Health

In 1984, Paul Castro sued ABC News affiliate KGO after the film crew refused to touch him, even to place a microphone on his person, because of their alleged fear of AIDS. In his press release and subsequent interviews, Paul Castro repeatedly emphasized, “I am not a disease, I am a person” (Roque Ramírez 2010, 118). His statement openly challenged disease stigma, as he obstinately refused to accept his expulsion from middle-class America (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Hames- García 2011b). This queer Tejano migrant Reagan-era civil rights strategy at the dawn of the AIDS pandemic brings out the interweaving of health and citizenship, of illness and national expulsion. Defending health and fighting disease in the United States has often implied expelling foreign bodies; Latinas/os—too often visibly foreign bodies in the American body politic— vividly demonstrate the biopolitics of assimilation and exclusion in the racial history of the United States. Latina/o health matters bring out three broad ways American health concerns shape Latina/o and minority communities in the United States (Dubos 1987; Rosenberg 1992, xi; Grob 2002). First, scholars work to expose the medical dimension of racial scripts, denoting the bodies and labor that are valued, devalued, and disposable (Farmer 2006; Brier 2009; Molina 2014). Second, research into health policies and health status bring out the ways “health” provides a measure of critique and a means for social reform. Third, health has been a key analysis in social movements that challenge established and normative—and in 1984 California, homophobic and racist—social mores. These three broad rubrics for health—a racial script, a measure of belonging, a point of volatile contestation—animate scholarly work in Latina/o studies.