When One Stands for Many
The Sun County community has been selected because of its ethnic composition, a composition that is explicitly racialized through a discourse of admixture. For example, Carl reports that the community was selected both for the high incidence of type 2 diabetes and for its presumed ethnic homogeneity. The early studies dealing with epidemiology and Mexican Americans paid considerable attention to estimating ethnic admixture. For these studies, admixture is operationalized as the percentage of genetic material derived from each branch of a person’s ancestral line, in this instance narrated in ethnic terms. For example, one study published in 1986 proposed a method for estimating individual admixture probability and found that the admixture of Sun County Mexican Americans to be 65 percent Caucasian and 35 percent Amerindian. Two years earlier, the degree of Native American admixture was positively correlated with type 2 diabetes in Mexican American populations.1 By 1991, the admixture estimates had been refined to 31 percent Native American, 61 percent Spanish, and 8 percent African. In 1993 another study compared polymorphic blood markers with self-reports of Mexican American grandparents with skin tone measurements. According to the study, the three methods for estimating admixture correlated poorly with one another, and none proved unique in the degree of positive association with any of three health outcomes of interest: diabetes, obesity, gallbladder disease. Still, the attention to admixture endured.
The attention to ethnic admixture, say scientists, is a means of adequately characterizing the genetic structure of the population of interest. The admixture estimates quantify the biological variation derived from a person’s ethnicity. Ethnic homogeneity of the DNA donor population is important, say researchers, because it helps limit the amount of genotypic information through which scientists must sift and thus enables comparisons of established genetic admixture estimates with their newfound nucleotide patterns. In 1992, Carl’s team attributed 99 percent of the total genetic diversity of Sun County Mexican Americans as individual variation within the population. They write, “The history of admixture is apparently old enough to have brought the entire Mexican American gene pool to a stable frequency of genotypes.” Sun County Mexicanas/os thus were proclaimed genetically homogenous and useful for genetic and epidemiological studies.
Let us return to the “discovery” in 2000 of a combination of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that conferred a threefold risk for type 2 diabetes that Nora, Carl, and others published in Nature Genetics. In this piece, researchers concluded that 14 percent of the risk of diabetes for Mexican Americans and 4 percent of that for Europeans could be attributable to this SNP profile. Exploring this racialized susceptibility hypothesis and situating the admixture-susceptibility matrix within the context of Anglo-Mexicano relationships of the region where DNA donation occurs reveals disturbing sociocultural linkages between historical and contemporary nativist concerns about the Mexicana/o threat to Anglo well-being and scientific concerns about the susceptibility of Mexicanas/os to type 2 diabetes. Below, we will explain the admixture-susceptibility matrix and conclude with its resonance with contemporary and historical nativist impulses.
For this widely hailed finding, scientists compared the patterns of single nucleotides (A,G,T,C) of persons with and without diabetes and found that a combination that included two different versions of the same gene conferred the greatest risk. Scientists hypothesized that the heterogeneous pattern that conferred risk was higher in Mexican Americans as a result of their Native American ancestry, which is estimated to be 31 percent. The admixture-susceptibility hypothesis was not explicit, however. In fact, the principal authors of the publication took great pains to avoid a simple admixture explanation for the increased risk in Mexican Americans.2 Instead, the authors explicitly reported that the haplotype (inherited SNP pattern) itself was not the result of admixture. It was not until a subsequent analysis published in 2002 that scientists directly attributed the increased frequency of the haplotype in Mexican Americans to the higher frequency of that haplotype found in Asian and Native American populations. While admixture does not create the haplotype, scientists use admixture to explain the frequency of the haplotype in Mexican Americans. In other words, admixture makes the haplotype appear more frequently in Mexican Americans than in other groups studied. This finding is entirely consistent, note researchers, with the established positive correlations between Native American admixture and type 2 diabetes among Mexican Americans.3
How can Mexican Americans simultaneously be an ethnically homogenous group and at higher risk for diabetes on account of genetic admixture? The answer relies on the definition of population homogeneity. Recall that the value of the Sun County donor group lies in part in their ethnic homogeneity. The community was chosen because it could be conveniently sampled, Carl explained, and was presumed to be 98 percent Mexican American. “The other 2 percent,” Carl noted, “probably answered the Census wrong.” Researchers report that comparing the expected haplotype frequencies with those found within the sampled group establishes that the data set is representative of the group as a whole. Homogeneity, then, refers to the degree to which Mexicana/o DNA data sets are homologous to and thus representative of Mexicanas/os in Sun County writ large. Interestingly, Finns and Germans are never described as admixed: Europeans, for the purposes of the genetic epidemiology of type 2 diabetes, are a homogeneous (not admixed) population.4
The rationale that researchers give for admixture estimates are that comparisons between specific data sets and the general Mexican American population data sets are needed to ensure that a finding was not simply an allele (bit of inherited nucleotides) characteristic of the sampled group. “We ignore allelic variation at our peril,” remarked a genetic analyst involved in the project. In this way, Mexicana DNA is thus evaluated for its homogeneity, only in this instance it is the homogeneity of Mexicana admixture that is of concern for genetic researchers. In other words, this haplotype model is founded upon a notion of a standardized admixed Mexican body: simply put, a pure Mexican. However, in this case, the purity in question is the purity of the admixture, presumed to be a 31 percent blend of American Indian, 64 percent blend of European, and 5 percent blend of “other.”
