Public Health in Hostile Climates: The Pathologization of Latinx Bodies in the Borderlands

In the decades between the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the institution of an official Border Patrol in 1924, US quarantine laws evolved into federally-regulated immigration policy relying heavily on medical... [ view full abstract ]

In the decades between the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the institution of an official Border Patrol in 1924, US quarantine laws evolved into federally-regulated immigration policy relying heavily on medical inspection. Excavating the history of quarantine and immigrant medical inspection as a precursor to formalized border surveillance along the Rio Grande, this paper uncovers the pathologization of the Latinx body at the border in two novels: Eve Raleigh and Jovita González’s Caballero: A Historical Novel and Américo Paredes’s borderland bildungsroman, George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel, both written in the 1930s yet unpublished until the 1990s. Although neither address quarantine or immigrant medical inspection directly, both  negotiate cultural identity, national belonging, and life in the borderlands according to Anglo-American nativism and the racialized medicalization of Mexican migrant workers and immigrants cultivated through border control. Caballero and George Washington Gómez unsettle established, Anglocentric perceptions of the nation, citizenship, and national belonging in the borderlands by prodding the liminality of Latinx identity. They challenge the authority of border control by foregrounding the temporal contingency of national borders and resist negative stereotypes of Latinx bodies as dirty or diseased and thereby dangerous, yet both novels simultaneously internalize the biopolitical regulation of Mexican Americans. The protections granted by legal citizenship are thereby undercut by the pathologization of Latinx bodies in the US-Mexico borderlands, I argue, and closer attention to the racist and nativist hostility cultivated in this climate reveals how profoundly public health protocol shapes social, cultural, economic, and political systems at the turn of the twentieth century and in the current moment, as well.