Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  Hidden away in the papers of the Secretariat of Foreign Relations in Mexico City, this small incident encapsulates many of the conflicts and complexities that characterized the Mexican-U.S. borderlands in the first half of the twentieth century. On the one hand, this confrontation illustrates the centrality of medicalization to the solidification of the border and to the atmosphere of heightening tension that shaped Mexican-Anglo relations. In this instance, the arms of Mexican border-crossers were literally imprinted with proof of cleanliness. In the eyes of the USPHS, bearing the word “ADMITTED” converted Mexicans from the status of undesirable and questionable outsiders to quasi citizens with—albeit temporary—constitutional and legal protection. In a related sense, the branding scandal demonstrates the extent to which the borderlands were becoming characterized by militarization in the early twentieth century. Seeking to bolster their authority as federal bodies, the immigration and public health services argued that the Mexicans marked as admissible by the hands of the U.S. nation would be safeguarded from the depredations of local vigilantes. Through modern forms of policing, enumeration, and classification, the USPHS and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) sought to civilize the “wild West” by bringing order and administration to a barbarous frontier still teeming with outlaws. The practice of stamping the arms of Mexicans that began in Laredo in 1916 presaged historical patterns that would unfold with celerity in the Southwest. Within one year, Mexicans crossing into the United States would be subjected to a much more harrowing rite of medicalization; within ten years, the U.S. Border Patrol would be formed and would start to implement strategies of surveillance, detection, and interception that continue to this day. In tandem, these two trends—medicalization and militarization—worked to create a regime of eugenic gatekeeping on the U.S.-Mexican border that aimed to ensure the putative purity of the “American” family-nation while generating long-lasting stereotypes of Mexicans as filthy, lousy, and prone to irresponsible breeding.5

  THE 1917 TYPHUS QUARANTINE

  Less than a year after the Laredo incident, the U.S. government and the USPHS launched a quarantine, targeted at the eradication of typhus fever, along the entire length of the U.S.-Mexican border. For more than twenty years, border-crossers and their baggage were subjected to rigorous procedures of disinfection and fumigation. The quarantine hardened the boundary line between Mexico and the United States, facilitated the creation of the Border Patrol, and fostered scientific and popular prejudices about the biological inferiority of Mexicans. As with many of the important dimensions of the history of medicine, race, and power in the American West, several of the principal protagonists of this drama had been active participants in eugenics and public health meetings at San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

  Indeed, the USPHS’s senior surgeon who instituted the quarantine, Claude C. Pierce, had served as chief sanitary officer at the fair. When the PPIE ended, the USPHS instructed Pierce to report to Laredo, Texas, to assess the likelihood of a serious typhus outbreak.6 Just as he had done when he implemented prophylactic measures in San Francisco, Pierce brought the racial presumptions of the tropical medicine he had practiced for more than a decade in the Panama Canal to the U.S.-Mexican border.7 When Pierce arrived, a process of medicalization had already been underway in the borderlands for the preceding three decades. Antedating the United States, which was slower than many countries to adhere to the tenets of germ theory, the Mexican health service had established quarantine and fumigation plants in border cities and towns such as Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, and Piedras Negras in the early 1890s.8 Sanitary agents in these facilities were responsible for sterilizing immigrants and animals and for fumigating baggage entering Mexico. Although the USPHS stationed inspectors at various points along the two-thousand-mile border at about the same time, routines mirroring those in effect in Mexico were not standardized until the 1910s.

