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Precarious Prescriptions Laurie B Precarious Prescriptions Laurie B. Green, John Mckiernan-González, Martin Summers Published by University of Minnesota Press Green, L. B. & Mckiernan-González, J. & Summers, M.. Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/31212 Access provided by Yale University Library (12 Jan 2017 17:42 GMT) 4 At the Nation’s Edge African American Migrants and Smallpox in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Mexican–American Borderlands JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ on july 23, 1895, secretary of state Edwin Uhl received a telegram from Torreon, Coahuila, stating that “one-hundred and fifty three negroes from [Tlahualilo] colony are here destitute. Surrounded by Mexican police to prevent them from entering town. Wire what to do. All are American citizens.”1 Secretary Uhl told the consul in Torreon to wait. Two days later, Uhl read a report that the group of “negroes [were] starving and almost in open rebellion to all authority. ...I anticipate serious trouble.”2 Apparently, John McCaughan, a regionally prominent landowner, mine manager, and U.S. consul, had told the group of African Americans that they “must not be choice about the kind of work, nor particular as the amount of pay. They should scatter as much as possible. It will be impossible to find employment together, and by remaining in a body they only make it more difficult for aid and employment.”3 McCaughan’s prediction was wrong. By refusing to move as a body and continuing to articulate their collective demands, the migrants in Torreon catalyzed an executive branch decision on their behalf. On July 26, 1895 president Grover Cleveland ended the standoff: “War depart- ment will issue rations for one week. If return to the colony is not practicable or consistent with humane considerations, let the consuls assure the railroad company that payment for the transportation of the sufferers to their homes will be strongly recommended.”4 The U.S. government now vouched for the costs of the railroad trip home to Alabama; however, the migrants had to find ways to guarantee food and shelter for their trip back home to Alabama. This labor rebellion in northern Durango—led by black migrant families originally from Alabama, working on a cotton plantation in 67 68 JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ northern Mexico in 1895—forced the United States to go into Mexico and intervene on behalf of American citizens. The State Department seized on the presence of smallpox among the families to transform the politically volatile conflict between black American citizens and the powerful Compañía Agricola Tlahualilo into an American medical mission to protect American refugees from Mexico. Most histories of the Tlahualilo migration end their analysis of the migrants’ situation with the declaration of a smallpox quarantine in Eagle Pass, Texas.5 This chapter goes against the general grain of scholarship on race and medicine in the Progressive Era and argues that, in addition to treating labor migrants as medical threats, the medical mission and the sub- sequent U.S. Marine Hospital Service (USMHS) smallpox serum field trial strengthened the collective negotiating position of the migrants. This chapter examines how black southerners in Mexico found their newfound status as the objects of an American medical mission useful to their demands to return home to Alabama. Moreover, they leveraged their status as objects of a federal smallpox serum field trial to guarantee their return against the wishes of white southern politi- cal authorities. The migrants’ return is a compelling story of African American workers exploiting their role as commodities in an emerging laboratory-based American research economy, just as federal health officers exploited the migrants’ high-profile illness while also laboring on behalf of the migrants’ survival. The 153-person collective in Torreon was part of a larger group of one hundred families (866 black men, women, and children, according to the railroad manifest) who left central Alabama in late January 1895 to work as sharecroppers in Mexico. Lured by promises given them by black emigration activist William Ellis and the Compañía Agricola Tlahualilo of racial democracy, higher shares, housing, and full rail pas- sage to Mexico, they left Alabama by train expecting a familiar work setting in a foreign place. As diplomatic historian Fred Rippy argues, the Compañía Agricola Tlahualilo banked on the promise of skilled black southern labor, turning the migration into a “private venture conducted for the profit of a Mexican land company and a member of the Negro race.” The Compañía’s investors had already put a large amount of capital into building a sixty-mile-long private canal to irrigate a 17,000-acre dry lakebed and a private rail line connecting the tiny town of Mapimi with the Mexican International Railroad in Torreon.6 AT THE NATION’S EDGE 69 The appearance of the