Beyond the rhetoric of the Human Genome Project, at its most formative moment, lies population sampling of which the Mexicanos/as of South Texas are but one instance. Initiated in the 1970s, the screening of Mexicanos/as for diabetes began as a statistical sampling of selected colonias in three Sun County towns. “The question was, How frequent was diabetes?” recalls Carl. “We went door to door in randomly selected blocks in each of these three towns and enumerated everybody in the household [as] either diabetic or nondiabetic.” From this initial survey, Carl’s team invited every diabetic—the proband—and all of his or her relatives to the office for a complete physical exam. Carl recalled: “So we got these beautiful pedigrees based upon carefully collected blood samples. It was almost like a National Geographic expedition. We had a team of 10 to 15 individuals who would fly down on Friday, start seeing people at 6:30 and go until 5 on Saturday and again on Sunday morning.” The team would then knock off around 11 A.M., “pack everything up, put the blood on ice, race to the airport and come home.” From there, the samples would be further processed and shipped to collaborators around the country.
The essentialism evidenced in Carl’s narrative of the beginning of the sampling effort fits with Nora’s description of the need for accurate admixture estimates to do her analyses of the genotypes derived from the population. Carl relies upon Mexicana/o self-identity to construct population homogeneity. Recall that in chapter 1 I showed how Nora narrated admixture into the rationale for population sampling as a reasonable but imperfect way to limit extraneous genetic signals in the search for diabetes susceptibility genes. At the root of this rationale is the attempt to create samples that are, in effect, statistically Mexicana/o. In other words, the diabetes science requires a statistically robust population, a population that is as genotypically uniform as is possible and in which the variation is known. Recall how Nora explained her concerns for homogeneity in the population samples. Admixture estimates are important because, she said, “Even knowing where our families’ grandparents were born tells me nothing about whether a family is pure Spanish or pure Native American.” Carl’s success in packaging the Sun County Mexicanos as an admixed population is evidenced by current admixture studies that rely upon his data set as source material for their admixture research.
For Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and most other Caribbean peoples, a link between mixed-race status and disease was one among many made by nativists and physicians alike in the early part of the twentieth century.5 Further, statements about race in fields as diverse as craniometry, anthropology, serology, and genetics dating to the formation of those fields in the mid-nineteenth century have also contributed to imagined difference-cum-inferiority of non-European peoples.6
Similar to Fullwiley’s findings for Puerto Rican asthma genetics, individual admixture estimates have been made for the Sun County data set for studies dealing with hypertension.7 For Tang and colleagues, Sun County Mexicanos are noted to be Native American (39 percent), European (57 percent), and African (4 percent). This is consistent, they note, with the admixture estimates of Mexicans from Mexico City but slightly inconsistent with Carl’s original estimates from 1991 of 31 percent Native, 61 percent European, and 8 percent African. The specific techniques that Tang’s team or Carl use to derive these estimates are less important than that they seek to derive admixture estimates in the first place. To do so requires a commitment to Old World notions of ancestral populations, but, more important, admixture estimates point their scientific imagination toward the bodies of Sun County Mexicanas and, consequently, away from social history and environment. A perfect example of this appears in this passage by Basu and colleagues.
The recent history of Latin America, starting five centuries ago with the arrival of Christopher Columbus, has been one of large scale and widespread exchange between African, Native American and European genomes. These unprecedented events brought together genomes that had evolved independently on different continents for tens of thousands of years. . . . The various Latino populations of the United States represent [such] admixtures. . . . Populations separated by continental distances, whose genetic makeup was shaped through thousands of generations in distinct environments, were suddenly exposed to an entirely new world and unfamiliar environment.8
Note in this passage the ways the words “admixture,” “exchange,” and “suddenly exposed” are a neutral gloss for slavery, genocide, forced dispossession and relocation. And the unexamined premise underlying this quote is that gene flow (interbreeding) did not occur sufficiently to wreak havoc on the supposed independent lineages or genetic isolation by distance.9 Further, the passage above perfectly illustrates a “biologistical construction of race” characterized by Fullwiley wherein precise molecular concepts of racial bodily difference somehow neutralize the often horrifying sociohistorical realities of interbreeding.10
The quest for scientific purity refracts earlier concerns with and about ethnic composition of Mexicanas/os. Scholars have amply documented that the racism that pervades the region is based upon the longstanding problem the Indian or indigenous ancestry of Mexicanos/as has presented for Anglo society. Menchaca’s analysis of federal and state racial laws from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century showed that particular legal statuses and discriminatory treatments were congruent with the color coding of Mexicans based upon their Indian ancestors.11 Analysis of earlier periods showed that little had changed between the colonial settlement era and the period leading up to the Mexican-American War. For example, De León showed how European settlers imported homologies of racial purity and Christian morality in the North American colonies.12 Similarly, Horsman’s analysis of the 1830s–1840s showed that beliefs in Anglo-Saxon superiority were used to explain Anglo successes in the northern Mexican territories.13 Dispossession was justified on account of the inferiority of Mexicans as a weak race who, “like Indians, were unable to make proper use of the land . .. because they were a mixed, inferior race with considerable Indian and some black blood.”14 Similar sentiments were echoed by members of Congress to justify the Mexican-American War in 1846–1848.15
However, purity-cum-homogeneity is a highly problematic concept for other reasons. For example, I observed numerous people who “pass” for Anglo. When I asked Judi about these apparently Anglo participants included as Mexican American in the research data sets, she replied, “You mean the zebras? . . . Because of the [U.S. Army] forts, there are families here whose names are Hewlitt, DeForge, or Anderson, but they have diabetes, and we include them in our protocols.” “What about a John Smith?” I asked, referring to a hypothetical participant without such a historical connection to Sun County. Judi said that a hypothetical John Smith could be screened for diabetes at the center, but his sample would not be used for research. The non-hypothetical Johns and Janes, whose surnames could be Spanish or English, were unquestionably categorized as Mexican American and included in the research samples. Their connection to Sun County established their Mexicana/o identity for Judi. Similarly, two of the center staff, Alma and Lena, could pass for Anglo. Their light skin and hair and their English surnames blur any notions of homogeneity-cum-purity.
