Fevered Measures

In Fevered Measures, John Mckiernan-González examines public health campaigns along the Texas-Mexico border between 1848 and 1942 and reveals the changing medical and political frameworks U.S. health authorities used when facing the threat of epidemic disease. The medical borders created by these officials changed with each contagion and sometimes varied from the existing national borders. Federal officers sought to distinguish Mexican citizens from U.S. citizens, a process troubled by the deeply interconnected nature of border communities. Mckiernan-González uncovers forgotten or ignored cases in which Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and other groups were subject to—and sometimes agents of—quarantines, inspections, detentions, and forced-treatment regimens. These cases illustrate the ways that medical encounters shaped border identities before and after the Mexican Revolution. Mckiernan-González also maintains that the threat of disease provided a venue to destabilize identity at the border, enacted processes of racialization, and re-legitimized the power of U.S. policymakers. He demonstrates how this complex history continues to shape and frame contemporary perceptions of the Latino body today.

“Fevered Measures is an engaging and multi-layered historical narrative that underscores the centrality of public health to daily life, social relations and power dynamics along the TexasMexico border over one century. . . . What makes this story particularly compelling is that Mckiernan-González frames it with a compassionate and informed plea for greater awareness of Latina/o health disparities.”, "Fevered Measures remaps the border as a space in which ideas of race and nation take on new meanings in relation to the development of the state and science. The book serves as a superior model for analyzing and narrating the transnational flow of people, ideas, and policies."—Raúl A. Ramos, author of Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861, “Mckiernan-Gonzalez . . . adds substantially to the large literature on the history of public health, particularly its role in controlling immigration into the United States.”, "In Fevered Measures, through dramatic case studies, John Mckiernan-González brings exciting new insights to the intersection of state formation, racial formations, and medical discourse. Using archives on both sides of the border, he complicates our analysis of federal and local dynamics, earning a place among the best of the new borderlands historians."—Sarah Deutsch, author of No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940, “Mckeirnan-González provides a sophisticated and fine-grained analysis of the work of overzealous public health officials on the border, but he also places these efforts in a global imperial context.”

John Mckiernan-González is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin.