Book Review | Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900–1950s, by Natalie Lira (University of California Press, 2022)

In 2020 over forty immigrant women filed a class action lawsuit against Mahendra Amin, a gynecologist accused of performing hysterectomies without patient consent, and LaSalle Corrections, the private contractor who ran the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia where the women had been held.Only a few years prior, many among the public had been shocked to learn that refugee men, women, and children were being held in unsanitary and overcrowded cages and subjected to family separation, casualties of the Trump administration's zerotolerance policies.Likened to "dog kennels," these cages signified as well as enabled the dehumanization of already vulnerable immigrants in rhetorical, material, and corporeal terms.Natalie Lira sheds much-needed light on an earlier history of this same process of dehumanization in Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900-1950s.The author examines the forced confinement and sterilization targeting Mexican-origin youth during the early twentieth century.Lira's focus is southern California's Pacific Colony.Allegedly intended as a treatment facility for people with developmental disabilities, Pacific Colony was used as a carceral institution where young people deemed criminals, troublemakers, or potential burdens to the state could be consigned, often against their will and that of their families.Officials incarcerated youth at Pacific Colony by using a medical diagnosis of "feeblemindedness," a conveniently pliant term with racist, ableist, and classist implications-and aims.Feeblemindedness was presumably a hereditary condition marked by a low IQ and leading to poverty, criminal behavior, and sexual licentiousness.Eugenicists following Francis Galton and Charles Davenport linked feeblemindedness to non-whites,