And yet, the ethnicity of Mexicanas/os in El Camino and of those who work for and donate to the diabetes enterprise is, as the political history of the region shows, a hierarchical one. Carl’s ‘98 percent pure pedigrees’ and his willingness to dismiss the other 2 percent illustrates the ways social group classification is not arbitrary. Of kinship and race, Brackette Williams writes, “When social classification meets hierarchy, their union is made possible by myths that fold social space back on itself to naturalize power differences that are legitimated in particular representations of the historicity of kin substance.”16 Mexicana/o purity is a myth. Many critical race theorists have shown that ethnicity is a malleable outcome of social and political processes. As, for instance, the changing status of Jewish and Irish immigrants demonstrate, “whiteness” is established through assimilation and class mobility.17 The malleable labeling of Mexicanos from El Camino demonstrates that “Mexicanness” works in similar ways.
Moreover, in spite of their phenotype, Alma’s and Lena’s references to “us,” “our community,” and “our diet” indicate their ethnic self-identity as Mexicana. Judi’s adherence to “our blood” and the inclusion of samples from “John Anderson” on the one hand supports, and on the other actively destroys, the alleged purity of the Mexicana/o DNA samples even as it reinforces the myth that Mexicana/o is somehow a meaningful biological construct. Hence Nora’s concerns about purity, even as a purely homogenous admixed population linked through some magical biogenetic substance,18 do not begin to address the profoundly social construction of Mexicanas/os in the genetic data sets.
Indian ancestry is a central ideological feature of the diabetes enterprise. Evidence of beliefs about blood-based heredity was easily elicited form field office staff when commenting upon the causes of diabetes. But so too were notions of social etiologies of diabetes. When explaining the causes of diabetes, staff members explain that genes and life conditions together explain diabetes. For example, on our way to an ice cream distributor to fetch dry ice for a Monday blood sample delivery, Maria remarks, “Genes are passed from one generation to another, but basically it’s our way of eating.” Being careful to explain the complexity of the diet hypothesis, Alma elaborated:
We see people whose parents have it, and now they have it. One woman [we know] makes a more balanced diet. Before she made BBQ, fajita, rice, beans, mashed potatoes, and a big glass of coke. Now just BBQ, rice, and beans only. Most folks don’t go to [diet] classes because they think, “I’ll take my pills so I can eat [or drink] whatever I want.’ But just as bad or worse [for them], they don’t have any options for screening [so they cannot really monitor themselves].
Lena explained diabetes as follows:
It’s genetics, and [our] diet is terrible. . . . Anglos eat a lot of vegetables. We eat fruit when we could afford it, mostly melons, onions, tomatoes, and corn. When I was growing up we weren’t introduced to vegetables or fruit really. Just beans, rice, meat, and tortilla. Also everyone walked, and no habia candy ni soda [there wasn’t candy or soda].
Here we read how staff understands diabetes as a disease with both genetic and environmental etiology.
This split between genes and life conditions was further elaborated by Judi, whose unflinching acceptance of the biology of “Mexicanness” was complicated by her critique of public health discourse, which blames Mexicanas/os for their lifestyle failures. Complaining of the ignorance of health professionals, she notes, “Es que, people are always saying that we should exercise more. But where are we supposed to do that? The roads aren’t safe to walk on, snakes and dogs are everywhere, and for much of the time it is too hot to be outside.” We read in Judi’s comments the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of an imposed biomedical discourse about Mexicana/o diabetics. On the one hand, Judi’s first reply to the causes of diabetes is a blood-borne genetic one. On the other hand, she accepts that exercise would be a good idea but that blaming people for not exercising fails to acknowledge the local biology of an El Camino resident.19 Judi recognizes the anthropological insight that bodily conditions must be understood as an interplay between biology and culture and the embodiment of the living conditions in the border region.20 Thus, for field staff, the etiological frames of reference are split between genes and the life conditions of Sun County residents.21
Judi’s affirmation of the hereditary etiology of diabetes and the blunt-edged identities assigned to some Sun County residents are necessary stages in the making of transnational protogenetic subjects out of research participants. Participants are not merely volunteering their time and DNA. Rather, through the diabetes enterprise configuration of their biological difference as that which confers susceptibility to diabetes, the participants, field staff, and researchers reiterate the subordination of Mexicanas/os based upon the naturalized differences between Indians and Anglos—a subordination that was upheld by the state institutions designed to dispossess Mexicanas/os from their land. Admixture so configured ideologically upholds social relations of inequality.
