What Hispanic publications reveal about the 1917-18 influenza pandemic - The Dallas Morning News

The 1917-18 flu pandemic was one of the most deadly infections, killing approximately 50 million people at its peak. Despite its severity and impact, information surrounding the pandemic was limited because of the heavy censorship during World War I. However, Hispanic publications of the time allow us to have a better understanding of the impact of this disease.

Last year, partnering with the University of Houston's Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program, I researched the impact the influenza pandemic had as reflected in publications of the time.

Most countries fighting in the war, including the United States, were concerned the pandemic decreased public morale toward the war effort and censored media outlets, documents and news articles regarding the subject.

However, as a neutral power throughout the war, Spain did not engage in wartime censorship and had widespread publications and reporting on the influenza pandemic. Yet, because Spain was the only country reporting on the illness, general opinion mistakenly held that nation responsible for the disease. Hence, the popularized term — the "Spanish flu."

These censorship efforts had consequences, and today there is limited documentation of the illness, the spread, or precautions taken, severely limiting our knowledge of the flu pandemic.

Nonetheless, Hispanic publications in the United States were not restricted by the same levels of censorship because of the language barrier and continued to report on the pandemic and its spread to communities of color. The Recovery Program has collected, preserved and digitized over 1,400 historical periodicals to study them and better understand life in U.S. Hispanic communities, dating from 1808 to the 1980s.

"El Mañana" from McAllen, a Soanish publication from the influenza pandemic era, in 1917-18. Publications in Spanish reveal what was censored in the English speaking media at the time, says Carolina Lopez-Herrera.(HANDOUT)

These periodicals include various published during the 1917-18 pandemic epidemic, such as San Antonio's La Prensa, Los Angeles' El Heraldo de México, Tucson's El Tucsonense, Laredo's Evolución, and McAllen's El Mañana, among others. As an intern for the University of Houston's Research for Aspiring Coogs in the Humanities Program, I was able to work with these archival newspapers.

The more I interacted with the documentation, the clearer it became that Hispanic communities throughout WWI were victims of discrimination as their ethnicity and language characterized them as carriers of the erroneously nicknamed "Spanish flu."

In particular, a column in El Mañana stuck out to me as a clear example of the daily mistreatment that Hispanic communities experienced. The author writes about how he was quietly sitting in a corner of a bar he visited regularly, smoking a cigar when he noticed a white man entering. After looking around the empty bar, the man approached the author. When the author raised his head, the stranger began yelling obscenities about how "his people" started the pandemic.

Throughout this altercation, the author reflected on his country of origin. He could not comprehend why he was the recipient of anger toward Spaniards when he was from a South American country. Additionally, the stranger was not the only one negatively impacted by this pandemic; he too had lost loved ones. It was unfair to be blamed for a tragedy that had also taken from him. In the end, angered by these frustrating thoughts, the man decided to leave as the man kept yelling.

This article illustrates the frustration, anger and exhaustion reflected in many of the articles that appear in Hispanic periodicals during this time. There was a sense of confusion and alienation felt by many Hispanic communities that were also severely impacted by the influenza. Moreover, it shows how unwanted Hispanics had become in places they had visited and enjoyed frequently. These discriminatory attitudes extended to every aspect of their lives, including the workplace. The author did not imagine that over a century later, members of the Asian community would suffer from the same prejudices during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What the article fails to articulate, however, is the feeling of hopelessness and dread about loved ones becoming ill and the frenzy of fear and panic that erupted within the community as the systems that were supposed to support them suppressed them. For example, other articles compared how inequitable care was when compared between Hispanics and their white counterparts. White Americans had medics on call and could receive prescriptions without issue, yet Hispanic Americans were either turned away by physicians or had to haggle for help. Furthermore, while white individuals often had the benefit of being able to quarantine, Hispanic populations could not always afford risking a loss of income, something that has replicated in the COVID-19 pandemic as well with essential workers, many of them Hispanics as well.

Other articles in the collection also highlight how hectic and harmful living situations could be throughout the influenza pandemic as Hispanic households often included multiple generations of a family, increasing chances of exposure. The core of these injustices was discrimination, which left Hispanic communities to fend for themselves rather than seek out resources from their local authorities.

The depth of insight into the daily struggles and societal attitudes uncovered within these newspapers will be available in the forthcoming 1917-1918 Influenza Epidemic Collection, part of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Digital Collections website.

The collection includes newspaper articles and advertisements from various Hispanic periodicals related to the 1917-18 health crisis alongside interventions, treatments and community reactions.

Despite being a century apart, the COVID-19 pandemic shares many parallels to the 1917 pandemic, including but not limited to mandatory quarantines, face coverings, public unrest, increase in prejudice to a certain ethnic group, government uncertainty, economic instability and lower-income communities being the most affected, demonstrating that we must continue investigating both pandemics to best prepare against future public health emergencies.

Carolina Lopez-Herrera is a master's degree student of public policy and applied economics at the University of Houston. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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