Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  El Paso’s disinfection plant did not cease operations until 1938, when medical inspectors decided that a combination of factors made mass sterilization unwarranted.40 An increase in commercial aviation meant that more visa entrants and visitors now arrived at airports, not border stations. Moreover, starting in the 1920s, doctors contracted and authorized by the USPHS and INS had begun to perform medical exams in the immigrant’s country of origin.41 Finally, broad-spectrum antibiotics and greater access to vaccines and antitoxins had wiped out many of the contagious diseases such as measles and diphtheria that had terrified doctors and patients at the turn of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, pedestrians, streetcar passengers, and drivers were still checked for smallpox. They were vaccinated if they appeared healthy but lacked visible scarification and deported if they appeared to be pocky or feverish.42 By the early 1940s, Laredo and Eagle Pass appear to have followed El Paso’s example, discontinuing substantial portions of their stations and often transforming them into venereal disease treatment clinics for the U.S. Army.43 When the Bracero Program, launched to transport seasonal laborers from Mexico’s interior to American industries and farms during an upsurge of war-driven industrialization, began in 1942, the USPHS returned to more systematic delousing. Now, however, instead of passing through kerosene and vinegar showers at border ports, Mexicans were dusted with DDT as they departed from the Bracero recruitment centers in Mexico. Two years into the Bracero Program, El Paso’s medical officer informed the surgeon general that “the use of DDT powder as a preventive of body lice [was] effective to a large extent.”44

  The extreme nature of the extended quarantine along the U.S.-Mexican border is thrown into relief by examining the Canadian border, which was quiescent during the same period. One of the most important reasons for this discrepancy was the racialized lens through which USPHS officials stationed along the two borders viewed and categorized those who crossed from one country to the next. In 1928, for example, the physician who had worked at Port Huron, Michigan, for more than twenty years wrote that the great majority of the bodies he processed consisted “mainly of the more desirable northern or western European.”45 Just two years earlier, John W. Tappan, El Paso’s chief inspector in the 1920s, published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in which he wrote, “Conditions differ from those on the Canadian border. We have here to contend with an alien race: one with a different language, different customs, different moral standards and different diseases.”46

  MEDICAL RITES AND RACIAL EXCLUSIONS

  The border quarantine helped to solidify a boundary line that had previously been much more nebulous and, in doing so, helped to racialize Mexicans as outsiders and demarcate Mexico as a distant geographical entity despite topographic and climatic similarity. It not only intensified racial tensions in the borderlands, it also catalyzed anti-Mexican sentiment on a national level and fueled nativist efforts to ban all immigration from the Southern Hemisphere. To a great extent, the pathologization of Mexicans represented an extension of the association of immigrants with disease into new racial and metaphorical terrain. While those disparaged as “other” have been depicted as ill, depraved, or untouchable since before the lazarettos of the Middle Ages, in the United States the linking of foreigners with sickness entered a more pronounced stage in the late nineteenth century when Chinese immigrants began to be associated with physical weakness, parasitic ailments, and bubonic plague.47 By the early twentieth century, this xenophobic logic was being applied to Eastern European, Jewish, and Middle Eastern immigrants, all of whom were explicitly targeted by nativists in the 1920s. Fears of a diseased, feebleminded, and dysgenic “immigrant menace” peaked in the 1920s when Harry H. Laughlin, the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, was appointed “Expert Eugenical Agent” of the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in 1921 by Seattle’s Republican representative, Albert Johnson.48 Laughlin, Johnson, and the East Texas congressman John C. Box—all members of the American Eugenics Society—collaborated with political allies to secure passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which stipulated a 2 percent quota per nation based on the 1890 census. Passed in 1924, this legislation, also known as the National Origins Act, was biased heavily against Southern and Eastern Europeans and, in addition, debarred nearly all immigration from Asia.49

  Despite its stringency, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act did not place the Western Hemisphere under the quota system. In conjunction with the pull of long-standing family networks in the Southwest, labor demands that could not now be met by European and Asian migrants, and the push of ongoing civil unrest in Mexico, this arrangement spurred immigration from Mexico, which rose substantially in the 1920s, from somewhere around 500,000 in 1910 to 1.5 million or more in 1930.50 As Mexicans came to the United States, sometimes settling in big cities beyond the Southwest such as Chicago and St. Louis, eugenicists redirected their gaze from the coasts to the southern border. In the latter half of the 1920s, calls to ban Mexican immigration began to be heard in congressional chambers, scientific and popular journals, and books on the future of the American nation.51 Reflecting the conflation of germs and genes, the image and description of Mexicans as filthy, lousy carriers that had been spawned by the border quarantine merged with eugenic arguments about the bad hereditary “stock” of immigrants. Indeed, it was not unusual for restrictionists to frame their anti-Mexican sentiment around the dangers of lice and typhus.

