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Natalia Molina This chapter provides insight into how public health and immigration policies intersected and informed one another when it came to Mexican immigration through an examination of key events throughout the 20th century. Medical racial profiling marked Mexicans as unfit for citizenship while ignoring structural inequalities in health care.

John McKiernan-Gonzalez Camp Jenner, a quarantine camp on the Texas border for black migrants, provides an unexpected lens on medical authority and black migrant citizenship in 1895. The returning migrants were quarantined in Eagle Pass when the United States Marine Hospital Service needed to test a promising smallpox treatment. The migrants, in turn, leveraged their status as objects of a federal field trial to guarantee their return home in defiance of white southern authorities. Camp Jenner illuminates the ways African American workers leveraged their role as commodities in an emerging research economy, even as federal health officers exploited their illness while laboring on their behalf.

Veronica Martinez-Matsuda This chapter documents how the U.S. Farm Security Administration aimed to improve Mexican farmworkers’ dire health status through direct medical treatment and social and cultural reform. Such efforts paradoxically helped Mexican families achieve improved health even as they frequently perpetuated racialized views blaming Mexicans for their poor condition.

Lena McQuade Documenting the history of New Mexican midwives, known as parteras, this chapter foregrounds the racialization of birth practices and practitioners in the decades following New Mexico’s admission as a state in the nation.

Jean Kim This chapter examines the multiple colonial roots of “local girls,” or indigenous Hawaiian, Asian, and mixed-race women working in Hawai’i as nurses in the early twentieth century and how these women both reproduced and challenged the racializing impulses of colonial biomedicine within changing parameters of settler and territorial inequalities.

Jason E. Glenn This essay explores the role that crack baby narratives played in redefining race in America. It helped policymakers come to a consensus as to how newly-coded racial discourses of behavioral pathology and personal irresponsibility could be employed to manufacture consent for neo-liberal economic policies and dismantling the New Deal state.

Mark Goldberg This chapter explores the state’s adoption of a peyote remedy during the 1833 cholera epidemic in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. The episode revealed contests over what practices elites considered “medically legitimate,” a discussion that became highly racialized as state officials advocated a therapy tied to Native spirituality and as elites debated the role of medicine in the emerging Mexican nation-state.

Jennifer Seltz This essay examines conflicts over the meaning of Native people’s health and illness in mid-nineteenth-century western Washington Territory. Arguments about who bore responsibility for Coast Salish people’s diseases, and over how those ailments differed from non-Indians’ sicknesses, both made and weakened American authority, and eventually charted new racial boundaries in the region.

Gretchen Long Letters from two very different African American doctors in 1866 reveal how their quest to become professionals hinged both on questions of racial equality and fundamental understandings of health, illness, and treatment.

Martin Summers This chapter argues that black physicians’ understandable preoccupation with somatic diseases such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and pellagra–diseases that allowed them to highlight the physical trauma of racism–contributed to the marginalization of those African Americans with functional mental illnesses as well as psychotherapy as a legitimate therapeutic practice.

Laurie B. Green By tracing the origins of the award-winning 1968 CBS documentary, “Hunger in America,” back to the “discovery of hunger” in the Mississippi Delta by U.S. senators and physicians a year earlier, this chapter shows how the producers used the “power of television” to transform highly racialized stereotypes of poor people into a compelling, politically effective visual narrative

Susan M. Reverby Voice and agency and resistance and suffering have been the operating tropes in historical analysis of race and medicine. Rather than opening analysis, it is argued that focus on historical contingency, uncertainty in medicine where race fills in the lacunae, and a critique metaphoric use of suffering might provide better historical tools.