By MICHAEL CALDERÓN-ZAKS
OK, we get it: somewhere in Mexico lies the epicenter of an outbreak of swine flu. It doesn’t really matter where because any part of the country would suffice for the hate-mongers in the media (Malkin, Beck, etc.), for which only Keith Olbermann has called out within the mainstream media. Is the swine flu really the next major human catastrophe? More people have died from “regular flu” since January, roughly 36,000. So then why isn’t there hysteria about that? Most of the deaths attributed to swine flu have taken place in Mexico, about 150, and only one in the US so far. Even so, the real culprit was probably Smithfield Foods, an Anglo-American company that owns factory pig farms.
This latest epidemic will probably prove to be an epidemic that isn’t, as was the case with several others leading up to today. Yes, there’s a tradition of using disease epidemics to prevent immigration along racial lines, and its been documented by historians. I recommend two thoroughly researched books: Alexandra Stern’s Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (University of California Press, 2005), and Natalia Molina’s Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (University of California Press, 2006).
In 1916, the US Public Health Service established quarantines at El Paso and Laredo to quarantine Mexican immigrants. The USPHS was heavily influenced by Eugenics, or race science (1). Then as now, some efforts were made to distinguish good and bad Mexicans along racial lines. Light-skinned Mexicans arriving in 1st class passenger railcars could bypass the quarantine while darker Mexicans arriving in second-class cars were quarantined, and then deloused in kerosene (2). At the El Paso station in 1917, a grand total of three Mexicans were acknowledged to have had the deadly typhus fever—after almost 800,000 Mexican bodies had been inspected. Almost 2,700 bodies were inspected per day in El Paso, in contrast to Ellis Island, which inspected about 350 a day (3). And while the Eugenics movement obsessed about eastern and southern Europeans through the 1930s, the latter had some protection from the Democrats. Mexicans had none back then, and very little now. These practices at the border lasted until the late 1930s (4).
punditman says...See my comment on a related post, here.