  Charles M. Goethe, for example, a Sacramento real estate broker, clamored loudly for an end to Mexican entry into the United States. In the 1920s he traveled to the Arizona border to survey health and social conditions. As a member of the national council of the widely distributed journal Survey Graphic, Goethe had probably read the steady stream of articles that it had published about Mexico and the typhus quarantine in 1916 and 1917.52 Soon after his return from Arizona, Goethe founded the Immigration Study Commission (ISC), with the aim of determining the extent of the mestizo peril to the American “seed stock.”53 Given a platform to disseminate his views in Eugenics, the monthly journal of the AES, Goethe concluded that Mexicans were scruffy and contagious: “Eugenically, as low-powered as the Negro, the [Mexican] peon is, from a sanitation standpoint, a menace. He not only does not understand health rules: being a superstitious savage, he resists them.”54 Profiling a young couple who chose to go “south of the Rio Grande, where so much of the Medieval persisted” for their honeymoon, Goethe then used the imagined tragedy that befell them to insist upon closure of the “back door” to Mexican immigrants. Three nights after the couple’s arrival at a tropical spot overflowing with bougainvillea, “the young bride lay tossing with an alarming temperature. Outside her bedroom door the doctor told the almost frantic bridegroom ‘It is typhus fever.’ ‘But it cannot be,’ the bridegroom objected. ‘We have been only in the cleanest hotels. See how scrupulously neat our quarters are, tiled floor and all.’ ‘Yes,’ replied the physician; ‘but peon servants like this chambermaid, Mercedes Ramirez, are only too often contagion carriers.’ ”55 Reprinted as a broadside for free distribution, Goethe’s article depicted Mexicans as apparently healthy yet lethal carriers of deadly germs.56 If allowed to defile the boundaries of the U.S. nation, here represented by a recently married couple at the sacred moment when procreation might begin, the propagation of the “American” family would be doomed.

  Such graphic associations were also staples of the eugenic and nativist vocabulary of Laughlin, who during the 1920s authored studies asserting that the country’s “melting pot” was breaking down under the weight of bad “germ plasm.” As he became increasingly preoccupied with definitions of whiteness predicated on family lineage and Mendelian fractions in the late 1920s, Laughlin offered to undertake a trip to the border on behalf of the so-called Citizens Committee, which had been formed by Box in the wake of rising Mexican immigration. Laughlin requested money from the Carnegie Institution, which was then financing the ERO, to travel to Texas to “find out t
he relative amount of race-crossing between American men and Mexican women and between Mexican men and American women.”57 During the course of his investigation, Laughlin obtained two confidential questionnaires that had been sent to Box. Both respondents were El Pasoans and one identified himself as a physician with a local practice of thirty years.58 Furnishing in-depth answers to all the questions, this informant responded to the query “What contagious diseases have they?” by stating: “Tuberculosis mainly, tho smallpox is constantly bobbing up here along the border and a constant fight by health authorities is the result. We have had typhus fever on more than one occasion, brought directly from Mexico. They bring disease into American families but Americans must use them because there are no others, and besides, they work cheap. The ‘Mexican situation’ has been a problem for the El Paso County Medical Society for years. Instead of solving the matter, we are getting worse.”59 Laughlin interwove these claims about the diseased nature of Mexicans with warnings about the low scores obtained by Mexican schoolchildren on intelligence tests to press for Mexican exclusion. His proposals and ruminations served as fodder for the bills proposed by Box throughout the 1920s to restrict immigration from the Western Hemisphere to a 2 to 3 percent quota. Although these attempts did not succeed, Goethe, Laughlin, Box, and other eugenicists did manage to formulate an alternative solution to the “Mexican problem”: the U.S. Border Patrol.

