Public Health, Assimilation, and the Racialization of Science and Religion: Cases from New Mexico in the 1960s

Public health campaigns among Catholic Mexican American populations in New Mexico in the mid-twentieth century often relied on the expertise of anthropologists and sociologists to help tailor the campaigns to Mexican American culture. Social scientists produced several reports based on fieldwork that suggested that New Mexican village religious practices and beliefs, often referred to as “folk Catholicism,” were durable barriers to embracing scientific healthcare standards. This article uses those reports to reveal and analyze the role that public health campaigns and social science researchers played in defining and challenging Hispano religious healing traditions. It likewise examines the various intersections of science and racializing discourse in the reports. I argue that these social scientific studies of Spanish-speaking, New Mexican village culture were intended to facilitate the “right” kind of assimilation to Anglo cultural norms around health, one that paradoxically aimed to include Hispanos in modern medicine while simultaneously defining essential religio-racial difference. The regulation of Hispano bodies rested on social scientific discourses that racialized religion, science, and health.