May 27, 2026 | Belen Ponce Leal | Lifestyle Editor
On May 14, Raymond Malewitz came to Western to discuss his newly released book, “Animal Illness and the Literary Imagination.”
Malewitz is a professor of English at Oregon State University. He has a bachelor’s degree in English and in biochemistry from the University of Michigan and received a doctorate in English from the University of Virginia.
His book explores how American and English literature present and assess the biopolitical management of large-scale animal disease outbreaks. The talk mainly discussed an event that took place at the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1950s that involved a disease affecting cattle called foot-and-mouth disease. He spoke about the events, the way the outbreak was handled and the works that were created during that time.
Malewitz spoke about the difficulty of being able to research this 1952 event due to the fact that all Mexican governmental records of the large-scale outbreak were ordered to be burned, likely due to the archive being politically damaging. He explained that the main documents remaining from this time period were U.S. governmental records and literary accounts that were written by Mexican and American literary figures.
What is known is that in December of 1946, foot-and-mouth disease, also called aftosa disease, was discovered in cattle in the city of Veracruz, Mexico. It was a highly contagious virus that affected sheep, pigs and mainly cattle. It was a direct threat to the economic well-being of the Mexican state, yet not because of lethality, as it only had a fatality rate of 3%. It concerned them because recovered animals were weakened. They produced lower-quality milk and beef when compared to unaffected cattle. This discovery generated an immediate response from the U.S. government, which closed the border to cattle to protect its own cattle, which consisted of around 82 million animals.
The U.S. government decided to form a joint commission with the Mexican government. The operation was funded by both governments and was tasked with managing the epizootic, an epidemic for animals. In 1947, the commission began actively trying to handle this through traditional stamping-out methods. Malewitz explained that this was called “el rifle sanitario” or the “rifle of sanitation.” Soldiers of the Mexican army went with trained veterinarians to carry out the slaughter of any infected animals throughout central Mexico.
Mexican literature at the time revealed the effects this had on cattle ranchers and communities within Mexico. Sympathetic writers expressed the sentiments of el rifle sanitario being a hegemonic expression of America’s power over the Mexican state and indigenous communities within that state. They reflected an extreme power imbalance, with many expressing feelings of grief that cattle were slaughtered heartlessly, without a second thought.
Malewitz showed a few different pieces of literary work to demonstrate this. One was an excerpt from a book titled “The End of Hope” by Rapheal Bernard. In it, a Texan cattle raiser who works for that commission tells the villagers that their cattle must be destroyed despite the disease not being detected on that farm.
In an anonymous poem published in Excelsior, a major newspaper in Mexico City, it attributes the campaign to Mexican politicians who bow down to their U.S. neighbors. “(The rifle of sanitation) cures any bull with aftosa / and the bull won’t be stricken / with the same disease again, according to / people who can never be wrong. / But now in Mexico, we can see / As a sad truth / that the remedy has been worse / than the disease! / Our bovine livestock are killed / without compassion / only to protect / the neighbor’s livestock. / If aftosa spreads / to the neighboring rancher / he will surely lose, while / attacking it, money.”
Malewitz’s talk and book were central in showing how literature is good at articulating sentiments in it, something that government documents can’t always do.
The writer of the poem assumes the identity of all of Mexico, viewing the killing as an investment in Americans’ cattle rather than actual protection of Mexico’s cattle. The anxieties are not about the loss of their cattle but instead about the money that the cattle will make so long as the animals aren’t infected.
When analyzing another work, a fiction book that depicted a village whose cattle were all destroyed, Malewitz went on to quote it. “Those people had no words left. It wasn’t just they were left in poverty. They were already accustomed to poverty. It was not that the men were talking about going to work far away. It was that they had seen the cruel and ignoble death of animals they loved and cared for. From whom they had made their living and for whom they had lived.”
Malewitz then proceeded to show a few video clips of movies at the time that depicted the event, drawing themes similar to the Holocaust, in which one scene depicts several men with rifles shooting at a large group of cattle in a ditch, a scene reminiscent of an execution.
The event ended with a Q&A, with Malewitz encouraging others who are interested in this subject material to continue to study it. For more information about Malewitz and his book, it can be found on his website here.
Contact the author at howllifestyle@wou.edu