  The quarantine had other important consequences. Although ostensibly a provisional measure instituted to combat a momentary health crisis, it became the status quo on the border, lasting until World War II. It contributed to the culture of segregation, suspicion, and violence that took shape in the Southwest and California during the first half of the twentieth century. In the popular memory of El Paso residents, the experience of the border as a strict and forbidding line dividing Mexico from the United States was connected intimately to the implementation of the quarantine and the somatic assault of disinfection and the medical exam. Although the voice of the “auburn-haired Amazon,” Carmelita Torres, who led the “bath riots,” is irretrievable, in oral histories conducted by the University of Texas at El Paso border residents identified disinfection as a moment of bodily desecration.60

  For example, one Mexican woman, remembering her husband’s accounts of the quarantine, told an interviewer “the only thing they did [in the immigration building] was bathe them [the immigrants]. . . . They bathed them and took off their clothes, which were washed somewhere else and returned all wrinkled.” All this, as Señora X recalled, was because “they thought [Mexicans] were bringing microbes or something like that over from Mexico.”61 For José Burciaga, who came to El Paso in 1907 and crossed frequently, the quarantine transformed the bridge into an obstacle and the boundary line into a construct verified and enacted upon the body itself. Noting that the disinfection plant was located right next to the bridge, Burciaga told his interviewer: “You see, when someone entered they doused him with something. What a nightmare! And then there was more: men, women, they shaved everyone. . . . They bathed everyone, and after the bath they doused you with cryolite [sodium aluminum fluoride], comprised of some sort of substance, it was strong.”62 Felix López Urdiales, who resided in Juárez, stopped crossing into the United States in the 1920s in part because of his distaste for the quarantine. He recalled that the plant, which included “some baths, some showers, and a boiler,” was underneath the bridge. Remarking that his steamed clothing was always returned wrinkled, López remembered that habitual crossers were required to undergo disinfection every week in order to renew their quarantine cards and that at his workplace this weekly requirement would cost them a half-day’s pay.63

  For some Mexican immigrants who ventured outside of the Southwest in search of opportunity, the quarantine framed their migration stories. This is aptly captured by a fictionalized account of the journey of “José,” one of many informants interviewed by a prominent group of sociologists who launched a survey of race relations in 1925. José began the tale of his passage from Mexico to Pennsylvania with his arrival at the Santa Fe Street Bridge. After he crossed the bridge, the immigration officers “led me first to the Disinfecting Plant. It did me no good to tell them that I had taken a bath a few minutes before in Juarez; I had to take the bath anyway, and meanwhile they took my clothing to disinfect. I made a bundle and tied it with my belt, then they put it in an oven very hot; from there it came out ready to put on again, except that my belt being of leather was wrinkled by the heat.” After being photographed, José and the other Mexicans in line were vaccinated and then marched to a medical inspector who looked “at our eyes and finger-nails and head.”64 For many Mexicans who entered the United States at official stations, the quarantine was an unforgettable passage into the strict racial order of the United States. Moreover, the preceding oral histories and statistics from the INS suggest that the severity of the disinfection procedure encouraged many to avoid designated points of entry. By the early 1920s, instead of undergoing baths, sterilization, and fumigation at El Paso’s Santa Fe Street Bridge or Laredo’s international footbridge, many border-crossers opted to head for isolated spots along the river or desert.

  It is quite telling that one of the immediate precursors to the Border Patrol was a unit created by the USPHS called the “Mounted Quarantine Guard.” Formed in Laredo in 1921, this guard was in charge of monitoring 150 mile-long stretches of the Rio Grande for “illegals,” vaccinating immigrants for smallpox if they lacked signs of scarification, and bringing seemingly dirty and sick Mexican immigrants to quarantine plants for kerosene baths. According to one official, these guards were instructed “in quarantine work and in fact have done work at the Station in order to gain this knowledge that is: how to vaccinate, how to examine [for] vermin; for ringworm of the nails, Trachoma etc. in other words how to give a general quarantine examination.”65 The journal entries written by the two mounted quarantine guards stationed in Laredo in 1921 detail this dual mission of surveillance and disinfection. On August 22, 1921, for example, Alvis C. Taylor, a river guard, wrote that he “scouted San Antonio road from 9:30 AM till 3:00 PM and apprehended 3 wet feet [who were then] delivered to immigration, bathed and deported.”66 The following month, the same guard noted that he reported to the “footbridge at 7:10 AM, left for San Antonio road 8:40 A.M. with Martin [his coworker],” and “stopped 3 Mexicans,” who were promptly “vaccinated and given the same preliminary medical inspection.”67 The journals reveal that up to twenty immigrants at a time were vaccinated by guards on patrol, and in fiscal year 1923 the Mounted Quarantine Guard intercepted and transported to Laredo’s international footbridge 1,120 “alien Mexicans,” along with a handful of Italians, Spaniards, Cubans, Greeks, and other immigrants.68

