Commercial and social disturbance and restrictions at the U.S.- Mexico border (1891-1924): An improvement to the public's health?

This paper explores the role played by restrictions imposed on persons and goods entering from Mexico to the US, in advancing sanitary practices in that country from 1891 to 1924. This study analyzes the Mexican participation in the American Public Health Association and in the International Sanitary Office, and the impact it had in urging Mexico to reorganize the Supreme Board of Health of the Mexican Republic and to draft a Sanitary Code (1891). This Sanitary Code awarded the Mexican federal executive the authority to be in charge of the Sanitary Service of all ports and frontiers, as well as to establish the National Departments of Health (1917) –which took under its charge the public hygiene of the entire nation–. The analysis includes the role played by the Sanitary Convention of Washington, signed in 1905, in preventing the invasion and propagation of infectious diseases from one country to another, and also its role in protecting foreign trade. Finally, I analyze the scopes and limits of the enforcement of interstate notification of epidemic diseases, vaccine protection for immigrants, and disinfection of infected people and things, on both sides of the US-Mexican border.