Pox by Michael Willrich

Author:Michael Willrich
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-03-03T21:00:00+00:00

Immigrants from a smallpox-infected ship, detained in 1901 at the quarantine station on Hoffman Island, N.Y. Photo by Elizabeth Allen Austen. COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Along the borders with Canada and Mexico, U.S. quarantine law called for aliens to enter only through designated points. Such rules proved difficult to enforce, particularly along the Rio Grande. Many Mexicans, accustomed to traveling freely across the border for work or to visit relatives, viewed the tightening system of inspection around the turn of the century as a violation of their rights. In a single week in February 1899, Acting Assistant Surgeon H. J. Hamilton and his staff at Laredo, Texas, inspected more than 2,500 migrants crossing the Rio Grande via the Laredo Foot Bridge, a truss bridge built in the 1880s, or by ferry or train. Most of the people he met at the footbridge insisted upon their “right to pass” without inspection. But that was a privilege the Service extended only to affluent travelers. While the Service routinely inspected all arriving passenger trains from Mexico, checking all second- and third-class passengers for “recent vaccine scars,” inspectors allowed travelers in the Pullman cars simply to swear to their immunity. In his time at the post, Hamilton concluded that the poorer class of Mexicans reckoned smallpox a fact of life and feared vaccination far more than the disease.35

In the winter of 1899, Surgeon General Wyman received a flurry of dispatches from Laredo, a border city of 15,000 people, the majority of them of Mexican descent. Virulent smallpox had raged there for months, with 376 cases and 83 deaths reported in January and February. (The death rate indicates an epidemic of classic variola major.) Hamilton advised the local authorities “to issue some law compelling vaccination, by force if necessary.” In March, Texas health officer W. T. Blunt arrived from Austin. City officials set about fumigating homes, vaccinating, and removing infected residents by force to the pesthouse. The actions targeted the poorer barrios on the east side of town. Meeting strong resistance from the residents, Blunt called in the Texas Rangers. In the ensuing violence, one Mexican American leader was killed, thirteen people were wounded, and twenty-one were arrested. A contingent of the U.S. Tenth Cavalry arrived, and Hamilton took charge of the local vaccination corps. Even with so many soldiers in the area, fifteen residents “had to be reported, arrested, and then vaccinated.”36

Even beyond the nation’s borders, the mark of vaccination became a powerful signifier of American rule. In September 1905, more than 650 black contract laborers from Martinique traveled aboard the French steamship Versailles to Colón, a port city located near the Atlantic entrance to the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone. As the crowded ship approached the port, laborers in canoes paddled up to the ship, warning the passengers that poor treatment and harsh conditions awaited them on shore. The messengers said that vaccination, required of all immigrant laborers by the American sanitary regulations of the Isthmian Canal Commission, would produce “an inextinguishable mark” that would make it impossible for them ever to leave the Isthmus.

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