Elaborating on the processes of subjectification, Foucault argues that the “dividing practices” of an objectivizing science are essential to creating subjects.22 He writes, “The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. This process objectivizes him. Examples are the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the ‘good boys.’ ”23 Echoing Althusser’s notion of “the hail,” Foucault sought to study “how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects,” in this case, as people whose ethnic group is interpellated as “diabetes prone.”24
Therefore, “Mexicanness” for the diabetes enterprise is part taxonomy and part social identity bundled together in fictions of social and genetic homogeneity and purity. In this light, the diabetes sampling project is a “regime of representation” like that expounded by Escobar’s analysis of development as a historically and culturally specific project.25 Arguing that development discourse regulates populations through the use and creation of representations of peasants, women, and the environment, Escobar’s analytic framework works for the representations of diabetics as well as it does for the “discourses through which people come to recognize themselves as developed or underdeveloped.”26 In fact, the resonance between the teleological ideology of development discourse and the biological fate of genetic predisposition constitutes subjects for research and subjects for development in similar ways.
By substituting “development” with “diabetic,” we can see that naturalizing Mexicana/o ethnicity within an admixture discourse thus primes the production of scientific knowledge for the process of reinscribing Mexicanas/os into subordinate subjects of national and scientific objectives. And yet, as Yanagisako and Delaney observe, “inequality and hierarchy come already embedded in symbolic systems as well as elaborated through contextualizing material practices.”27 In this instance, “Mexican” is the symbol of blood-based ethnicity, which as we have seen, is shot through and through with hierarchical notions of inferiority. The DNA sampling efforts thus are the contextualizing material practices that elaborate upon the ethnic hierarchy of the region. At issue is what constitutes “Mexicana/o” ethnicity under these historical circumstances and within these sets of scientific practices. The wedding of identity and genotype in the racially stratified border zone of conflict shifts the nationalist enterprise of regional hegemony onto the meanings of “Mexicanness.” By relying upon the ideology of admixture and hereditary disease etiology as the rationale for Mexicana/o sampling, researchers and field staff construct research participants as genetic carriers in a stratified social order that places a premium on genetic purity at the level of identity and genotype. The hereditary etiological framework for diabetes is consistent with the U.S. project to control the border through the surveillance and micropolitical control of the Mexicana/o peoples of the region. The ontology that results must be considered as part and parcel of the U.S. nationalist project of Mexicana/o subordination. In her analysis of the historical production and reproduction of racially defined substances, Williams writes, “[A] major objective of nationalist ideology has been to invent a unitary substance,” in this case biogenetic, “and to link that substance to a sociopolitical unit and its economic structure.”28
More than simply an imposed ontology, the Mexicano/a participant is a dynamic interlocutor in the construction of Mexicanness and non-Mexicanness, and of the individual, social, and political bodies to which the label refers. As Scheper-Hughes and Lock observed, the body is “simultaneously a physical and symbolic artifact, is both naturally and culturally produced, and is securely anchored in a particular historical moment.”29 More than overlapping analytical or epistemological approaches, the Mexicana/o body constructed in the diabetes enterprise is a site of the confluence of individual experiences of illness and of well-being, of the representation of the social history of the U.S.-Mexico border and Anglo-Mexicano-Native American relations, and the regulation and disciplining of Mexicanas/os individually and as a class of people. The dynamics of this process, its contours and the boundaries it crafts of bodies, geographies and identities, are seamlessly locatable as befitting the contemporary quest for biocapital.30 That is, the Mexicano/a body is a fulcrum of biopolitics and governmentality upon which great investment and potentially profit (scientific, material, symbolic) teeters: profits, I will show in subsequent chapters, that require specific configurations of the Mexicano/a body, specific Mexicana/o subjects.
In his analysis of the Human Genome Project, Rabinow explores the alterations in the modern forms of power over and through the body as an object of discipline and the population as an object of analysis, control, and welfare, which surface in the relentless pursuit of the human genome.31 Inspired by Foucault’s concept of biopower, Rabinow analyzes the specific rationalities that emerge within practices and institutions designed to apply genomic knowledges to questions of life and labor.32 Genetic epidemiological practices that attempt to understand the genetics of diabetes is one such institution and an ideal site through which to ethnographically flesh out Rabinow’s insights into this phenomenon that he calls “biosociality.”