railroad in the iron-rich regions of the Mapimi basin led many Mexicans and foreign investors to believe the Great Mapimi Basin could become the next Mexican breadbasket. However, investors in the region’s mines, farms, and plantations faced a common challenge: bringing in enough workers to match capital investment in a region that numbered maybe five thousand people in 1890. Leaving kin and community for work outside the United States may have been a difficult decision for many of these families. However, the attraction of leaving the racial terror associated with Alabama after three years of an economic depression and two nationally infamous racially volatile gubernatorial and presidential elections is not so hard to imagine. The populist challenge to the Democratic Party in Alabama led to vitriolic and violent attacks on black and white men suspected of voting for the Populist Reuben Kolb over Democratic or Republican candidates.7 Moreover, iron mines and steel mills in Alabama had begun to rely more heavily on the convict lease system for substantial numbers of their workers. In the aftermath of its sweeping victory in state elections in 1894, the Alabama Democratic Party moved to excise any claims black residents had on public office, public goods, public services, or public space. Because the majority of the migrants came of age during the twenty years after the Civil War, when African Americans openly voted in Alabama elections, these actions directly attacked their identities as citizens. The indifference to Alabama’s political violence and coercive labor regimes must have made leaving industrializing urban Alabama for industrializing rural Mexico seem attractive.8 The general American indifference to recent events in Alabama made the migrants’ ability to attract attention to their situation in Mexico even more striking. Migrant and coal miner Sam Claiborne set events in motion when he convinced the consul in Chihuahua that the migrants “found themselves in the worst form of bondage with [no] hope of ever securing liberty.”9 Migrant advocates presented the conditions as an issue for Americans in Mexico, a problem the American government ought to fix. Democratic president Grover Cleveland’s directive to the State Department to guarantee passage to Alabama is a reminder of the success of this effort. The migrants’ collective actions outside the nation’s edge remind us of the importance, in historian Natalia Molina’s words, of understanding how those “who are not citizens negotiate a sense of national identity, calibrating notions of citizenship and democracy in 70 JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ the process.”10 Although the migrants were citizens, collective actions against black southerners that preceded their decision to leave for Mexico in 1895 put the migrants on the margins of the American body politic. This is what makes their negotiations with the federal medical authority a window into the paradox of American medical citizenship: the simultaneous way sympathy and exclusion organize access to health care in the United States. Rather than focus on the dynamics of exclu- sion, the interpretation here argues that Camp Jenner was more a case of sympathy and exploitation, a twist on Beatrix Hoffman’s succinct analysis of immigration and health care policy.11 This chapter argues that these black southern migrants engaged a politics of entitlement to turn an American public health commitment to medical progress into an instrument of social membership and a vehicle for their return home.12 In the process, this chapter calls attention to the obvious dependence of American medical authority on the tacit and active cooperation of their (detained) black migrant subjects. FROM MIGRANTS TO REFUGEES: THE JOURNEY FROM TORREON TO EAGLE PASS A week after the standoff in Torreon, two hundred migrants stepped out of boxcars into the border town of Piedras Negras, Coahuila. Consul Jesse Sparks walked this group across the Rio Grande into Eagle Pass, Texas. The Associated Press remarked approvingly that Grover Cleveland, “regarding the case as one of the greatest emergencies involv- ing the lives of American citizens,” had guaranteed funds and rations in Eagle Pass.13 Texas state health officer Jack Evans inspected the first group and “found them all healthy” but still placed them in abandoned boxcars under “quarantine with guards.”14 The call to quarantine the migrants ignored the absence of illness. Two days later, 170 more migrants arrived at Eagle Pass, and this time there were eight cases of smallpox. After repeated complaints by Eagle Pass customs collector William Fitch, state authorities moved the boxcars three miles north of Eagle Pass and assigned two armed guards to detain the migrants.15 When Fitch informed the secretary of the Treasury that there was “smallpox among negro refugees from Mexico,” these five words added medical value to the existing federal investment in these black migrants.
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