At the Nation’s Edge
At the Nation’s Edge
African American Migrants and Smallpox in theLate-Nineteenth-Century Mexican–American Borderlands
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.
Keywords: Traditional healing, Ethnic Studies, Medicine, African Americans, Native Americans, Critical Race Theory, Public health, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Immigration Studies
Minnesota Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
