Diseases in Colonias

William Ordeman

doi:10.5744/rhm.2025.2509

Rhetoric of Health and Medicine May 2025 Open Access

Diseases in Colonias

William Ordeman Clemson University

Abstract

In the fall of 2020, a US/Mexico border community received national attention because of its high number of COVID cases. Hidalgo county reported over 51,000 COVID cases in 2020 resulting in 2,200 fatalities. Rural communities in Hidalgo were uniquely precarious to the disease because of assemblages constructed by human and material interactions that displaced Latinx/e bodies to unincorporated, underdeveloped communities called colonias. Centuries of interactions between humans and material life in the region had created and sustained an ecology of harm which exploited labor of rural citizens living in colonias. These interactions and the ecology they constitute are grounded in the Rio Grande River, which separates Hidalgo County from Mexico. From its initial arrival to the Hidalgo county region 2 million years ago, the Rio Grande River has assembled together humans and material life into relationships in which human rhetoric brings ideologies and ways of being that determine the precarity of border communities in the 21st-century.

Journal: Rhetoric of Health and Medicine
Published: 2025-05-28
DOI: 10.5744/rhm.2025.2509
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Topics: rhetorical criticism
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Diseases in Colonias

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