Fighting for Control is the history of how Mexican-origin women in the US–Mexico borderlands have navigated multiple powerful interests in the organization, management, oppression, and control of their reproductive lives over the past century. Focusing on El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, Lina-Maria Murillo demonstrates how the Catholic Church, the international and national family planning movements, capitalists, and white welfarists sought to control and influence Mexican-origin women's reproductive lives on both sides of the border. She uses a mixture of archival sources and oral histories to show how community activists and individual women navigated these powerful interests in forging community-based reproductive health practice and reproductive justice. Murillo outlines how the history of this struggle plays into its contemporary legacies and dynamics. Putting her positionality forward, the author starts with a powerful prologue about her own coming of age in San Jose's Eastside, California, on the edge of the US–Mexico borderlands in the late 20th century, as a way of showcasing “how the politics of sexual and reproductive liberation, especially for Latinas and women of color, have changed over time” (p. 3). This acknowledgement that the politics of liberation are nonlinear and are often contingent on community organizing and community support operates as a framing for the book. The introduction, which is titled “Reproductive Control and Care in the US-Mexico borderlands,” highlights how social inequalities in relation to class, gender, sexuality, and race, amongst others, have intersected with the politics of reproduction in this region. Murillo centers the story of reproductive control in the El Paso–Ciudad Juarez borderlands using leading figures in the birth control and eugenics movement, such as Betty Mary Goetting, Amelia Castillo, and Guadalupe Arizpe de la Vega, as a way of exploring the ways in which “Mexican-origin women and powerful interest groups shaped the family planning movement” (p. 5). One of the biggest contributions of Murillo's work is to show how the birth control movement and eugenic feminism of the early 1930s “weaponized social inequalities as justifications for directing racist contraceptive campaigns almost exclusively to Mexican-origin women in the borderlands” throughout the 20th century (p. 6). Murillo uses a reproductive justice framework as a way of analyzing the complexity of this issue and its actors, noting that most of them “fought over the significance of reproductive control and justice, but not rights” (p. 10). In “Making a White Settler World in the Twentieth-Century Borderlands” (Chapter 1), Murillo zooms in on the convergence of racialization processes in the borderlands. Using Calvin Smith Babbitt's 1909 publication, “The Remedy for the Decadence of the Latin Race,” Murillo highlights how eugenic thinking and demographic anxieties of “race suicide” were discussed and contended with in the borderlands from the outset of the 20th century. Throughout her discussion of racialization processes, she centers reproduction and demographic panics of whites to explore “what it means to proliferate as a white race at the very edges of the American nation” (p. 29). She argues that for people of Mexican origin, the simple act of existing in this space represented a threat to white racial supremacy (pp. 25–29). By highlighting the longer histories of American colonization and the ways in which science and reproduction play a big part in racialization processes, Murillo contributes not only to intellectual history but to the ways in which racialization is understood contemporaneously. Using an intersectional approach, Chapter 2 titled ʻʻFighting for Control, “brings to light the worldmaking of upper-middle-class white women as they sought to help preserve white settler power in the borderlands through birth control” (pp. 50–51). Throughout this chapter, Murillo examines the tensions between community-based Planned Parenthood and the Catholic Church which, ultimately, created a “fight for control” over Mexican-origin women's reproductive choices during the 1930s and 1940s. Murillo explores how geography, race, class, ableism, religion, and reproduction were and are still intertwined in the advocacy of birth control and population control in the borderlands. She explores how birth control advocates devised different terminological toolsets, such as markers of religion, ableism, and pauperism, to provide a “convenient rationale” for reproductive interventions rather than looking at structural and systemic forms of inequalities among Mexican-origin peoples. However, she also nuances her analysis by showing the ways in which Mexican-origin women exerted their agency. For instance, Murillo argues that “Mexican origin women also learned to utilize what little resources they were offered without succumbing to powerful Americanization programming” (p. 56). In short, Murillo highlights in this chapter how feminism, race, class, religion, and resistance all operated in the borderlands in complex and intertwined ways. She demonstrates how the borderlands served as a laboratory for population and birth control policies that were later transposed across national boundaries. For example, she mentions how these population control policies were then implemented in places like India and Puerto Rico during the late 1940s and 1950s onwards. Synergizing oral histories and the Planned Parenthood-El Paso archive, Murillo uncovers the reproductive histories of the borderlands. Chapter 3 starts by showcasing the story of Bertha Gonzalez Chavez, who was a nurse