To begin, we must consider diabetes as an illness that is thoroughly inflected with a rationality of risk. But this is not merely a statistical artifact of probabilities for the likelihood of the disease, though it is this to be sure. Diabetes in Mexicanas/os is a condition now attributed—14 percent of it at least—to a heritable pattern of nucleotides whose presence is explained as a result of ethnic admixture. As one scientist explained to me in an e-mail, the risk haplotype “appears to be found more often in Mexican Americans because they are found more often, on average, in Asian and Amerindian populations.” In this light, the diabetes susceptibility haplotype produces a risk group whose social environment is relevant to its suffering only as an ontological necessity that defines the quantitative parameters of risk, 14 percent, and the typological purity of the ethnoracial subject, the Mexican American of Sun County, Texas.33
The diabetes susceptibility haplotype transforms the conventional epidemiological concern for predicting which persons will become ill to predicting who is an ill person. The creation of the Mexicana/o diabetes susceptibility haplotype is, in Rabinow’s description of biosociality, an “identity term . . . around which and through which a truly new type of autoproduction” has emerged.34 In this instance, “Mexican American,” the social label, has been transformed via the practices of genetic epidemiology into a natural one. Though similar, this transformation is different from simply racializing Mexican American ethnicity. As Miles and Brown write that racialization “denote[s] a dialectical process by which meaning is attributed to particular biological features of human beings, as a result of which individuals may be assigned to a general category of persons that reproduces itself biologically.”35 Whereas racialization is the attribution of innate fixed biological differences between human groups labeled with ethnic-, cultural-, national-, political-, or geographical-based taxonomies, the emergent biosocial category of diabetes-susceptible persons are in fact a newly discovered natural class of human. In this new assemblage, carriers of the risk haplotype are made visible through the prism of heritability36 within the new genetic technosciences. The simultaneous homo-heterogeneity conferred upon the Mexicana DNA data set affords a glimpse of the social conundrum presented by complex disease genetics.
In this case of genomic knowledge making, the enduring processes of social stratification and the technoscientific means through which these processes come to be normalized, even internalized, come into view. When Mexicana/o DNA is transformed into quantified admixed matrices of risk—in this case, 14 percent disease risk that is derived from 31 percent Native American admixture—the Mexicanas/os from whence the DNA comes now embody such risk simply by virtue of membership in the sampled group. What is more, the social conditions of Sun County Mexicanas/os become the biogenetic conditions of Sun County Mexicanas/os. The diabetes genetic research enterprise is thus an instance wherein the conditions of a donor’s life, those events that shaped their physiological condition and the social and political history that attached itself to their lives in the form of an ethnic identity, are conscripted into the service of a biogenetic disease research enterprise.37
Central to my thinking of these ontological maneuvers are the polyvalence of race within the biologistics of admixture. The task at hand is determining how to account for and explain race or, as I prefer to call it, “ethnorace,” which is simultaneously a taxonomic system, a social identity ascribed by others, a self-imposed identity, and a conceptual apparatus within the epistemic machinery of disease gene research.38 In the latter instance, because it is reiterated again and again, each time with new technoscientific certainty and rhetorical force, it becomes “real biological human difference” because it is treated as such. By this I mean that, in its consequences, ethnorace within the diabetes enterprise and beyond enables ever more and expanding possibility for its own existence and demise.
By demise, I mean the scientific ruptures in which, as Fullwiley, Kahn, and others demonstrate, the truth claims figuratively and sometimes literally do not add up and thus require a reframing. I also mean the fundamental contradictions that are so often articulated with talk of matters of race. How is it that Mexicana/o admixture comes to be once again a dominant feature in the making of a social and biological problem such as type 2 diabetes? The rhetoric and ontological sleights of hand that conjure the antimiscegenation and degeneracy tropes of old do so in what Hall aptly describes as articulation.39 That is, in a nonreductive way, structures of inequality and meaning systems converge in a historically specific conjuncture to reiterate difference—in this instance racialized—that is at once structural and ideological.
These iterations of difference need not be flat-footed one-to-one correspondences to what scientists say they are doing when they deploy admixture estimates: The explanations scientists give can vary from the sociohistorical significance when placed in a broader frame. Gary and Carl would shudder to be associated with nativist claims, although other scientists may take it in stride.40 However, the homologies between the deployment of admixture estimates by researchers using Sun County Mexicana/o DNA and the social and political use of mixed blood by nativists and eugenicists in the United States are striking. Race, then as now, “works like a language,”41 discernable only in context, to represent and compose a world of human creation.
Articulation is not causal, but it is not random either. When we account for the material and semiotic relationships embedded within claims about admixture or biogenetic human variation, the political implications come into view. Just as possessive individualism and the Protestant work ethic were and are building blocks of industrial capitalism, so too is bioethnic difference a response to threats and endangerment.42 In this instance, the movement of (predominantly) Mexicanos across the border—as people have for five thousand years43—is perceived as a new threat under the conditions of huge demographic shifts in the United States and the chronic effects of deindustrialization and a failed, consumer-driven economic structure during the rise of neoliberal governance. In the case of the diabetes enterprise, bioethnic difference is now, as in past eras of mass migration and economic turmoil, a means through which threat and danger are expressed and managed.44 As Chavez has compellingly demonstrated for the contemporary moment, the Latino threat narratives are perpetuated through the images of “anchor babies,” the invasion of criminal border crossers, public proclamations against the darkening of Anglo-American people, or media accounts of the diseased immigrants (nonwhite and largely Mexican) who threaten the United States.45 In the case of type 2 diabetes among Mexicanos, dangerous and endangered and threatened and threatening operate as two sides of the same coin.46
By deploying the ideology of admixture and hereditary disease etiology as the rationale for Mexicana/o sampling, researchers and DNA donation field staff construct research participants as genetic carriers in a stratified social order that places a premium on genetic purity. But more, the wedding of identity and haplotype in this racially stratified border zone of conflict shifts the long-standing U.S. nationalist enterprise of regional hegemony onto the meanings of “Mexicanness” itself. In other words, what might be characterized as a technoscientifically enacted ontological sleight of hand, the threat to the social order is not merely some external racialized Other menacing the borders of the nation-state. Rather, this making and breaking of boundaries and borders is being internalized through the contests of postgenomic specifics of genetic differences within the registers of diabetes haplotype science. In this manner, genetic epidemiology of type 2 diabetes naturalizes the Mexicana/o body as an admixed transnational protogenetic subject characterized as a biological and social problem in need of a solution.47
The risk of diabetes in this episteme is that as an epistemological artifact it serves as a means of subjectification. By accepting the biogenetic risk narrative, affected people cede the sociocultural risk factors so central to disease. Many have observed that risk derives its meaning from its social, cultural, and historical context.48 In this vein, I argue that context of the U.S.-Mexico border is co-configured by the risk calculus derived by the diabetes enterprise. It is a bidirectional semiotic and material phenomenon. As subjects of analysis, Mexicanas/os serve as more than a population at risk. The essentialist notions of Mexicana/o ethnicity inherent in the etiologies of DNA sampling efforts construct Mexicana/o ethnicity as a risk in its own right. For example, the subtitle of a Wall Street Journal article reads, “In Rural Texas, Scientists Seek Genetic Cause for Diabetes in Mexican American Clan,” and also references the standard Hispanic risk statistics, the homogeneity trope, and the heritability theories being redeveloped by Carl and colleagues.
