Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the 21st Century

Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900–1950s

Natalie Lira

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520975965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études relatives au genre

Pacific Colony, a Southern California institution established to care for the "feebleminded, " justified the incarceration, sterilization, and forced mutilation of some of the most vulnerable members of society from the 1920s through the 1950s. Institutional records document the convergence of ableism and racism in Pacific Colony. Analyzing a vast archive, Natalie Lira reveals how political concerns over Mexican immigration—particularly ideas about the low intelligence, deviant sexuality, and inherent criminality of the "Mexican race"—shaped decisions regarding the treatment and reproductive future of Mexican-origin patients. Laboratory of Deficiency documents the ways Mexican-origin people sought out creative resistance to institutional control and offers insight into how race, disability, and social deviance have been called upon to justify the confinement and reproductive constraint of certain individuals in the name of public health and progress.

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Terminology
• Introduction: Life, Labor, and Reproduction at the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Disability
• 1.   The Pacific Plan: Race, Mental Defect, and Population Control in California’s Pacific Colony
• 2.   The Mexican Sex Menace: Labor, Reproduction, and Feeblemindedness
• 3.   The Laboratory of Deficiency: Race, Knowledge, and the Reproductive Politics of Juvenile Delinquency
• 4.   Riots, Refusals, and Other Defiant Acts: Resisting Confinement and Sterilization at Pacific Colony
• Conclusion: “We Are Not Out of the Dark Ages Yet,” and Finding a Way Out
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index