The spread of swine flu provides many opportunities for us to examine both public policy and personal beliefs. In the early weeks of the reported H1N1 outbreaks, a conservative organization, Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, said President Obama should deploy military troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to stop illegal immigration and stop “non-essential” traffic by land and air. According to a statement by the spokesman of ALIPAC William Gheen, “We have thousands of illegal immigrants entering America each night and we can’t contain or slow the progression of the latest Mexican outbreaks with that happening.” This type of narrative is not suddenly created whenever an epidemic occurs, but rather this specific story derives itself from the long history of negative representations of the Mexican people in the American public imagination.

While the Mexican people were being reduced into a divisive political issue in U.S culture, in Mexico they were being coerced into silence and quickly ushered away from the media attention by administration of Fidel Herrera Beltran and by the Carroll Farms company to be silent. Ironically, Mexican news organization La Jornada reported that during this same time, the state government was setting up a newsroom and regional tourism promotion. Combined with the fact that the people of La Gloria had been protesting the emergence of hog farms and the spike in health respiratory problems since 2006, it is clear that the swine flu outbreak could not have happened without Mexican state government complicity.

Therefore, the U.S media blaming of the Mexicans obscures the global structure of inequality: first world countries and benefit from the cheap labor of workers and government oversight without providing the necessities of a sustainable community, and then the workers become scapegoats for the problems that inevitably arise. Despite this enormous structural problem in the world’s capital system, the story of Smithfield Foods and neoliberal capitalism was not closely examined in mainstream media. This omission simply continues to show how the power of disease outbreak discourse and its effects on race perceptions as well as its ability to sustain the systematic inequalities in the 21st century.

Failing to appreciate the complexity of all the factors that contribute to our fear and discomfort with the swine flu outbreak leads us to over-simplistic solutions and missed opportunities to reflect on our individual and collective fears. There are no easy solutions to this problem we have here, especially because the examples of cultural ignorance and prejudice cannot be dismissed as being only in a vacuum. Instead we must acknowledge how the racism and fear of the Mexican people expressed in the U.S portrayals of the 2009 swine flu outbreaks are symptoms embedded within the neoliberal ideology. As a result, the first step we can take towards resistance is to always critically evaluate media news stories and opinions, and especially the ways they create hierarchies against different groups of people. We must always ask ourselves these following questions in looking at media reports: Who is targeted? Is this depiction justified, and if so, in what ways? Most importantly, who benefits or suffers if we take this information at face value?

Now that we are done with our path, here are some questions that I wish to leave behind:

1.     Given what we have learned about the historical context of Mexican representation as well as the many factors surrounding the H1N1 outbreaks, how might media portray the epidemic that does not reaffirm old stereotypes?

2.     Given the complexity of swine flu because we have refigured its story, would it be even possible to capture such information in a five minute media report? What other methods of presentation would work to articulate this information (like an essay for instance)? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each style?

3.     In what ways could this multimedia project be better in presenting the information? What points could have been investigated more or in a different manner? 

4.     Did the additional resources section presented in each page help enhance knowledge about the topic at hand? Would it have been better for this project to incorporate the information into the analysis?

Works Cited

Méndez, Enrique, and Andrés Morales.”Por 14 años La Gloria ha vivido con miedo por la
contaminación de Granjas Carroll” La Jornada: Política. La Jornada. Web. 2 May 2009  http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/05/02/?section=politica&article=009n1pol