This book follows Lupton’s charge to bring empirical material to bear on the configuration of risk at a particular time, place, and for a particular set of people.49 I do not seek to create an overdetermined analysis in which social and political etiological forces seem just as ineluctable as the biologisms appear in biomedicine. Rather, I intend here to offer a beginning point for ways to critically bridge the biological and the social, nature and culture, individual and society without succumbing to a naïve reductionism or summary dismissal of uncritical epidemiological analyses. Frankenberg, Williams and Collins, Cooper and David, and Krieger and Fee all try to coerce the epidemiological gaze outward to social history and social structure.50 Similarly, cultural epidemiology, biocultural synthesis, embodiment theory, and a range of emergent models that control and account for contextual environments broadly defined offer promising visions of research approaches that are robust and capable of attending simultaneously to the biological and sociocultural complexity of human life.51
In this chapter, the DNA sampling practices have been placed in social and historical context. We have seen that the complex measurements and biological sample taking occur as a result of Mexicana/o participation as research subjects and field workers. Further, I argue that this voluntary participation is consistent with the nationalist enterprise of subjugating Mexicanas/os along the U.S.-Mexico border and thus is a racial project of the first order.52 I have also compared the hereditary and social etiological frameworks for disease to assess the configuration of Mexicana/o ethnicity as a biological risk factor. Stepping back further from the empirical case, additional consequences of the DNA sampling for the diabetes enterprise can be discerned.
Tapper has shown how sickle-cell anemia first worked to construct African blackness, then how blackness was used to explain sickle-cell anemia.53 He also shows how the public health campaigns dovetailed ideologically with the post-civil rights movement demand for full citizenship for African Americans, making full membership more conditional upon whether or not African Americans regulate their bodies (personal choice of partners, early testing, adoption) to control the spread of sickle-cell anemia. Tapper’s “technique-of-self” thesis,54 however, does not forge a bridge between epidemiological or biomedical claims and the social-historical causal claims because it does not address the legitimate ways biological approaches to sickle-cell disease can address social etiology or visa versa. To reiterate, the use of Mexicanas/os within the diabetes enterprise is not a waste of time. It is not that the incidence and prevalence of diabetes among Mexicana/os is uninformative. Rather, what this examination of the production of diabetes genetic epidemiological knowledge seeks to explain are the cultural meanings of the use of Mexicanas/os. In other words, the use of Mexicanas/os in diabetes research is informative, but informative of what?
The diabetes genetics research enterprise configures Mexicanos/as as diabetes prone by virtue of the bits of genetic information they carry. These bits of genes, SNPs, are the material and semiotic nodes conjured from the bodies of Mexicano/a research subjects.55 It is a subjection that is based upon the racialization of Mexicana/o bodies and upon the relationships between the state-funded research enterprise, instantiated by the Human Genome Project and the sociopolitics of the U.S.-Mexico border. One very important aspect of the polygene discovery that is implied rather than stated in the Nature Genetics publication of this particular research is that the genetic material that confers susceptibility is allegedly acquired through admixture—one bit from European ancestors and another from Indian ancestors.56 In spite of the evidence to the contrary, the boundaries of biological difference are being reworked within the sociopolitical space of the Sun County scientific enterprise.57
Devoid of the social and historical context of the border region, diabetes research hardly warrants a quarrel. Carl and his colleagues are respected professionals whose scientific projects are founded upon helping people with diabetes, solving public health problems, and making good use of federally funded data sets. Carl, for example, insists to his staff that any research subject with medical conditions identified in his or her screenings get immediate referrals. Nora remarked that complex disease research is the right thing to do with genomic data since so much public money was used to gather it. However, in context, the sampling of Mexicano/a DNA along the U.S.-Mexico border inserts into the very bodies of research subjects the governmental efforts to maintain the region under strict U.S. control. The recruitment of research subjects thus is the most recent form of a U.S. governmental project that transforms a dangerous zone of racially inflected conflict into a manageable population problem.58 This form of “governmentality”59 extends the control and surveillance of the population well beyond what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Census Bureau, Internal Revenue Service, or other agencies are able to do.
