| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Natalia Molina. Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939. (American Crossroads, number 2.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 279. Cloth $50.00, paper $19.95.
Natalia Molina offers an insightful, clearly written and well researched work that analyzes how public health campaigns in Los Angeles over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries institutionalized racial and citizenship inequality. She builds on previous scholarship that challenges the "objectivity" of medical science, arguing instead that efforts to protect the public's health were premised on and also promoted certain beliefs about which individuals constituted the citizenry of the public worthy of protection. Inevitably, such beliefs also entailed identifying other individuals and groups as undeserving of medical care and even the source of public health endangerment. Molina's study offers new insights into this literature through three aspects of her analysis of race, specifically her historically grounded and comparative study of race, her focus on the significance of a "regional racial lexicon," and her illumination of the gendering of race through public health (p. 17).	1
Although Molina claims to focus "primarily on Mexicans" in her book because they constituted "the largest immigrant group in Los Angeles" by 1930, she also offers a comparative analysis of how public health campaigns alternatively targeted Chinese and Japanese, as well as Mexicans in the region as sources of medical contagion over the course of the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries (p. 8). Her approach is crucial for understanding how conceptions of racial difference, inevitably conflated with alienness, transferred over time from one group of perceived "foreigners" to another. Molina's careful examination of differences among groups, however, also reveals how various factors (including population size, class status, and gender composition) could result in differential depictions and treatment of these groups at particular historical moments.	. . .

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