| Popis: |
John Mckiernan-Gonzalez’s insightful book analyzes the role of public health regulation along the border of Mexico and the United States as a state-building project that helped to define both nations during a period of significant change in the borders and in the political systems of each. His narrative begins in the period following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and ends during World War II. Like other scholars—including Natalia Molina, Nayan Shah, and Alexandra Stern—he is particularly interested in the ways that issues of race, the body, health, citizenship, and politics intersect. He focuses especially on those policies that emerged to address communicable diseases such as smallpox, typhus, and cholera, as well as the multilayered contestation of such measures. Mckiernan-Gonzalez argues: “Public health provided another theater for people to demonstrate their ability to participate in national society—to show that they were indeed worthy of citizenship” (p. 3). Those policies shaped local, national, and international politics, as well local communities along the border, in this century-long span; both U.S. and Mexican officials envisioned their regulatory efforts as a modernizing project. The author explains that, while public health officials sought to regulate the border and to clearly demarcate national boundaries and identities, those borderlands and their complex history of intersecting peoples, traditions, and economies could not be neatly contained. In fact, in discussing the complex terminology of place names and labels to identify race, nationality, and political alignments, the book’s preface hints at the difficulty of that project. Mckiernan-Gonzalez’s impressive and extensive primary research draws on Department of State and U.S. Public Health and Marine Hospital Service records at the U.S. National Archives, Texas state archival records, several Mexican government records collections, as well as university archival collections and a large number of Spanish- and English-language newspapers in |