In the perpetual war along the frontier, the institutional mandates of state-funded public health research naturalize the continuing marginalization of Mexicano/as. As Yanagisako and Delaney observe of evolutionary origin stories, “The social was embedded in the natural, but in a particular version of it.”60 The same must be said of the origins of disease among Mexican Americans. What are we to make of the persistent configuration of Mexicanos/as as enemy, Other, labor source, and now public health burden?
Switching analytical vantage points brings the scientific enterprise of diabetes genetic epidemiology in line with the national enterprise of capital appropriation and accommodation in the region. Under these conditions, the border can be viewed as a social and historical creation that makes possible the specific DNA collection practices of the diabetes enterprise. A unique location, the border is a transnational and global space within which, as Gupta said, “cultural forms are imposed, invented, reworked and transformed.”61 The attention given in this chapter to the political and social history of the space of DNA collection locates the scientific enterprise in two senses—as a space of subjectification and as a set of social practices that naturalize difference.
In this first sense, this chapter argues that the acquisition of DNA samples for the type 2 diabetes enterprise transforms Mexicanas/os into racialized subjects consistent with the decadeslong wars of maneuver between Anglos and Mexicanas/os along the border. The subjectification of Mexicana/os is accomplished because the conditions of poverty and disadvantage are exploited to recruit DNA donors. Additionally, through the process of “donation,” DNA donors are transformed into “participants,” which, in true Althusserian terms, is the hail that interpellates them.
In the second sense, the geography of the border space, on the edges of two nation states, offers an “ethnoscape”62 of persons whose embodiment of difference shapes and is shaped by the politics of the region and by extension the perpetual struggle between the United States and Mexico and between Anglos and Mexicanas/os more generally. The political context of DNA collection locates the border as a space of ontological contestations through which the identity and subjectivity of its inhabitants are reworked in particular ways. Now crafted of genomic material, this border zone becomes a DNA-scape that recomposes geographic and social topologies of inequality and differentiation in a postgenomic guise. This chapter demonstrates that while the ideology of diabetes science may interpellate Mexicanas/os into state subjects, it does so by naturalizing a particular social order.
Thus, the frontiers of science are being co-configured by the political and economic exigencies of the frontiers of nationhood. Mexicanos/as are conscripted as racialized research subjects by scientists desperate to appeal to the authority of objectivity. The use of ethnicity in this context transforms it into a taxonomic metacategory that fits easily within the discourse of biological science. Race, however, is not a biological concept. Yet, as I will show in chapter 6, this “bioethnic conscription” fuses the social history of Mexicanos/as with their purportedly biological essence. Not unlike the well-documented exemplar of biomedical constructions of women’s bodies based upon concurrently prevalent social prejudices,63 genetics researchers’ use of a border population illuminates the manner in which Mexicano/a ethnic identification—and the social history through which it is forged—is taken up in biological knowledge. In this process, research participants become transnational protogenetic subjects irrespective of their national identities and allegiances.
Returning to the myriad ways Mexicana/o bodies are defined, located, surveyed, labeled, diagnosed, screened, genotyped, and analyzed, we see yet another important transformation of the social body into the biological body. Prior to participation in the research, Mexicanas/os with impairments in glucose metabolism are often undiagnosed. Participation ensures a diagnosis and a referral to a physician if needed. The diagnosis occurs within the epidemiologies of genetics and thus conscripts the participant into the essentialism inherent in the hereditary etiological model. Taussig points out that a diagnosis redefines a person “firmly within the epistemological and ontological groundwork from which the society’s basic ideological premises arise.”64 It was shown above that for diabetes epidemiology, the “epistemological and ontological groundwork” inherent in the use of Mexicano/a bodies is predicated upon notions of “racial” admixture, the pseudo-biological consequence of conquest, and, additionally, the elision of the highly stratified structural context of Anglo-Mexicano relations in the region.
Thus, in the context of the persistent representation and treatment of Mexicanos/as as an enemy, an Other, an uncivilized brute, a squatter, a thief, a peasant, a half-breed, and now a carrier of susceptibility genes, Mexicanos/as on the border fulfill an embodied role as racialized objects of research. Further, that government agencies pay for most of this research is an important fact. For what was once a military and business practice—the making of controllable border subjects—is now also carried out by biomedical institutions with money from U.S. government agencies.
Another way to imagine this is as follows. If in the era of conquest and dispossession the half-breed mongrel race threatened the natural and thus social order, in the contemporary era of genetic admixture, the miscegenational metaphor reconstitutes the social order as a response to the epidemiological monster called type 2 diabetes in Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The monstrous person is no longer the one dimensional target of governmental concern. Instead the bodies (social/biological) of Mexicanos are marked as outside the genotypic norm by virtue of the risk carried in the Mexicano haplotype.65
I have striven to accentuate here that the local context of DNA acquisition matters in the assessment of the diabetes research enterprise. To understand the context makes a raft of troubles for the humanistic rhetoric of screening, treating, preventing, or curing type 2 diabetes, but mostly illuminates the conditions that make possible the diabetes genetic research enterprise. First, Mexicanos/as are not willing participants in research. This does not mean they are screened against their will, but rather that participation in research screening for a debilitating condition that occurs in a space of 150 years of political and economic subjection, when no viable alternate means of surveillance is available, is hardly voluntary. Who would not participate in a research project if it was the only way to gain lifesaving knowledge for oneself and one’s family? In fact, one field office worker told me that people with insurance coverage are hard to recruit.