  At the turn of the century, a lack of epidemics and a fluid interconnected economy of peoples, industries, and culture allowed for relatively easy passage through border stations in places such as El Paso and Laredo. During this era, in fact, immigration and public health officials were not primarily interested in Mexicans but in the Chinese, Syrians, and Greeks who apparently avoided Ellis Island by using the border as a “back door” into the United States.9 Documents of the INS and local oral histories show that until the first decade of the twentieth century, Mexicans regularly came into the United States unquestioned. For this reason, Greeks and Syrians often sought to learn enough basic Spanish to enter as mexicanos.10

  As the twentieth century progressed, however, and Mexicans began to settle in the United States—often making a seasonal visit into permanent residence—the situation along the border began to change. With the USPHS in a growth phase and with the generalized expansion of epidemiological surveillance, U.S. border cities began sporadically to enforce quarantines, usually for yellow fever and smallpox, against their southern neighbors.11 As nativist alarm over rising numbers of newcomers, especially Southern and Eastern Europeans, fueled the formulation of stricter immigration laws, USPHS officials became more aware of the porosity of the Mexican and Canadian borders. This transition was also catalyzed by the Mexican Revolution, which began in the northern states of Coahuila and Chihuahua in 1910. As the uprising spread and Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa led thousands into armed struggle against the Mexican government, the USPHS and immigration officials began to express great trepidation about the increasing circulation of insurgents, refugees, and temporary laborers in the twin cities of El Paso–Juárez and Laredo–Nuevo Laredo. When news of a typhus epidemic in Mexico’s interior surfaced in 1915 and several cases of the fever appeared in 1915 in Laredo, the USPHS dispatched Pierce to the border. Reaching Laredo a few days before Christmas, Pierce met with Hamilton and local physicians, who reviewed the history of a family (a mother and two sons) taken ill with typhus earlier that month and the measures enacted to quell the disease. They explained that the patients were kept in isolation, bathed with kerosene, and their hair cropped, and the family’s “shack and all its contents” as well as an adjoining structure were burned to the ground to destroy all potential vermin.12 Hamilton showed Pierce how the baggage of persons entering the United States was sulfur fumigated at the international bridge, and, revealing Mexico’s superior medical infrastructure—the product of a centralized attempt to modernize the country during the decades-long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz—that immigrants suspected of infection were deloused, with the permission of local authorities, at a Nuevo Laredo plant outfitted with a French steam-chamber and boiler.13 After gathering information about the situation in Laredo, Pierce traveled to El Paso, where he began to refurbish the city’s disinfection plant, spending approximately six thousand dollars remodeling and furnishing it with up-to-date fumigation and bathing equipment.14

  After more than one year of preparing the plant, observing USPHS activities along the border, and steady news of typhus fever in Mexico’s interior, Pierce announced on January 23, 1917, that the moment had arrived for an “iron-clad quarantine” against every body entering the United States from Mexico.15 Although fewer than five fatal cases of typhus fever had been reported in El Paso in the previous two months, one of these had taken the life of El Paso’s city physician, Dr. W. C. Kluttz.16 This death caused quite a stir among the Anglo elite, which was very invested in projecting an image of El Paso as a dynamic frontier city and “a great health center for the Southwest.”17 This loss was compounded two weeks later by the withdrawal from northern Mexico of General John J. Pershing, who after nine months of an elusive quest had failed to capture the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.18

  This time, the draconian actions of the USPHS provoked even angrier protest than that seen in Laredo the previous March. The morning the quarantine was enforced, Carmelita Torres, forty-seven years of age and most likely a domestic employed by an elite El Paso family, spearheaded a demonstration
of about two hundred “Juarez women, incensed at the American quarantine regulations” at the Santa Fe Street bridge, which was shut down almost the entire day: “from the time street cars began to run until the middle of the afternoon thousands of Mexicans thronged the Juarez side of the river and pushed out to the tollgate on the bridge. Women ringleaders of the mob hurled stones at American civilians, both on the bridge and on the streets of Juarez.”19 The women were irate at the prospect of being forced into kerosene showers and had heard rumors that American soldiers were “photographing the women while bathing and making the pictures public.”20 The following day the “bath riots” continued as several men joined the fray and, “armed with empty bottles, rocks and sticks,” they “rushed the American troops, customs, immigration and quarantine officers.”21

