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Injecting Racist Hysteria

How Media Coverage of the 2009 H1N1 (Swine Flu) Virus Raises Questions about Border Security, NAFTA, and Mexican Representation in U.S Culture

Vincent Q Pham, Author

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Introduction


In 2009, the World Health Organization declared swine flu to be the first global flu pandemic in 40 years as a result of the outbreak of cases in Mexico. Although the mortality rate of the disease was lower than predicted, the narrative constructed around the disease offers important takeaways regarding how an outbreak is perceived and what groups become associated as disease carriers.

When examining the H1N1 outbreaks, we must ask questions about the consequences that developed as a result of how it was portrayed: What were some of the more prominent reactions? What factors, past or present, shaped these responses? Most importantly, are they even justified?

Incorporating knowledge of Mexican-American relations, past and present, in the analysis of the media coverage broadens the understanding regarding the roles that racism and xenophobia play in responses to swine flu. However, the U.S media’s blaming of Mexico, especially when connecting to issues of immigration and borders, draws attention away from American culpability in the H1N1 experience. For example, by unpacking the capitalist economic imperatives of NAFTA, I examine how its neoliberal policies encouraged transnational corporations to open up industrial pig factories and its impacts on the environment, human health, labor practices, animal welfare, and immigration.

I argue that these factors are symptoms of a “NAFTA Flu”, which shaped unequal disease development conditions and unequal access to treatment in Mexico, a perspective that anti-Mexican media ignore. Therefore, critiquing the U.S media framings of the outbreak undermines the stigmatization and blaming of the specific populations in traditional outbreak narratives. Thus “H1N1 still deserves attention for the lessons it teaches about globalization, global health and infectious disease” (Sparke 726). In this case, geography and socioeconomic status played a large influence on to the individual and nation’s relationship to the virus. 

Using my Scalar project as a holding space and synthesis for different thought provoking articles, imagery, and videos about this subject will allow the audience to understand the systematic conditions that influence the spread of diseases like H1N1. Subsequently, it provides the possibilities to examine the consequences of globalization and its impact on the psyche of the American society and culture. Although the interdependency between these systems cannot be denied, there is immense variation in the experience and perception of the H1N1 virus, which is dependent on what parts of the world that the people are from.


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