New Books in Latino Studies · Marshall Poe

Lina-Maria Murillo, "Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands" (UNC Press, 2025)

March 9, 2025·1 hr 8 min·5 clips

Planned Parenthood in El Paso closed overnight, and its archives led Lina-Maria Murillo to a 12-year investigation into reproductive control.

1. New Books in Latino Studies hosts historian Lina Maria Murillo to discuss her 2025 University of California Press book 'Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.' 2. Host David James Gonzalez is himself a historian; Murillo is Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa in Gender Studies, History, and Latino Studies, and won the 2023 Katherine Stimson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship. 3. The episode's core question is how Mexican origin women exercised reproductive agency under conditions of contested citizenship, racialization, and population-control ideology across the 20th century. 4. Murillo describes her personal background: daughter of Colombian immigrants who settled in East San Jose, California; undergraduate degree from San Francisco State in history and Raza Studies, a program she notes no longer exists in that form. 5. She began her PhD at the University of Texas El Paso (UTEP) in 2008, intending to study feminicides in Juárez, but was redirected when the cartel violence made that research untenable at that moment. 6. When El Paso's Planned Parenthood clinic closed abruptly in 2008-2009 and donated its complete archive to UTEP, archivists approached Murillo because she had been researching women's history in the border region; she then spent approximately 12 years with those documents. 7. She clarifies the clinic's closure had nothing to do with then-governor Rick Perry's later attacks on Planned Parenthood in Texas, a misattribution she says was widespread. 8. Planned Parenthood was founded in El Paso in 1937 by predominantly white Protestant women — with some Jewish women — with no Mexican origin women involved in operations until the 1950s, using the rationale of addressing 'ill health and poverty' among the Mexican origin population. 9. Murillo argues that because Mexican origin people were mass-deported (including US citizens) in the 1930s and denied educational and labor rights through de facto segregation, the discourse of 'reproductive rights' was structurally inadequate as a framework for understanding their experiences. 10. She distinguishes between reproductive rights (the white feminist mainstream), reproductive justice (a framework developed by Black feminists and women of color in the 1990s), and her own concept of 'reproductive care.' 11. Reproductive justice centers the experiences of women of color and demands not just access to contraception but the right to raise children in safe and sustainable communities — three prongs: not having, having, and raising children in dignity. 12. Murillo's concept of 'reproductive care' names the specific labor — material, emotional, community-building — that marginalized women perform to construct futures for people who do not yet exist, even under brutal conditions of exploitation. 13. Her oral histories with midwives and social workers in the borderlands region were central to articulating reproductive care as a concept, revealing how women sustained a sense of futurity despite low wages and racial subjugation. 14. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chicana activists explicitly rejected 'family planning' language while supporting birth control access, because decades of population-control discourse had made the term racist in their experience. 15. She found documents where Chicana activists wrote that they wanted their own clinics, under their own conditions, with no population-control framing attached — a position that diverged sharply from mainstream white feminist reproductive rights advocacy. 16. She acknowledges scholars whose prior work on sterilization history — including Elena Gutierrez's book and Natalie Lita's research — created the foundation she built upon, as well as the film 'No Más Bebés.' 17. Murillo notes that Planned Parenthood archives show ongoing back-and-forth with pharmaceutical companies during the early birth control pill era, using poor Mexican origin women as study populations to test dosages. 18. The episode's tone is conversational and intellectually generous — both host and guest share a long-standing scholarly relationship and discuss methodological challenges for historians working with archives that systematically erased marginalized voices. 19. The episode will appeal to scholars and students in Latino studies, women's history, reproductive health policy, and borderlands history, as well as general listeners interested in the politics of race and healthcare. 20. Listeners seeking chronological narrative history or policy prescriptions will find this primarily a theoretical and methodological conversation about how to conceptualise power and agency in historical archives.

As heard by us

A careful argument about reproductive justice, control, and care in the borderlands.

It traces the history of reproductive care in the US-Mexico borderlands and keeps a steady focus on how power, race, medicine, and community shape that story.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a careful conversation about sterilization, rights, and justice in Latino studies, press play.

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