Second, I have tried to demonstrate that the bodies sampled for research make knowledge possible. Without DNA, research comes to a standstill. Yet, as the case of Sun County illustrates, acquisition is no simple affair. It involves multiple levels of administrative and interpersonal prowess. What is more, Mexicano/a DNA is valuable to the genetic economy of diabetes research. In the chapter that follows, I will show that the material and cultural capital generated by the processing of blood samples flows away from the donors.
In addition to the contextual and political economic critique I have offered here, particular attention must be paid to the body as a field through which biological and political discourses are construed. Up to this juncture, my quarrel has emphasized the place and use of particular bodies. The diabetes research enterprise is not unique in its elision of the political context of knowledge production, as the criticisms of Frankenberg, Williams and Collins, Cooper and David, and Krieger and Fee all demonstrate. It is, as so many have observed, impossible for context to creep into biomedical discourse because to do so would disrupt the frame of reference for the entire medical industrial complex.66
The body conjured by the diabetes research enterprise instantiates Lock’s insight that bodily conditions must be understood as an interplay between biology, history, experiences, meanings, and social context.67 Thus, the stakes for those whose ethnicity is conscripted for biological narratives of diabetes are costly. Simply put, the diabetes genetic research enterprise would lead us to conclude that Mexicanos/as are biologically predisposed to diabetes. That this assertion happens to fit a long-standing pattern of Mexicano/a subjugation, the elision of which requires ethnographic unpacking, demonstrates the extent to which science supports the state’s production of racialized Others in such spaces of contestation as the U.S.-Mexico border. Recall Duster’s critique of the empirical arbitrariness of racial typologies used in biomedicine.68 The point argued here is that the populations are not arbitrary, empirically or otherwise. In fact, when the conditions and contexts of donors’ lives are included in the epistemological framework of medical knowledge, Duster’s warnings about biological racial profiling are more easily understood.
The diabetes enterprise thus illustrates how scientists like Carl and his colleagues are pressed into service of the U.S. nation-state’s perpetual assertion of its social and political hegemony. This assemblage of state, academic, and corporate research is nothing new nor unique to the U.S.-Mexico political milieu. As Paul Rabinow has remarked of the alliance between France’s state genomic laboratory and a patient group, “What is distinctive—and ‘contemporary’—in this situation is not its radical newness but its assemblage of old and new elements.”69 Notwithstanding Judi’s comments about public health workers blaming diabetics on the research subjects’ sedentary lifestyle, the complete absence of patient advocacy voices within this specific assemblage endows this research enterprise with a preponderance of by now familiar biopolitical elements.70 Hence, though not overdetermined, the scientific frontier of diabetes genetic epidemiology contains a double edge. One side is the humanist effort to prevent chronic disease, while the other is a “technique of power” aligned—historically, politically, and economically—with the nation-building efforts of the past century and a half on the U.S.-Mexico border.
For the purposes of this discussion, the racialization inherent in this practice is but a starting analytical point to understand the racial emplacement of Sun County Mexicanas/os. Racial emplacement occurs when group identities come to stand in for group biology. In this instance, Carl’s biogenetic rationale for why Sun County Mexicanos/as are appropriate for genetic research reflects the formal logics of classification while simultaneously “torqueing” the way Mexicana/o is a label that references a specific group of people linked to a specific place and time, such as Sun County, Texas. What is of particular interest are the scientists’ attempts to quantitatively characterize the ethnic homogeneity of the Mexicana/o population as a means of understanding the incidence and prevalence of diabetes. As Stefan Helmreich observes, “Individual biographies are twisted into tortured shapes that materialize in the negative space that opens up when powerful classification schemes do not line up in the local logics of everyday life.”71
The practice of racial emplacement—that is, characterizing the population structure of an ethnic group like Mexican Americans—is not merely a simplistic typological exercise. Rather, it is an epistemological practice that works on the meaning-cum-location of diabetes itself, and thus is also an ontological cultural operation. Locating diabetes within Mexicana/o ethnoracial admixture cleaves both Mexicanness and the illness called diabetes from the social histories that produced the ethnic label and the socially embodied conditions that contribute to the disease. Racial emplacement is repeating itself for numerous ethnic groups for numerous diseases in attempts to gain empirical purchase on the biology of human variation.72
That diabetes scientists begin with a social label for their population of interest (Mexican American) and then characterize the ethnic group according to its percentage of genetic admixture from Native American, African, and Spanish inheritances, presents an interesting object lesson for the study of the coproduction of science and society.73 On the one hand, the need for valid population constructs requires the most accurate characterization of the population structure possible. On the other hand, the history of Mexicanas/os in the Sun County region of the United States is bedeviled with conflict, often violent, that is itself rationalized by reference to the racial impurity of the Mexicana/o. Classification, genetic characterization, and political history are thus conflated.