Transnational Medicine and the Creation of the Tropics in Latin America

Dr. McCrea’s remarks will examine the relationship not only between the global and the local but also among global, local, and regional perspectives. Her research explores the creation of a “tropical” identity connected to region and humans in southern Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. Exploration of internationally sponsored public health and sanitation campaigns to combat diseases in the early twentieth century reveal that residents of Latin America's tropics grappled with an imposed and medicalized identity. At the same time, workers, immigrants, and field scientists all negotiated with and reconfigured this codification of place, peoples and diseases as uniquely “tropical,” to advance their own agendas connected to modernization and civilizing campaigns.