Race, Disease, and Criminality: Creating the Deportable Mexican in 1940s California

In the early 1940s, just as the United States was launching the now widely known Bracero Program, a temporary contract labor with Mexico, Mexican laborers in Californiaxs Imperial Valley were organizing to improve working conditions. Although many of these labor organizers were established community members and had friends and families in their community, they were deported because of their labor organizing work. During this time period, it was not uncommon to attempt to deport labor leaders for their organizing efforts, but usually they were accused of being communists in these cases. Those involved in the deportations of Mexicans in the Imperial Valley, however, which included border patrol agents, local employers, and immigration officers, deported the labor organizers on the grounds that they were health threats. They used their health records obtained from the clinics they visited to claim they had violated immigration laws by becoming public charges because of their use of public health clinics. This case demonstrates how notions of health were key in the constructing Mexicans as criminal and illegal, thus cementing ties between race and disease. In this presentation, I also discuss the methodological challenges of doing work on race and disease when so many of sources related to this subject are institutionally produced. It demonstrates how voices are silenced through the production of historical documents, the resonances and traces left in this process, and what this can tell us more broadly about early to mid 20th century intersections of citizenship, health, "normality," race and racialization.