XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Unliving Rats and Undead Immigrants: The Health State in São Paulo, Brazil from the Bubonic Plague to the Great 1918 Flu

• In Event: Rethinking Racial Hierarchies: Immigration, Ethnicity, and the Built Environment in São Paulo (SESSION I)

Abstract

How are life and death negotiated when immigrants and state representatives have conflicting ideas about health? This paper explores two global health crises, the turn of the century bubonic plague and the 1918 influenza outbreak, from state and popular perspectives. My focus is on Bom Retiro, a globalized Sao Paulo neighborhood both residentially because of immigration and industrially because of the textile industry.
The paper will show why public health officials believed that immigrants brought diseases to Brazil and how they created discourses to suggest that the working-class neighborhoods where large numbers of foreigners lived encouraged the spread of disease. I will argue that the residues of the public health approaches to bubonic disease eradication in the nineteenth century could be seen both discursively and materially in medical documents and in building usage with the outbreak of the Flu in 1918. In both cases, public health officials surveilled immigrants in public spaces and used forced entry into homes as part of eradication programs that emerged from prejudices about immigrant filth rather than the resolution of infrastructural factors like poor sewer systems, a lack of litter pickup by the state, and flooding because of poor urban planning.
Immigrants and others in the working classes responded in multiple ways to the increased incursions. The use of non-biomedical cures, like using amulets and other popular cures for diseases were one reaction to a distrust of official medical pronouncements. Some state sponsored eradication programs, like rat-catching and selling, became income generators rather than exclusive public health actions. The state’s inability to handle medical crises even led immigrants to return to life after being declared dead by state actors ranging from doctors to gravediggers.
Dissecting how life and death are negotiated by immigrants and state representatives shows the limits of biomedical approaches to cure and how the residues of prejudice and xenophobia are critical factors in understanding public health policies and actions.

Author

• Jeffrey Lesser, Emory University