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Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939

Natalia Molina

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Nov 02, 2017 Simon Purdue rated it it was amazing

Natalia Molina’s Fit to be Citizens offers a concise and interesting history of the relationship between public health, race, and eugenics in Los Angeles between 1879 and 1939. Molina argues that while Los Angeles was being advertised to the nation as a haven of natural abundance and good health, its minority populations were targeted with racist public health policies that sought effectively to ‘eradicate’ their communities. In stark contrast to the image of a clean, natural LA that was projec Natalia Molina’s Fit to be Citizens offers a concise and interesting history of the relationship between public health, race, and eugenics in Los Angeles between 1879 and 1939. Molina argues that while Los Angeles was being advertised to the nation as a haven of natural abundance and good health, its minority populations were targeted with racist public health policies that sought effectively to ‘eradicate’ their communities. In stark contrast to the image of a clean, natural LA that was projected to the rest of the country, internal correspondence shows that authorities viewed Chinese, Japanese and Mexican communities as ‘dirty’, ‘rotten’ and diseased. Using the fallacy of ‘scientific objectivity’ city authorities and public health officials attributed the very real health problems that these communities faced to ‘biological deficiencies’ and cultural practices. Rather than addressing the severe racial disparity in public health services and sanitary infrastructure which caused epidemics to occur, the city simply further discriminated against these communities and sought ultimately to ‘racially cleanse’ the city of LA, as demonstrated by the explicit request of the city’s public health officer to the city council to ‘eradicate Chinatown’.
Molina goes on to argue that public health officials also acted as ‘gatekeepers’ who were effectively given the power to determine who had the right to citizenship and full civic engagement. Using the language of health and cleanliness, public health departments had the power to decide who could enter public schools, who could establish businesses, and ultimately who was ‘American’. Informed by deeply racialized health and hygiene norms, public health officials thereby enforced their own measures of Americanness and acted as the gatekeepers to the body politic.
Furthermore, in a national context of shifting and solidifying racial boundaries, public health officials played an important role in defining race. Molina notes that in the industrial cities of the East and Midwest public health programs played a role in ‘Americanizing’ and ‘whitening’ European migrant populations by enforcing American hygiene norms and ‘cleansing’ ethnic communities, contributing to the consolidation of what came to be known as the ‘Caucasian’ race. However in the far west racial boundaries were blurred, and Molina argues that Mexican and Asian migrants did not fit easily into the increasingly dichotomized racial hierarchy. By determining social membership public health officials played a key role in defining racial boundaries in cities like LA, and defining what it meant to be American in the west. Molina argues tangentially that the people of LA thus saw race differently to the rest of the nation. While ideas of race dichotomized into a black/white divide across the country, in Los Angeles the racial order was actually further graded and a broader racial hierarchy developed (much like the earlier conception of European racial hierarchies of Slavs, Celts etc).
In the epilogue to her book Molina offers perhaps her most interesting point, framing racialized public health discourse as a precedent for the later New Deal policies of the HOLC and the resultant redlining which would serve to entrench and bolster segregation and systemic racism in the urban space, creating racial disparities which severely limited economic and social opportunity and whose legacy continues to plague non-white populations today. This situates the topic of public health as an important chapter in the long and unfinished story of racism in the United States, marking it as a key tool of discrimination.
Molina contributes not only to the history of public health but to the history of racialization and the construction of race in the United States. By looking at how race and public health were mobilized to fit the ‘needs’ of society (i.e. the initial assimilation efforts directed at Mexican populations when the city needed cheap labor followed by the later racist eugenic policies that sought to limit their reproduction once that need had been satisfied) and exploring how these populations executed agency and mobilized ideas of race and the language of public health to their own advantage, she highlights the fallacy of racial thinking and the constructed nature of race through a lens that widens the discourse beyond the traditional white/non-white dichotomy.
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Oct 15, 2018 Rachel marked it as to-read

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