject to colonial and racist violence at border sites: violence which continues today in contemporary US border policy and practice (De León, 1983; Aldama, 2003; Doty, 2007; Anzaldúa, 2012).…”