"Of Low Grade Mexican Parentage:" Race, Gender, and Eugenic Sterilization in California, 1928-1952.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that from the 1920s into the 1950s tropes of disability deployed through the notion of “feeblemindedness” converged with nativist concerns over Mexican immigration to mark certain Mexican-origin women and men as unsuitable for citizenship, threats to the racial health of the nation, and in need of institutionalization and sterilization. Mobilizing an interdisciplinary mix of feminist, critical racial, and disability studies lenses I explore Mexican American’s experiences of sterilization in California institutions. Drawing from a vast archive of sterilization requests, interdepartmental letters, institutional publications, and social science studies, my scholarship uncovers the ways Mexican-origin women and men were pathologized by scientists, social workers and institutional authorities as sexually deviant, inherently criminal, genetically inferior, and ultimately unfit to reproduce. Combining qualitative, quantitative and historical methods, my research uncovers the largely neglected racial aspects of California’s eugenic sterilization program, providing statistical evidence of the disproportionate sterilization of Mexican-origin women and men in California institutions for the feebleminded. My focus on the state’s southern institution for the feebleminded, Pacific Colony, reveals how race, gender and notions of disability converged to construct young Mexican-origin women as “sexual delinquents” and Mexican-origin male youths as inherent criminals in order to justify legal commitment and sterilization. I present quantitative data from records processed by Pacific Colony that suggests that Mexican-origin patients were more likely than their non-Mexican counterparts to be described as criminals and sexual delinquents in need of reproductive constraint. In doing so, this research expands the gendered scope of literature on the politics of reproduction beyond a focus on women, illustrating the ways in which race, gender, and disability came together to justify reproductive surgery. Finally, I situate the Mexican-origin patients sterilized at California institutions as more than mere victims of the state by discussing the various ways in which patients and their families resisted nonconsensual sterilization. This dissertation places Latina/o Studies in conversation with Disability studies to shed new light on the history of eugenic sterilization in California representing a critical facet of the larger pursuit of racial and reproductive justice by Chicana/os in California during the twentieth century.