| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939. By Natalia Molina. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, xvi, 279 pp. Cloth $50.00, ISBN 0-520-24648-9. Paper $19.95, ISBN 0-520-24649-7.)
Many contemporary opponents of immigration argue that because most newcomers are poor they are often sick, draining health re sources and posing a public health menace. Among Latinos, especially, poverty and illness go together, critics insist. These claims are made in the face of increasing evidence that diet, lifestyles, and support networks often combine to make poor Latino migrants healthier than many native-born Americans. As the historian Natalia Molina amply demonstrates, stigmatizing newcomers as threats to the public's health, even when they are not, is a perennial nativist tactic.	1
In her thoroughly researched and well- argued volume Fit To Be Citizens?, Molina turns to Los Angeles as a laboratory to investigate how public health officers helped shape the public perception of racial minorities between 1879 and 1939, a peak migration era. Los Angeles was a magnet for Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican migrants. Building on my work, as well as that of the historians Howard Markel and Amy Fairchild, Molina adroitly focuses on how public health officials stigmatized these groups as public health menaces, associating them with particular diseases in the public mind.	. . .

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