Racialized Bodies

Now the adobe . . . has become a tenement for several families, and the courtyard has been honey-combed with shacks, and tents, and non-descript barn-tenements of one and two rooms . . . until one can think of nothing but the squalor of a Chinese city.

Bessie Stoddart, "The Courts of Sonoratown," 1905 ¹

In her exposé of "the housing problem" in Los Angeles, Bessie Stoddart surveyed the rapidly changing contours of Sonoratown, the old Mexican Quarter of the city. By 1905, Mexican immigrants had arrived in greater numbers to work on the railroads and in agriculture. As a settlement house worker and a member of several pioneering municipal commissions in Progressive-era Los Angeles, Stoddart played an instrumental role in appointing the first district nurse and in establishing the city's first housing commission of 1906. Her career illuminates the development of public health and housing policy in Los Angeles at the turn of the century. But more than this, Stoddart's analysis of the impact of Mexican immigration upon the city was predicated on an important analogy: she framed her discussion within an existing racialized discourse, a discourse that made specific reference to Asia. In geographical terms, the old Mexican Quarter of Sonoratown bordered Chinatown in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles. Mexican and Chinese inhabitants were also entwined in the social imagination of the city's reformers and health officials. The parallels made by early-twentieth-century reformers such as Stoddart draw our attention to the ways in which immigrants—and their descendants—have historically been racialized in relation to both white and non-white groups.

When examining processes of racialization, historians often underplay these complexities. Yet these nuances are brought out forcefully in Natalia Molina's Fit to Be Citizens? Molina examines the perception and treatment of Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican communities in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Los Angeles through the prism of public health. By analyzing how public health discourse and policy racialized, excluded, and/or sought to reform different groups at different times in relation to one another, Molina moves us beyond the conventional mono-ethnic study. Whilst discourses on the Chinese and the Japanese framed the perception, reception, and racialization of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, health authorities treated these ethnic groups very differently, and their position within the racial hierarchy shifted over time. Molina demonstrates the fluid and socially constructed nature of race. Her emphasis on institutional practice, discourse, and the racialization of space also signifies that cultural geography remains a critical methodological tool with which to understand the mapping and remapping of race in the United States. Molina's work certainly falls within a recent body of critical literature that examines the intersection of race and geography, a focus evident in studies of LA as the "Latino Metropolis," and in work documenting the importance of spatial identities in Chicano/a literary and cultural production.² Molina's historical dimension complements earlier studies of "barrioization," and the more recent "spatial turn" in Chicano/a, immigration, ethnic, and labor history.³ By examining how race is "regionally constructed," Molina's interdisciplinary study also enriches the recent scholarship that moves us beyond the black-white paradigm (p. 48). Ultimately, the focus of Fit to Be Citizens? falls upon Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and as Molina's comparative analysis unravels, we emerge with a greater understanding of why Latinos/as are located "at the intersection of several racializing dynamics" in contemporary America.⁴

Asian and Mexican immigration dramatically reshaped the economy and demographic landscape of California and the Southwest, and helped build Los Angeles as a city and metropolitan region. By examining the various waves of immigration and the significance of federal legislation such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, Fit to Be Citizens? is grounded within the existing historiography of immigration. Molina's analysis is partly structured through its attention to the nativism...