ABSTRACT
Drawing upon ethnography in a predominantly immigrant community in California, this chapter explores the ways that oral health professionals and educators present compliance with regimens of oral hygiene as a sign of "proper family governance" that indicates their capacity for citizenship. In doing so, however, they ignore the political and economic circumstances that contribute to children's poor oral health. The chapter suggests that public health campaigns' anxieties about immigrant mothers' caregiving practices serve as a potent site for racialized constructions of Mexicans during the second major wave of immigration to the US The reduction of oral disease in developed nations is viewed as one of the major public health triumphs of the past century due to the fluoridation of public water systems and the promotion of preventive oral hygiene practices. Sarah Horton conducted interviews and participant-observation with a range of actors involved in farmworker children's oral health to examine how oral hygiene campaigns construct Mexican immigrant families' "deservingness" of citizenship.
