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McQuade, Lena. "Troubling Reproduction: Sexuality, Race, and Colonialism in New Mexico, 1919-1945," University of New Mexico, July 2008. Advisor: Alex Lubin
Throughout the early twentieth century, the state of New Mexico had the highest rate of infant mortality in the nation. Various constituencies in the state-including the public health department, Mexican American parteras or midwives, medical anthropologists, and birth control proponents-all sought to address poor reproductive health. This dissertation is an interdisciplinary feminist and critical race analysis of these often divergent efforts to improve reproductive health. Drawing from recent scholarship on reproductive justice, this project situates New Mexican reproduction within a larger context of shifting racial logics, persistent economic inequities, and New Mexico’s liminal position within the nation. More specifically, ‘Troubling Reproduction’ investigates how reproductive health policies were inextricably linked, not only to ideologies of race, gender, and national belonging, but also to their material effects evidenced in institutionalized racism, colonized health practices, and racially and economically stratified reproductive health.
From the U.S.-Mexico War when the inhabitants of the New Mexico territory were described as a “mongrel race”-meaning inappropriate national reproducers-to contemporary debates about teen pregnancy and out-of-weedlock births, the reproductive potential of New Mexicans has been deemed problematic. ‘Troubling Reproduction’ analyzes the historical process through which the reproduction of New Mexicans came to be understood as troubled and how these ideologies justified state interventions into reproduction and the permanent altering of cultural health practices and autonomy. Additionally, this dissertation troubles how we imagine and write the reproductive history of the United States by questioning which bodies and what aspects of the reproductive process are absent or under-analyzed in this field. Through centering the complex interworkings of sexuality, gender, race, and colonialism in New Mexico, this dissertation illuminates how reproduction has been crucial to the project of U.S. national formation.
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