  By the end of the week the commotion subsided and Mexicans as well as all other immigrants seeking entry through El Paso found themselves subjected to a medical inspection that differed in significant ways from procedures being carried out concurrently at Ellis and Angel Islands.22 In a special report featuring photographs of four different points at the quarantine plant—the station for the sterilization of clothes, the entryway alongside the bridge where Mexicans waited to be deloused, the yard, and the women’s shower room—Pierce described how medical inspectors scrutinized and cleansed the multitudinous bodies seeking to cross the international bridge. Stating definitively that “all persons coming to El Paso from Mexico, considered as likely to be vermin infested, are sent through this plant for disinfection,” Pierce explained that upon entering the building the bodies were segregated by sex and stripped naked.23 While their clothing was being chemically scoured, a laundering that lasted about thirty minutes, each scalp was examined by a “male or female attendant, as the sex requires” for lice, the vectors of typhus fever.24 As was common procedure at the time, especially among lousy schoolchildren, if found: “the hair of the men or boys [was] clipped with No. 00 clippers, the hair dropping on a newspaper, which [was] then rolled up and burned. Women with head lice [had] a mixture of equal parts of kerosene and vinegar applied to the head and hair for half an hour with a towel covering the head.”25 Attendants then directed border-crossers into sex-segregated showers where they were sprayed with a mixture of soap, kerosene, and water; after this, they were vaccinated for smallpox if deemed necessary. At the end of these ablutionary rites, sterilized clothing was returned to its owners, who received a signed certificate with the heading “United States Public Health Service, Mexican Border Quarantine” verifying that they had “been deloused, bathed, vaccinated, clothing and baggage disinfected.”26 The passage was not complete, however, for the immigrant still faced a general medical examination, occasionally a psychological profile, and questioning about visa or citizenship status.27 Shortly after its unveiling in El Paso, the quarantine was implemented in the Arizona towns of Naco, Nogales, Douglas, and Tucson, and in Texas in Laredo, Eagle Pass, Rio Grande City, Brownsville, and Hidalgo, although only Eagle Pass and Laredo had fully functional disinfection stations.28

  Figure 3. Mexicans waiting to be disinfected at the El Paso Street Bridge, 1917. Source: File 1248, Records of the U.S. Public Health Service, Record Group 90, National Archives and Records Administration.

  In June 1917, after approximately four months of quarantine, Pierce could finally confirm that no new cases of typhus fever had occurred along the Mexican border.29 Out of thirty-one cases recorded in the United States as a whole during this period, the total number of fatalities was three, all in El Paso.30 This figure of three shrinks in comparison, though, when juxtaposed against its accompanying statistics: 792,629 bodies inspected, 60,295 deloused, 27,537 vaccinated for smallpox, 373 excluded on account of illness or for refusing disinfection, and 11 retained for observation. According to Pierce, the USPHS inspected 37,774 bodies per week, or 5,392 per day.31 Considering that most entrants came through El Paso, we can divide the latter figure in half to arrive at what is surely a conservative estimate: 2,696 bodies inspected each day at the Santa Fe Street Bridge, with a schedule that began at 7:00 A.M. and ended at 7:00 P.M., 225 per hour, or about 75 per physician each hour.32 These figures surpass those calculated for Ellis Island during the same time period, even after taking into consideration the fact that quarantine and inspection were separate processes. On the East and West Coasts, disinfection and vaccination were performed by steamship companies and state health officials responsible for examining passengers before disembarkation; these procedures had developed during the nineteenth century and became codified into law with the 1893 National Quarantine Act and subsequent immigration acts.33 In fiscal year 1917, for example, with reduced European entry due to World War I, 129,000 immigrants, or 350 per day, were scrutinized by approximately twenty physicians as they passed through Ellis Island.34 Given the limited infrastructural capacity of the Santa Fe Street plant in comparison to Ellis Island, the figure of 225 bodies per hour reveals the fervor that characterized the quarantine. Even more striking is the fact that strip showers were compulsory and integrated into the general examination. According to Pierce’s numbers, 410 immigrants per day, or 34 per hour, were deloused at Mexican border ports. If delousing seldom occurred at Ellis Island, on the southern border it constituted the threshold of entry for hundreds of people each day.

