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.
Natalia Molina is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is the author of the award winning How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts and the co-editor of Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice.
"Fit to Be Citizens is tightly organized, crisply and clearly argued, and beautifully written throughout. Molina paints a vivid portrait of an understudied dimension of southern California social history."—David G. Gutiérrez, author of Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity
"This riveting study crosses boundaries of both discipline and nationality to marvelous effect."—David Roediger, author of Working Toward Whiteness
293 pp.6 x 9Illus: 4 b/w photographs, 4 maps, 4 tables
9780520246492$34.95|£30.00Paper
Mar 2006