Horton Sarah, Barker Judith C
Department of Anthropology, Campus Box 103, University of Colorado Denver, P.O. Box 173364, Denver, CO 80217-3364.
Am Ethnol. 2009 Nov 1;36(4):784-798. doi: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01210.x.
Histories of the role of public health in nation building have revealed the centrality of hygiene to eugenic mechanisms of racial exclusion in the turn-of-the-20th-century United States, yet little scholarship has examined its role in the present day. Through ethnography in a Mexican migrant farmworking community in California's Central Valley, we explore the role of oral-hygiene campaigns in racializing Mexican immigrant parents and shaping the substance of their citizenship. Public health officials perceive migrant farmworkers' children's oral disease as a "stain of backwardness," amplifying Mexican immigrants' status as "aliens." We suggest, however, that the recent concern with Mexican immigrant children's oral health blends classic eugenic concerns in public health with neoliberal concerns regarding different immigrant groups' capacity for self-governance.
关于公共卫生在国家建设中的作用的历史研究揭示了在20世纪之交的美国，卫生学在种族排斥的优生机制中的核心地位，但目前很少有学术研究探讨其在当今的作用。通过对加利福尼亚中央谷地一个墨西哥移民农业工人社区的人种志研究，我们探讨了口腔卫生运动在将墨西哥移民父母种族化以及塑造他们公民身份实质方面的作用。公共卫生官员将移民农业工人子女的口腔疾病视为“落后的污点”，加剧了墨西哥移民作为“外国人”的地位。然而，我们认为，最近对墨西哥移民儿童口腔健康的关注将公共卫生中经典的优生学关注点与新自由主义对不同移民群体自治能力的关注点结合在了一起。
