Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939University of California Press, 13 mar. 2006 - 293 pagini Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Fit to Be Citizens? demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina’s compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times. |
Cuprins
1 | |
15 | |
Public Health Attitudes toward Japanese and Mexican Laborers in ProgressiveEra Los Angeles | 46 |
3 Institutionalizing Public Health in Ethnic Los Angeles in the 1920s | 75 |
DepressionEra Public Health Policies in Los Angeles | 116 |
Mexican Americans and the Struggle for Public Housing in 1930s Los Angeles | 158 |
Genealogies of Racial Discourses and Practices | 179 |
Notes | 189 |
Bibliography | 255 |
Index | 273 |
Alte ediții - Afișează-le pe toate
Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 Natalia Molina Previzualizare limitată - 2006 |
Fit to be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 Natalia Molina Previzualizare limitată - 2006 |
Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 Natalia Molina Previzualizare limitată - 2006 |
Termeni și expresii frecvente
African Americans Angeles City Angeles County Health Annual Report areas argued Belvedere Berkeley birth rates Board of Health California Press camps Chicago Chinatown Chinese Exclusion Act Chinese launderers cited as AHR citizens city council city health city’s clinics County Health Department county hospital county’s cultural Department of Charities Dillingham Commission discourse disease East Los Angeles epidemic ethnic filed with CP George Sánchez groups high IMRs History hygiene Ibid ican Japanese birth John Pomeroy LACA LACC LACHD/City LACHD/County laundries living Los Angeles County Mexi Mexican American Mexican and Japanese Mexican births Mexican communities Mexican immigrants Mexican laborers Mexican population Mexican women Mexico neighborhoods ordinance percent plague policies Politics programs public health public health officials public housing quarantine race railroad slum social membership Southern California sterilization Tate-Thompson tion tuberculosis typhus United University of California University Press urban WBCs workers yellow peril York
Pasaje populare
Pagina 238 - ... any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge...
Pagina 49 - The entrance into our political, social, and industrial life of such vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions, is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm. These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement. They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races; representing...
Pagina 57 - ... anarchy, we had better not have begun the task at all. It is worse than idle to say that we have no duty to perform, and can leave to their fates the islands we have conquered. Such a course would be the course of infamy. It would be followed at once by utter chaos in the wretched islands themselves. Some stronger manlier power would have to step in and do the work, and we would have shown ourselves weaklings, unable to carry to successful completion the labors that great and high-spirited nations...
Pagina ii - ... Representation, by Herman S. Gray 16. Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920, by Paul Ortiz 17. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, by Alexandra Stern 18.
Pagina 17 - We have four millions of degraded negroes in the South . . . and if there were to be a flood-tide of Chinese population— a population befouled with all the social vices, with no knowledge or appreciation of free institutions or constitutional liberty...