3 April 2026 – 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100
Nic John Ramos (American Studies)
“A Tale of Two Clinics: Bringing the History of Anti-Poverty Clinics into the History of Community Mental Health Clinics”
This paper approaches the modern federally-funded U.S. neighborhood health clinic as not only a technology designed to distribute health services more efficiently to formerly-excluded patient populations after 1965 but also to distribute those services in ways that would eventually produce citizens who consumed health services on the same terms of their previous exclusion. By examining two different health clinics built as a response to the 1965 Watts Uprisings, this paper unearths the shared discourses of respectable marriage and family, consumerism, and individual responsibility that unify two movements usually discussed in isolation from each other (the community health movement and the community mental health movement); and two movements usually discussed in mainstream conversations about race as being in contention with each other (the civil rights movement and the Black power movement). In so doing, the paper reveals that the goal of the clinics built in Watts was not to eradicate sickness or poverty per se, but to produce individuals who desired work and normative family lives independent from state assistance as signs of being “normal” and “healthy.”
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Nic John Ramos is an Assistant Professor in the UT Department of American Studies and the Center for Asian American Studies. He holds a Master’s and Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and earned a dual-degree in Asian American Studies and Political Science with a minor in African American Studies from the University of California at Irvine. He has previously held appointments in the Department of History and the Program in Africana Studies at Drexel University; in the Department of Africana Studies, the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Race in Science and Medicine at Brown University, and served as a Ford Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Race, Science, and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. His talk today is a part of his book, Health as Property: Racial Capitalism and Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, which is available for a 40% discount at UCPress.edu if you use the code AUTHOR40 at checkout.