Current book project: "White Plague"

As a descendant of lungers (migrants who moved West for the “climate cure”), my current book project is motivated, in part, by my desire to more deeply understand my own ancestral complicity in the settler project.

White Plague: Tuberculosis and the Settlement of the Haunted American West will be the first book to examine how one of the most impactful human migrations in American history. From the late 19th through the mid-20th centuries, tuberculosis spurred hundreds of thousands of East coast health-seekers to relocate to arid regions in search of the sunshine cure. Their arrival radically transformed the American West, and their legacy continues to give shape to those lands today. Gold and cattle and land theft and fur trapping made the West, but tuberculosis did too.

Sunshine – the desert’s most abundant natural resource – couldn’t be bottled, but the titans of wellness did all they could to sell it anyway. Beginning in the late 1800s, they aggressively advertised Tucson, Arizona as the place “where winter never comes.” Doctors colluded with businessmen to lure the desperately ill there based on flimsy medical evidence and a growing network of private hospitals and sanatoriums. Poor and minority consumptives wound up in dusty and underserved tent cities that quickly became an eyesore – and a public health threat – in the growing city. Similar patterns played out in Palm Springs, Pasadena, Colorado Springs, Santa Fe, and El Paso, as well as numerous other cities across the desert West.

The chapters of this book are rooted in place and driven by narrative. Woven throughout this book’s deeply researched histories are specters that still circulate today: ghosts of former tuberculosis victims, haunted cemeteries, decrepit sanatoriums, saints, Satanists, and vampires. I didn’t set out to write a haunted history, but these stories surfaced so regularly that I couldn’t look away. Instead, "White Plague" summons the otherworldly as a metaphor for settler colonialism and structural racism, offering a vernacular for readers to engage with complex social theories about the ways the past continues to imprint itself upon the present.

This book is in development and I hope to have a complete proposal and sample chapters by September 2024.

New America Us@250 Fellowship

I’m thrilled to share that I’ve been selected as an Us@250 fellow with the New America Foundation. For the coming year, I’ll be part of a cohort of other scholars and journalists writing nuanced stories about America in honor of the upcoming 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding. As New America wrote in their announcement of the fellowship:

“Focused on reimagining the American narrative, Us@250 centers around three core themes: pride in the nation’s progress from its origins; reckoning with historical and contemporary wrongs that have caused the nation to fall short of its ideals; and aspiration for a multiracial, inclusive democracy. The Us@250 Fellowship plays a pivotal role in this mission by empowering storytellers with funding, resources, and a supportive community. These storytellers are dedicated to telling a fuller, more comprehensive American narrative, fostering connections across differences, and expanding our understanding of American culture and identity.”

For my fellowship, I’ll be focusing on the afterlife of Amache, Colorado’s WWll-era Japanese American concentration camp, by looking at the decades-long struggle to properly commemorate the site and its transition to becoming, as of February 2024, our newest National Historic Site. I’ve been researching this topic ever since attending the May 2023 Amache pilgrimage and I’m so looking forward to continuing this research and reporting work.

The other fellows in my cohort are doing incredible work (read more about it here) and I can’t wait to learn from and with them over the coming year.