How Race Is Made in America by Natalia Molina

Author:Natalia Molina
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520280076
Publisher: University of California Press

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONSTRUCTION OF DEPORTABILITY

The Imperial Valley arrests and subsequent deportations demonstrate one way in which a group can be made deportable, in this case by the local Border Patrol, which had a reputation for being predisposed toward supporting the interests of growers. I would like to emphasize the difference between the state of being deportable and the act of deportation itself, drawing attention to how a certain group, Mexicans in the Imperial Valley, is made more easily policed and deported.84 The case I have described could be viewed as one that simply involves a combination of efforts aimed at safeguarding the public: four Mexicans living and working in the Imperial Valley were deported because they had syphilis. However, it does not require much analysis to scratch the veneer of the professed goal of protecting public health and expose a different, and much less laudable, aim. The Imperial Valley arrests serve as a primer on the power that can be wielded by industry and the government under the auspices of public safety. The arrests speak to the broad capacity of the state to choose when and against whom to enforce certain laws.

Using health as an analytical lens adds another important dimension to our understanding of the Imperial Valley cases. It reveals the development of a medicalized racial profiling that served to make Mexicans deportable. The Border Patrol agents’ quick move to investigate other patients at the public clinic where Gutiérrez had been treated almost certainly reflects an assumption that doing so would result in more arrests and subsequent deportations on the charge of being “afflicted with a loathsome and dangerous contagious disease,” which they could link to LPC grounds. The strategy was foolproof. Migrant laborers’ poor working and living conditions made them more vulnerable to disease, and the high population of single, male migrant workers and workers separated from their families increased the likelihood of the presence of sexually transmitted diseases in particular. Hence Mexicans were always suspended in the state of deportability as these conditions were the norm for low-wage, unskilled laborers of this time.

In his book Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace,” historian Alan Kraut uses the metaphor of the double helix to capture the entanglement between Americans’ concern for health and their understanding of particular immigrant groups as more likely to be disease carriers. Other historians of race and science, including Nayan Shah, Alexandra Stern, and I, have looked at how similar perceptions of Mexican and Chinese immigrants led to tighter medical screening at borders and ports, as well as calls for stricter immigration policies.85 Historically syphilis drew particular attention, marking groups as “other,” especially during times of demographic or political change.86 In the early twentieth century, eugenicists (who believed that the human race could be improved through selective breeding) claimed that syphilis arose from bad genes. One way to lower the number of cases, the argument went, was to reduce “the bad gene pool.” Immigration restrictions, aimed mainly at southern and eastern Europeans, who were frequently described as “defective,” were meant to assist in that process.

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