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

正如在人口控制政策和做法以及对残疾人的侵犯中所体现的那样，墨西哥的优生做法和思想仍然反映在土著和非裔墨西哥社区之间的社会不平等中。本文从历史社会学的角度探讨了优生学在墨西哥的开展方式。特别是，它分析了优生措施和思想在墨西哥的历史延续，以及它们在21世纪的影响和回响。反过来，这又使我能够采取一种交叉的方法，涉及性别、“种族”、性、科学和技术、风险和疾病管理等问题。全文共分五章。前三章的方法是历史性的，解决了墨西哥革命(1910-1920)后国家的建设，以及这一事件如何与优生学中巩固的排外思想的兴起交织在一起。这一方法使人们能够从不同的角度探讨墨西哥的优生学，包括墨西哥优生学学会(MSE)成员在个人和国家一级对家庭构成的影响，以及哪些机构和人口不属于墨西哥民族的定义。最后两章集中于二十世纪末和二十一世纪初，在科学种族主义的撤退和MSE的衰落之后。我研究的一个关键发现是，优生学并没有简单地消失，而是继续出现在个人管理自己身体的过程中，以及与艾滋病毒流行等公共卫生危机有关的州内措施，以及人口控制问题。总体而言，这项工作引入了“滑动优生学”的概念，以解释优生学思想在墨西哥正在进行的发展和影响，我认为，优生学思想继续塑造着这个国家到现在的复制。到目前为止，对墨西哥优生学的学术描述一直将其视为一个在第二次世界大战后不复存在的领域。相反，我的发言最具创新性的方面是展示优生实践和意识形态如何继续塑造当代社会政策、对科学的文化理解、民族主义概念和生物科学。作为更广泛的国际网络的一部分，我对墨西哥优生学的探索为展示全球优生学思想的相互关联性及其对个人日常生活的影响提供了一个框架。我认为，在墨西哥，优生的思想和“种族优越”和“异常”的语言--二战前很常见，经过净化并被“残疾人”之类的术语取代--促成了一个国家机构的创建，而这个机构反过来又帮助病态化了一些群体，在优生学家看来，这些群体无法“改善”国家存量--通过使用含蓄的、没有明显种族主义色彩的暗语继续存在的思想。因此，我提供了工具来识别优生学实践和想法，以揭示它们的延续，即使在优生学的语言从可接受性下降之后也是如此。然而，优生做法--如绝育--继续适用于土著人口。我的研究被英国和美国的研究引用，它指出了墨西哥优生学与其他国家的相似之处，但它的内部矛盾和悖论使其成为一个值得注意的案例，可以用来解释优生学知识产生背后的动力，不仅是在拉丁美洲，而且是它与世界各地的优生学学会和优生学家的联系。

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.