Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Fit to Be Citizens? demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina's compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.

Molina has picked a worthy topic for exploration. However, failing to establish a clear methodology for historical investigation, and through systemically flawed citation, Molina undermines her own arguments and weakens her own credibility. The most immediately glaring error is her utter omission to mention, not even once, the greatest public health crisis in the US in the period on which she writes: The Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918. Why Molina fails to mention this becomes may be explained in the context of agenda-driven research which conveniently ignores that which does not fit her model. But, leaving that aside, let me point out fundamental problems in her approach.

One of her most unfortunate habits is her use of decontextualized "quoted phrases". She puts phrases in quotes but leaves the reader uncertain as to whether such constructions are her own, references to common knowledge of the period, or excerpted bits from the most recent (or upcoming) citation: "heathen Chinaman" (23); "real Americans" (30); [Mexicans] "required constant supervision" (74); "Oriental rats" (82); etc. By the time Molina arrives at the devastatingly incriminating evidence of brutally segregated divisions in the health care system, her use of these decontextualized statements becomes unnecessarily suspect: "In their directory of clinics, health officials classified Maravilla [clinic] as for `Mexicans only.'" (90). The citation she then gives is not to a directory but to the 1925 county health department annual report, leaving us to wonder to what degree the "Mexicans only" designation was explicit, enforced or even conceptualized. On the subsequent page (91), she quotes the phrase "yellow peril" but, instead of demonstrating with a full quotation, tells us that the phrase is being used to include Mexicans as well as Japanese. Use of the full quotation, fully contextualized so that the term "yellow peril" could be clearly seen to be applied to Mexicans, could open up an interesting discussion of color terminology in racialized rhetoric (Mexicans as "yellow"). Yet, while she returns to color in her discussion of "brown peril" (129) she never examines how "yellow" terminology was applied to Mexicans (if ever it was).

Molina makes frequent assertions without reference or citation: "both [Lummis and Kinney] were strong believers in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race" (19); "[Public health officials concluded that] Chinese people would always be disease carriers" (26); "Like most white Americans, Californians presumed that the Mexican presence in the United States would be completely erased in due time" (44); "Writers warned the public of the `almond eyed stork'" (107). Adequate citations are lacking. When she claims (without citation) that "In actuality, California public schools were segregated until 1947" (132) she is implying that segregated schools were the norm. In actuality, various approaches were taken towards school segregation in California in the early 1900's; not all schools were segregated. Her claim is misleading as it implies all schools, not "some" or even "most" schools. She supplies no statistical data on this.

Molina is often vague and unnecessarily unclear: In her discussion of the photo on the cover of the 1916 Board of Health Bulletin, Molina makes the assertion that this portrayal "resonated with then-current negative stereotypes" (69); she goes on to imply (show?) the pejorative nature of the caption of the photo. Oddly, she phrased this ambiguously: "Captions such as, `The type of people who are bringing typhus and other diseases into California from Mexico' made certain that not even the most naïve of readers could miss the point." (70) Was that the caption for that photo? But why not either show the whole front cover of the work or simply state that it is the photo's caption? Complex constructions and passive voice dull the clarity of her argument. In her discussion of Pomeroy's alleged fear of Japanese births outstripping "white" births (indicated by his personal notations for a speech), she alleges that his "personal prejudice... soon evolved into standard department policy." (110, emphasis mine) Does she mean to imply that the placement of markers on end-of the year reports to indicate where Japanese birth rates surpassed "white" birth rates was incorporated as a standard operating procedure from then on? Molina allows this ambiguity to corrode her scholarship but fuel her thesis (on public health racialization of immigrants).

Molina cites issues which are "debated" (20, 24) but often omits multiple sides of the debates: her presentation of the hostile arguments used against the Chinese Laundries provides an example of racial injustice, yet she presents no counter-narrative of victory for racial equality (35 - 43). At times Molina has recourse to valuable data but does not use it: in her discussion of anti-immigration legislation... Read more     |  Comments (2)