What Happened to Mexican Eugenics?: Racism and the Reproduction of the Nation

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As manifest in population control policies and practices as well as violations against people with disabilities eugenic practices and ideas in Mexico are still reflected in social inequalities among Indigenous, Afro-Mexican communities. My thesis explores the ways in which eugenics was carried out in Mexico from a historical sociological perspective. Particularly, it analyses the historical continuations of eugenic measures and ideas in Mexico and the ways in which they impact and echo in the twenty-first century. This, in turn, has allowed me to carry out an intersectional approach that engages with issues of gender, "race", sexuality, science and technology, risk, and the management of disease. The work is divided into five chapters. The first three chapters are historical in their approach and tackle the construction of the nation after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and the ways in which this event became intertwined with the rise of exclusionary ideas cemented in the science of eugenics. This approach enables an exploration of eugenics in Mexico from different angles, including the impact of the members of the Mexican Society of Eugenics (MSE) on the making of the family at an individual and national level, and the definition of which bodies and populations do not belong to the Mexican nation. The final two chapters focus on the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, following the retreat of scientific racism and the decline of the MSE. A key finding of my research is that eugenics did not simply disappear but continues to be seen in the processes in which individuals manage their own bodies, as well as in-state measures concerning public health crises such as the HIV epidemic, and issues of population control. Overall, this work introduces the concept of "slippery eugenics" to account for the ongoing development and impact of eugenic ideas in Mexico, which, I argue, continue to shape the reproduction of the nation into the present. Scholarly accounts of eugenics in Mexico have so far treated it as a field that became defunct after the Second World War. The most innovative aspect of my intervention is to show, on the contrary, how eugenic practices and ideologies continue to shape contemporary social policy, cultural understandings of science, conceptions of nationalism, and biological science. My exploration of Mexican eugenics as part of a broader international network offers a framework for demonstrating the interconnectedness of eugenic ideas globally and their impact on the every-day lives of individuals. I posit that eugenic ideas and the language of "racial superiority" and "abnormality"-common before WWII and sanitized and replaced by terms like "people with disabilities- in Mexico allowed the creation of a national body that, in turn, helped to pathologize groups that, in eugenicists' views, were not capable of "improving" the national stock-ideas that continue to exist through the usage of veiled and coded language without overtly racist overtones. Thus, I provide the tools to recognize eugenic practices and ideas to reveal their continuation even after the language of eugenics fell from acceptability. However, eugenic practices-like sterilizations-continue to be meted out to indigenous populations. My research, which has been cited in British and American-based studies, points to the similarities of Mexican eugenics with other countries, but also how its internal contradictions and paradoxes make it a noteworthy case for explaining the dynamics behind the production of eugenic knowledge, not only in Latin America but its connections with eugenics societies and eugenicists around the world.