Puro Cuento: Everyday People and Transnational Public Health Formations at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942

In the fall of 1903, United States Public Health Service officer Dr. Gustavo Guiteras repeatedly expressed his frustration with working-class Laredo. Cuban-born, American employed Guiteras reported to his white superiors in Washington that, “the ignorant class of the population seldom called in a physician, fearful that they might be quarantined or sent to a hospital.” Even more difficult for Guiteras, Laredo’s political and military authorities refused to challenge this wide-spread reluctance of many of the residents to be removed to any field hospital, As he stated, the officials “impressed upon me that the very class of cases I wished to remove to a hospital would absolutely refuse to go, and that there was no authority to force them to do so.” Humbled by the power of Mexican working-class residents in Laredo, Gregorio Guiteras gave the impression that the everyday men and women exercised far too much power over federal health authority and, moreover, that this situation threatened the United States. This power was such an unexpected development that subsequent accounts did not include the Mexican challenge to the unprecedented success of mosquito eradication in the 1903 Laredo yellow fever quarantine.

Unike Dr. Guiteras, I was pleasantly surprised that people at the border exercised so much power over the thoughts and actions of American public health officers. This paper emphasizes the ways everyday people used and challenged the establishment of American public health authority at the Rio Grande border. The three case studies for this analysis will be the 1882 Texas-Mexican yellow fever epidemic, the 1895 Camp Jenner smallpox quarantine and the World War II creation of the US Mexico border health authority.