Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the Early-Twentieth-Century United States

Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the Early-Twentieth-Century United States Natalia Molina Every few years, the debate over whether race is a social construction or a biological reality is rekindled.1 A recent example is a March 2005 New York Times op-ed piece by Armand Marie Leroi. In an editorial titled “A Family Tree in Every Gene,” Dr. Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, contended that racial differences are biologically identifiable realities and asked readers to reconsider the idea that individuals share nearly as much genetic simi- larity across races as they do within them.2 The lively response to the piece, which included comments from those in both the natural and social sciences, demonstrates that the so-called race question remains unresolved. Historically, meanings of race have been understood in both biological and social terms. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much scientific effort was devoted to determining — and ranking — human racial groups.3 Contempo- rary scholars, however, especially those in the social sciences, tend to concur with Michael Omi and Howard Winant (authors of the leading U.S. text on race as a social construction), who argue that “as a result of prior efforts and struggles, we have now reached the point of fairly general agreement that race is not a biological given but rather a socially constructed way of differentiating human beings.”4 Many scholars in the social sciences who view race as a social construction explic- itly decouple concepts of race from biology. Their work shows how racial meanings Radical History Review Issue 94 (Winter 2006): 22–37 � Copyright 2006 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. � 22 Molina | Medicalizing the Mexican 23 evolved and how these concepts shape social life, determining, for example, where people live and how they are perceived by others.5 Alas, this close attention to social construction may have exacted a price, shifting our focus from the corporeality of race so that important ways in which race is written (and continuously rewritten) on the body are sometimes overlooked. Cultural practices have written race on the body so indelibly that, as some scholars have shown, they are almost indistinguishable from biological inscription. In Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare, Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs argue that when a cholera epidemic broke out among indigenous persons in the delta region of the Orinoco River in east- ern Venezuela in 1992 and 1993, cultural reasoning held the victims themselves accountable. Health and government officials blamed the cultural beliefs and practices of the region’s inhabitants and in the process “transformed individual bod- ies into natural bearers of disease.”6 Similarly, in his examination of hypertension and heart-disease studies and research on human genetic diversity, Troy Duster has demonstrated how scientists continue to use “a set of assumptions about race” to interpret their data, thereby ascribing disparities between groups to racial differences. As Duster convincingly argues, a methodology that privileges race as the main interpretive framework can lead investigators to miss or ignore other under- lying causes of disease.7 Both studies underscore the observation that Evelyn Ham- monds, a historian of race and science, recently made regarding the sizable amount of work that remains to be done in challenging “the power of biology as a natural- izing discourse.”8 A potentially useful step in mounting such a challenge is to initiate and sus- tain a conversation between historians investigating race and immigration and those conducting scholarship on disability. Our joint recognition of the body as a narrative site provides us with a shared border to use as a starting point: the modal subject. In the United States, the modal subject is neither raced nor disabled. Historically, race has provided a shorthand way to refer to difference, be it physical, cultural, or political, and thus also has been central in defining the modal subject (e.g., enfranchised/ disenfranchised; citizen/alien, slave owner/slave). Likewise, the modal subject historically has been assumed to be independent and, by extension, able-bodied as well. The provisions of the 1790 Naturalization Act, which allowed only those deemed legally white to become naturalized citizens, are a case in point. Members of groups denied citizenship could not vote, testify in court, initiate lawsuits, or own property. With the modal subject by definition independent and by default able- bodied, those with disabilities were legally incapable of representing themselves, regardless of their race. The concept of the modal subject draws attention to similarities in the ways in which race and disability have been used to exclude certain groups from the body politic. In each case, physical difference is identified and mobilized to figure specific 24 Radical History Review groups discursively as outside the bounds of social membership. Studies of race and immigration and of disability provide a unique opportunity to understand the fal- lacy of the modal subject. To make the most of that opportunity, though, we need to conduct a joint conversation, one that deliberately reaches across the separate, isolated spaces — academic, private, and public — that are and have been the typi- cal sites of discourse. We would be wise to remember that it was just such isolated discourse that shaped the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which for all its historic achieve- ment in redefining the legal meaning of race fails to even mention disability, though the act was amended nine years later in 1973 with the inclusion of section 504. This essay contributes to multidisciplinary perspectives in the academic field of disability studies by examining some of the social and political determinants of the status and role assigned to Mexican immigrants in early twentieth-century America. Because immigrants were considered advantageous only to the extent they filled critical gaps in the labor market, physical fitness was central to gauging a group’s desirability. One way immigration advocates positively constructed Mexicans was by emphasizing this group’s special affinity for manual labor. Mexicans, they argued, were uniquely able-bodied. They were capable of doing work whites could not do, as well as work that whites simply would not do. In contrast, when anti-immigrationists turned their attention to Mexican immigration in the aftermath of the 1924 Immi- gration Act, they emphasized how unfit Mexicans were, even as laborers. Calculat- ing the worthiness of a given group on the basis of its members’ perceived physical characteristics provided a way of calibrating racial difference as well. As a result, long after immigration legislation was passed (or, in some instances, was defeated), the arguments used to construct Mexicans as desirable or undesirable continued to resonate. Attributes, including corporeal characteristics, ascribed to Mexicans during immigration debates became central to the construction of the racial category Mexican. The practice of judging an immigrant group’s desirability based on their perceived physical abilities emerged well before the 1920s, of course. The 1882 Immi- gration Act legalized the exclusion of any immigrant deemed to be a “convict, luna- tic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.”9 Although Mexicans were not categorized as disabled, they were constructed as nonnormative, and discourses that emphasized the body constituted a main vehicle for achieving this construction. In American immigration policy, the specific grounds for exclusion were malleable; the crucial step was simply to estab- lish difference. And in that regard, as Douglas Baynton points out, the concept of disability played a key role. He notes that “beyond the targeting of disabled people, the concept of disability was instrumental in crafting the image of the undesirable immigrant.”10 Conversely, even the arguments in favor of Mexican immigration that emphasized Mexicans’ physical capability as laborers became yet another way to mark them as racially distinct. Molina | Medicalizing the Mexican 25 Mexican immigrant workers, suspected by authorities of being likely typhus carriers. Published in the California State Board of Health Monthly Bulletin 12 (1916), 181. The original caption reads, “A gang of Mexican railroad section laborers in Los Angeles County. These men have but recently arrived from Mexico and are under the supervision of the railroad and health authorities.” Mexican Immigration in Historical Context In the early twentieth century, large-scale employers, particularly those in the agricultural, railroad, and mining industries, supported immigration to facilitate devel- opment in many parts of the Southwest. Projects requiring an infusion of labor included the expansion of railroad lines, construction of federally funded irrigation, and support for the increase in agricultural exports made possible by refrigerated boxcars. During the 1910s, employers turned to Mexican immigrants as a source of low-skilled, low-wage labor.11 The number of Mexican employees grew steadily throughout the next few decades, assisted by an immigration policy that permitted a steady supply of low-cost Mexican labor.12 Although Southwestern capitalists generally welcomed Mexican immigration,

Load more