“A Sensual People, and Doomed”

Fat studies scholar E. Cassandra Dame-Griff have carefully revealed that Latina/o/x bodies are routinely framed as excessive in their numbers, their assumed reproductive capacities, their overuse of supposedly “American” resources, and in the size of their physical bodies. This paper excavates a longer history of this framing, contending that the stereotype of the fat Mexican emerges in newspapers during the Mexican-American War, reflecting other efforts to naturalize the dispossession and oppression of Mexicans by associating them with Black Americans. As Sabrina Strings has shown, contemporary anti-fatness develops in service of anti-Black racism, used to shape an understanding of Black people as uncivilized, indolent, and greedy. During the middle of the nineteenth century, authors and journalists used fatness to associate these traits with Mexicans and to tacitly condone American expansion. This paper shows that, over the following one and a half centuries, the meanings invested in the figure of the fat Mexican would shift and expand, responding to changes in American politics and culture, and laying the groundwork for the twenty-first century’s anti-fat and anti-Mexican responses to immigration amid the so-called “obesity epidemic.”

Duke Scholars

Author Kendall Dinniene