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John McKiernan-González , Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848-1942 (Durham, NC, and London : Duke University Press , 2012), pp. xvi + 416, £71.00, £17.99 pb; $94.95, $26.95 pb.
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Geography is key in this spirited book, where the Mexico-United States borderlands lie abuzz with the transit of disease, public health officers, soldiers, local and federal authorities of two countries, as well as Mexican, African-American, and white American citizens. The earnestness of the public heath interventions implemented highlight three important matters for Latin Americanists: the ubiquity of human mobility in this region, the variety of interventions deployed by the US Public Health Service and the US Marine Hospital Service, and the options available to populations singled out for health surveillance by local medico-political forces.
By the 1840s, the borderlands in McKiernan-González's story had been a part of Mexico far longer than they had been a part of the United States. Mexico's territorial losses in the aftermath of the war in 1848 did little to diminish the influence of Mexicans and people of Mexican descent to the economies of the areas the United States acquired. A new fact of life for Mexican populations in the borderlands, control by US authorities included public health measures cast as 'privileges of citizenship' (p. 17) that evinced levels of intrusiveness and antagonism absent from health authorities' dealings with white Americans living in the same places....