who worked with an abortion provider in Ciudad Juárez. Murillo argues that Gonzalez Chavez's story “was both extraordinary and conventional and that the lives of the people she worked with and for are critical to understanding what Murillo calls reproductive care” (p. 92). Murillo defines reproductive care as “the sometimes radical, sometimes conventional everyday actions of racialized, minoritized, and marginalized community members to comfort, support, and uplift each other amid the confines of state and nonstate suppression, surveillance, and capitalist exploitation” (p. 93). She uses reproductive care as a way of exploring how, and in what conditions, Mexican-origin women were practicing reproductive justice during the early decades of the 20th century, before the coining of the reproductive justice term in 1994 (Ross and Solinger, 2017; Luna, 2020). In this chapter, Murillo focuses on the broader dynamics of reproductive control as a way of highlighting the challenges that Mexican-origin women faced in relation to the third tenet of reproductive justice—“the ability to raise children in safe and sustainable communities” (p. 93). One of the main contributions of this chapter is its robust theoretical framework wherein Murillo synergizes borderland studies, reproductive justice, and racial capitalism to explore “reproductive care.” Murillo also introduces an innovative transnational analysis of both the United States and Mexico as a way to understand the ways in which reproductive care intersects in the borderlands. Murillo carefully traces the histories alongside her thoughtful theoretical approach that makes this chapter seminal to our understanding of reproductive politics, colonialism, and gender. Chapter 4, titled “Se Aguanta: Borderland Internationalism, Overpopulation, and Reproductive Control,” deals with the ways in which racialized interventions informed aggressive population control policies that targeted Mexican-origin women and others in the post-WWII era. She explores how a myriad of birth control technologies had multifarious uses arising from past biases and conceptualizations of who should and who should not reproduce. She describes how eugenic praxis continued under a new terminological toolset in relation to “Cold War obsessions with population increases, especially with communist countries, and how this inflected mid-century anxieties about overpopulation and helped re-shape old rationales for birth control into new technological advancements in contraception” (p. 122). Through an exploration of door-to-door campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s, Murillo is able to observe the insidious nature of aggressive population control services that responded to Malthusian moral panics. One of the most insightful things about this chapter is the contrapuntal reading of the archive as a way of analyzing what Murillo calls moments for reproductive liberation and care. This refers to the ways in which Mexican-origin women would make use of birth control technologies to assert their own privacy, agency, and resistance. Subsequently, Chapter 5 moves to consider reproduction in the borderlands in the context of the civil rights movement and health care activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Murillo first focuses on Chicana activist Luz Guitierrez to show how grassroots health care activism in this era brought forward a “more holistic version of health care, which would encompass the ‘total’ needs of the community” (p. 158). This community-based understanding of health care activism guides the theoretical framework of this chapter. Murillo works with epistemologies that stem from grassroots activism to create frameworks with, for, and by the community. Murillo explores health care activism in relation to the politics of self-determination among the Chicana/o population in the 1960s and 1970s, reproductive justice activism,1 resistance, religion, and the politics within and beyond the “clinic.” In Chapter 6, titled “Battling Mexico's Growth: Population Control, Neoliberalism, and Reproductive Autonomy,” Murillo traces the economic history of the borderlands as a way of highlighting its intersections with reproduction and coloniality. She explores the continuations of the “Bracero Program2” (1942–1964) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (1994–2020), and situates them against the politics of reproductive control inside the maquiladora system.3 Murillo highlights how, in the second-half of the 20th century, the borderlands experienced a twofold version of coloniality—coming from both Mexico and the United States—where “gore” versions of capitalism4 (Valencia 2010; Deller 2018) come to the fore. Murillo notes in the introduction that, as she was writing this piece, ʻʻTexas has become ground zero for reproductive rights wars in the 21st century,ʻʻ and that “Borderland cities, such as El Paso, have become the first casualties of these wars as cities endure loss of access to basic reproductive health care” (p. 20). She returns to the urgent contemporary relevance of her work in the epilogue, where she traces direct links between the histories of population control, community organizing, and resistance, and the exacerbation of contemporary social inequalities in the borderlands. This is an important and timely book, demonstrating how deeply histories of oppression and control underpin contemporary landscapes of reproductive control, as well as speaking to the power of activism and community organization in navigating routes to justice.
R. SÁNCHEZ RIVERA (Mon,) studied this question.
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