Race, Public Health, and Nation-Building along the U.S. and Mexican Border

John Mckiernan-González’s insightful book analyzes the role of public health regulation along the border of Mexico and the United States as a state-building project that helped to define both nations during a period of significant change in the borders and in the political systems of each. His narrative begins in the period following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and ends during World War II. Like other scholars—including Natalia Molina, Nayan Shah, and Alexandra Stern—he is particularly interested in the ways that issues of race, the body, health, citizenship, and politics intersect. He focuses especially on those policies that emerged to address communicable diseases such as smallpox, typhus, and cholera, as well as the multilayered contestation of such measures.

Mckiernan-González argues: “Public health provided another theater for people to demonstrate their ability to participate in national society—to show that they were indeed worthy of citizenship” (p. 3). Those policies shaped local, national, and international politics, as well local communities along the border, in this century-long span; both U.S. and Mexican officials envisioned their regulatory efforts as a modernizing project.

The author explains that, while public health officials sought to regulate the border and to clearly demarcate national boundaries and identities, those borderlands and their complex history of intersecting peoples, traditions, and economies could not be neatly contained. In fact, in discussing the complex terminology of place names and labels to identify race, nationality, and political alignments, the book’s preface hints at the difficulty of that project.

Mckiernan-González’s impressive and extensive primary research draws on Department of State and U.S. Public Health and Marine Hospital Service records at the U.S. National Archives, Texas state archival records, several Mexican government records collections, as well as university archival collections and a large number of Spanish- and English-language newspapers in Mexico and the United States. Although his narrative ultimately tilts in the direction of the United States, readers gain insight into the role of Mexican consular officials, diplomatic negotiations between the two nations, and the development of public health requirements among those seeking entry into Mexico after 1917.

Based on their views of Mexicans as potential carriers of disease or political radicalism, U.S. officials imposed strict policies on those crossing the borders. One way of subjugating Mexicans was to portray them as living in filthy and unsanitary conditions. But those perceptions were weighed against the recognition that migrants were crucial to the labor needs of the rapidly growing U.S. economy and of the trans-border nature of business and transportation.

Mckiernan-González analyzes a particularly effective 1917 grass-roots protest by a group of female laundry workers commuting by foot between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. The women halted traffic over the bridge connecting the two countries when U.S. government officials, seeking to prevent the spread of typhus, mandated that transnational workers traveling as pedestrians between these cities disinfect their clothing and bathe in kerosene. While many Mexican migrants/immigrants along the border have been male agricultural workers, women have always migrated as well—often as domestic workers and, especially since the NAFTA agreement, as factory and service-sector workers. Including women’s perspectives is vital to understanding larger community issues, and it highlights the fact that they were active participants in labor protests; and the author does this especially well.

Chapter three is a particularly interesting and insightful one that illustrates the book’s emphasis on the interplay of race, state-building efforts, and public-health goals. Mckiernan-González recounts an 1895 controversy over labor conditions and a smallpox outbreak in Hacienda Tlahualilo in Durango. That agricultural colonia, or settlement, had recruited a group of African American farmers from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to produce cotton. These migrants, along with many other Americans...