Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 by John Mckiernan-González (review)

Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 by John Mckiernan-González contributes to critical conversations on the intersections of nation, race, and disease that Nayan Shah’s Contagious Divides (2001), Natalia Molina’s Fit to Be Citizens? (2006), Priscilla Wald’s Contagious (2008), and others have helped shape. Fevered Measures distinguishes itself by reporting on an elusive archive of public health mandates and responses to them that perforated the geo-political Texas–Mexico border, a history that testifies to the contradictions of borderland modernity.

Reporting on the flux of public health at the border during the nineteenth century, chapter one casts a wide net over an array of public health mandates that evolved into a U.S.–based discourse that linked Mexicans with material degradation, suggesting they were unsuitable for modern citizenship. Different from chapter one, chapter two and three possess narrative anchors that reflect the way public health directives and discourses began to take more coherent shape. Chapter two addresses an inconsistency in late-nineteenth century public health debates by juxtaposing a journalist who touted Nuevo León as a model of public health and a health officer who pronounced a lag in sanitation and vaccination by Mexicans that, as he claimed, proved their inferiority. Shifting focus from Mexicans to African Americans, chapter three considers the recruitment of African Americans laborers from Alabama to a plantation in Mexico and their eventual removal to quarantine in Texas for smallpox in 1895. According to Mckiernan-González, this case indicates that American illness enabled the extension of U.S authority beyond its political borders but that racial segregation superseded claims to medical and civil rights. Such extended interest in African American illness appears in this chapter alone, as chapters four and five interrogate an overemphasis on Mexican hostility toward medical modernity that failed to capture the ways they resisted and submitted to public health measures. Specifically, chapter four focuses on newspaper representations of small pox and yellow fever in Laredo from 1898 to 1903, and chapter five attends to the treatment of typhus and resistance against those efforts in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez from 1910 to 1920.

While differentiated from other chapters by its analysis of embodied vaccination verification, chapter six repeats a discrepancy, established throughout the book, between Mexican adherence to medical modernity and public health officials who ignored it. Indeed, chapter six makes a cogent case for a dynamic wherein Mexicans challenged abusive public health measures, the U.S. federal government responded, and the Anglo population resisted cooperation with federal rulings. Chapter seven advances the book’s timeline to 1920–1942, returning to previous topics such as typhus by addressing racist surveillance of Mexico’s 1932 Olympic team that public health concerns enabled.

The clear achievement of Fevered Measures is Mckiernan-González’s excavation of an under-examined archive about public health at the Texas–Mexico border. At times, however, devotion to archival detail comes at the cost of presenting cases of disease and themes that tend to tread the same ground rather than complicate the book’s argument about the contradictions of borderland public health.