  After the creation of the Border Patrol, the Mounted Quarantine Guard was phased out. During its brief existence, however, this unit, like the disinfection process itself, helped to mark Mexicans as outsiders who could be admitted to the United States only if sanitized by the methods of modern science. The Border Patrol buttressed and intensified the racial dynamics of boundary maintenance. Engaged in strategies of bodily pursuit that complemented those of the USPHS, the Border Patrol strove to uphold immigration laws that determined inadmissibility based on national provenance, physical condition, financial status, moral standing, and occupation. Rather than raising an impenetrable shield between the United States and Mexico, however, the Border Patrol functioned as a gatekeeper that allowed or denied entry depending on the country’s economic, political, and ideological climate as well as on patrolmen’s personal predilections and local customs.

  PROTECTING THE AMERICAN FAMILY

  The installation of the Border Patrol at ports stretching from Galveston to Calexico and from Nogales to Los Angeles constituted a continuation of patterns of militarization that dated back to the seventeenth century, when the Spanish empire erected presidios and garrisons along its northern frontier. This spatial configuration, which came to be known a
s the “line of defense” (linea de defensa) was part of Spanish attempts to control raids by “hostile” Indians and, beginning in the late eighteenth century, to offset the increasing encroachment of the French, Anglo-American, and Russian empires into the area and its embryonic trading circuits.69

  After Mexico gained its independence in 1821, the region was beset by both legal and illegal Anglo colonizers responding to Mexico’s enticing offers of land in return for conversion to Catholicism. Secessionist movements in Texas and the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846, which sparked the Mexican-American War, unleashed more bellicosity. After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe of Hidalgo granted the United States most of the present-day Southwest in 1848, militarization was further bolstered by the activities of U.S. cavalry and army regulars (many posted at old trading forts), who waged guerrilla warfare against Indians. Augmenting this climate were the Mexican rurales, who hunted down Indians and defended the property of rich Northern hacendados, as well as border raiders seeking either to extirpate Anglo capitalists and land speculators or to overthrow the autocratic government of Porfirio Díaz.70 In 1904, the Bureau of Immigration (the INS’s precursor) installed its first cadre of mounted inspectors on both the Canadian and Mexican lines. Commissioned with debarring primarily Chinese and Southern Europeans, the arrival of these inspectors—many of whom had seen duty in the Spanish-American War—should be seen as an overlapping part of a longer chronology of militarization in the contested postcolonial space of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands.71

  During the first two decades of the twentieth century, both the mounted inspectors and the Texas Rangers monitored the boundary line. Officially formed in 1873, although with roots reaching to the 1830s, the Rangers were a group of Anglo “mobile troubleshooters” known for frequently taking the law into their own hands and aggressively pursuing “frontier justice.”72 First formed to run Apaches and Comanches either back into Mexico or onto the rapidly expanding reservation system, in the early twentieth century the Rangers turned their attention to working-class Mexicans and Mexican Americans. As Anglo farmers and merchants gradually gained control of land in the Southwest, they shifted their focus from the supposed depredations of “hostile” Indians to the perceived abuses committed by Mexican “outlaws” against their private property. From 1915 to 1917, during the height of the Mexican Revolution and the transition to commercialized agriculture, the Rangers were instrumental to the emergence of a new capitalist order and inciting what scholars have called a “race war” in Texas’s Rio Grande valley.73 Hundreds of Mexicans were killed, and many protested to Mexican consuls in border cities about the Rangers’ brutalities. In the 1910s, both the Rangers and immigrant inspectors were regularly accused by border residents of violence and vigilantism, and the records of the Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Relations, the INS, and the USPHS all contain numerous complaints of mistreatment, especially of women.74