  Figure 4. Mexican man being administered the smallpox vaccination by a public health official at the El Paso immigration station, 1917. Source: File 1248, Records of the U.S. Public Health Service, Record Group 90, National Archives and Records Administration.

  Over the next two decades, the sanitation plants along the border were enlarged and further equipped, and despite the disappearance of any typhus threat the quarantine became more widespread and demanding. In 1923, U.S. secretary of labor James J. Davis, who was worried about lax enforcement of immigration laws along the Mexican border, asked for reports from the field about immigrant processing. He received letters from the Arizona stations of Ajo, San Fernando, Nogales, Naco, and Douglas and the Texas ports of El Paso, Presidio, Eagle Pass, Brownsville, Del Rio, and Laredo, all of which mentioned, usually in some depth, medical inspection.35 For instance, El Paso’s acting assistant surgeon, Irving McNeil, meticulously described the modus operandi at the Santa Fe Street Bridge. Noting that 90 percent of all arrivals required chemical showering because of their physical appearance and perceived status as lower-class laborers, he wrote: “The line inspection for the Immigration Service is governed by the regulations covering the medical inspection of aliens prepared under the direction of the Surgeon General, with certain modifications at this port, on account of the fact that the arriving alien who goes through the bathhouse at the disinfecting plant is previously thoroughly inspected while naked, by a trained and experienced attendant, male or female, as the case may be, and, if necessary, by a medical officer as well.” McNeil reiterated the same litany of showers, steaming, and vaccinations that Pierce had recited six years earlier, stressing the routinization of weekly disinfection and the renewal of quarantine cards. He wrote, “The working classes from the neighboring Mexican cities known as ‘locals’ are required to pass through the disinfecting plant once a week. A bath certificate is issued to these and taken up at the expiration of a week, a new one being issued after each disinfection.”36 In another letter to Davis, the Santa Fe Street Bridge’s inspector in charge, Will E. Soult, provided additional details about the thoroughness of the medical examiner, who was not content to stand “at a distance noting and certifying obvious defects,” and described a procedure of streamlined efficiency: “the aliens are formed into single file, spaced about twelve feet apart, with head coverings removed and required to pass singly with hands up-raised, nails to the front, before the Medical Examiner, who stations himself, with back to light, about twelve feet in front of and facing the line of approaching aliens.”37

  Antityphus delousing and fumigation were institutionalized along the U.S.-Mexican border from 1917 to the eve of World
War II. By the late 1920s, for instance, El Paso had a new cyanide room for treating baggage and a full-time staff of fourteen that included two supervising surgeons and ten inspectors in charge of vaccinating immigrants, routing them into the baths, assisting with laboratory work, and running the boilers and steam machines.38 In 1926, a revamped quarantine plant was built at Laredo’s international footbridge, allowing for delousing of more than five hundred border-crossers per day.39 By the early 1930s, many of the smaller border ports had received dry air sterilizers and additional personnel. This was a system characterized by clear-cut class distinctions from the outset, as most middle- and upper-class Mexicans were able to bypass disinfection because they were familiar to inspectors, arrived on the train via first class, were well coiffed and dressed, or could furnish a doctor’s waiver. Conversely, the majority of Mexican laborers, whether they hailed from the interior or commuted daily across the border, were required to undergo sterilization on a weekly basis and carry a card noting the date of their next shower. Although the intensity and pace varied from port to port and were periodically affected by attempts to control minor outbreaks of other diseases, these requirements for entry were enforced in the large border cities as well as small towns such as Terlingua and Roma.