How Scientific Racialization Shapes Mexican Immigration

Policies, 1848-present

Professor Natalia MolinaHistory & Urban Studies

Race and Membership in American History: an Interdisciplinary Exploration

 August 11, 2016

• "Disease is a particularly effective mechanism because it does not just mark deviance. Used as accusation toward the already deviant, disease intensifies the rhetoric of hatred, fear, and blame utilized against undesirable populations. It shifts the quality of this rhetoric from the socially constructed to the medically legitimated, from a vaguely if forcefully defined rationale of difference to a rational basis for surveillance, control, and exclusion." - Susan Craddock

The Legacy of the Mexican-American War (1846-48)

American Progress,John Gast (1872)

Manifest Destiny• (National level) [Manifest Destiny] (ideology)• Who is not seen as capable of self-government?• Inherently a racial ideology• Economic motivations (material conditions)• - Westward expansion• -phrase used to justify continental expansion

• “…we have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race--the free white race. To incorporate Mexico would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race… I protest against such a union as that!

• –-Former Vice President and then South Carolina Senator John Calhoun

• The Mexican provinces are filled with a population, not only degraded, but of every possible shade and variety of color and complexion, from the deep black of the negro, to the sallow white of the Mexican Indian…If we annex these provinces to our Union, will we admit those who are now the free citizens of Mexico to the privileges of American citizenship? ..If this policy should be pursued… One of two consequences must follow annexation: either the American slave must become free, or the Mexican negro and mulatto must become slaves (U.S. Congress 1847, 133).

• --Congressman James Pollock (also originator of the phrase, “In God we trust,” used on US currency)

Medical Borders

Medical Borders

Eugenics and race betterment

Eugenics, race betterment, sterilization

Families in a railroad camp, 1916, CA health report

Public health nurses, 1925

Immigration Reform-1920s

• My Dear Chairman Johnson:•  The danger of an unrestricted Mexican Amerind influx lies in the differential

birth rates. I have not here the exact statistics. However we may say approximately that the Old American stock averages perhaps 3 children per family. We found in the poor neighborhood * in one unit an average of +9 children. These averages show 2 families yielding the 3rd generation respectively. 27 Americans, 729 Mexican peons (PAGE 4) while the American 3-child average will be found approximately correct, there are probably no available statistics as to American families that are worth much. My own population-pressure studies, which are world wide and over many years, indicate it is difficult to find a more fecund group than the Amerind.

•  • A Mexican peon mass, free from revolution and under American

sanitation, means a terrific problem in the future. Our negro slave immigration was, say 750,000. Their descendants must number over 10,000,000. Our peon population nucleus today may be 3 or 4 times the slave beginning. It is tragic that there is any delay over establishing the Quota against Latin America.

•  • Very Earnestly C.M. Goethe, President Immigration Study Commission

• “For the most part Mexicans are Indians, and very seldom become naturalized. They know little of sanitation, are very low mentally, and are generally unhealthy.”

• -Texas Democratic Representative John C. Box, Quoting from a 1926 report by the California Commission of Immigration and Housing

The Depression

Medical Authority• “large, socially under-privileged Mexican

population…would unquestionably become a public health problem” --County social worker Zdenka Buben

• Return to biological determinism • Ex-Tuberculosis in Racial Types with Special

Reference to Mexicans,” by Dr. Benjamin Goldberg, • Claimed: “all men are not created equal” and that

“health heredity is a part of biological heredity.” Thus, he called for stricter immigration laws, warning the public that the “Mexican is coming in thousands.”

“Juan Crow”

Zoot Suit Riots, 1943

Los Angeles Sheriff Edward Ayres

• “the inborn characteristics" of "the Mexican element," which had a "desire to use a knife or some [other] lethal weapon.”

• Although a wild cat and a domestic cat are of the same family they have certain biological characteristics so different that while one may be domesticated the other would have to be caged to be kept in captivity; and there is practically as much difference between the races of man.”

Mendez v. Westminster (1947)

Forced Sterilizations, 1970s: 1972- Madrigal vs. Quiligan

Proposition 187

Mothers of East Los Angeles

UFW protest