Contested bodies and cultures: The politics of public health and race within Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese communities in Los Angeles, 1879--1939.

摘要

"Contested Bodies and Cultures" examines the institution of public health and the broader medical culture to understand the ways in which public health discourse was utilized by a broad array of people in Los Angeles to advance their agendas in the rapidly developing city. These agendas often shaped immigrants' places within the Los Angeles social order. Like immigration laws, public health ordinances had the power to expand and restrict people's access to citizenship and relationship to the nation-state.;Public health officials viewed Mexicans and their culture, often considered a backward culture, as antithetical to their efforts at progress. Health officials launched Americanization programs in hopes that assimilation would eliminate Mexicans as an obstacle to progress. Health officials were very concerned that Mexicans caused high disease rates and epidemics that would be costly to the county.;In contrast to the programs developed for Mexicans, health officials did not develop any significant health care programs for the Japanese and Chinese communities. While health officials characterized health and cleanliness as tropes for healthy citizens and a strong nation, spurring the development of health programs for Mexicans, for the most part, they did not extend similar programs to Asian communities. In fact, Chinese and Japanese communities often supplemented city and county health department budgets so that they could hire public health nurses to work with their communities. To analyze health and city officials attitudes towards Chinese and Japanese communities, I turn from a discussion of public health programs to an examination of public health as discourse that became reified into city ordinances which circumscribed these communities. These ordinances reveal how health officials racialized the Chinese and Japanese in opposition to the body politic and by extension, citizenship.