Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands

by Lina-Maria Murillo

The first birth control clinic in El Paso, Texas, opened in 1937. Since then, Mexican-origin women living in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez have confronted various interest groups determined to control their reproductive lives, including a heavily funded international population control campaign led by Planned Parenthood Federation of America as well as the Catholic Church and Mexican American activists. Uncovering nearly one hundred years of struggle, Lina-Maria Murillo reveals how Mexican-origin women on both sides of the border fought to reclaim autonomy and care for themselves and their communities.

Faced with a family planning movement steeped in eugenic ideology, working-class Mexican-origin women strategically demanded additional health services and then formed their own clinics to provide care on their own terms. Along the way, they developed what Murillo calls reproductive care— quotidian acts of community solidarity—as activists organized for better housing, education, wages, as well as access to birth control, abortion, and more. Centering the agency of these women and communities, Murillo lays bare Mexican-origin women’s long battle for human dignity and power in the borderlands as reproductive freedom in Texas once again hangs in the balance.

Genres: Feminism, Academic, Nonfiction

336 pages, Hardcover

Published January 7, 2025

Reviews

[Sunny Lu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eugenics and the birth control movement 🤦🏻‍♀️

Amerikkkan SStandard aKKLademiKKK English (as Reem said)

[Daphne · Rating 4 out of 5]

i think that the book was really accessible and i much appreciated Dr. Murillo’s engagement with upper class euro-amerikan women as oppressive forces in mexican-origin women’s lives, but I wish that there was more engagement with how euro-amerikan women regardless of class benefit from the superexploitation of poor mexican-origin women on both sides of the border

[Alana · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who's new to this topic, I found that this book did a good job of explaining the history of the birth control movement in the borderlands. The theoretical lens used to analyze the events mentioned in the book felt underdeveloped, but the events and evidence presented are substantial enough to make a strong case on their own.

[[charlotte]]

read for class 🤓👍

[Lisa Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dr. Murillo’s work interweaving the advancement of white supremacist ideology and eugenics with reproductive control is massively important. So many antiabortion narratives that claim to be pro Black and pro immigrant hone in on the history of reproductive medicine as a reason for “untrustworthy actors” in the reproductive movement, when the actors who pushed for population control of those communities back then are the same ones pushing for control within immigration crackdowns and anti bodily autonomy policies today.

Thankfully all of the history that speaks to this is presented in an accessible manner in this book.

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

overall super informative and interesting. i definitely recommend everyone read it. i only wish there was a chapter dedicated to a comprehensive timeline since there’s a lot of back and forth regarding events and figureheads!

[leireads · Rating 4 out of 5]

really accessible book for anyone interested in the topic, specially relevant in our present day political landscape

[carmen rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

read for a summer class

[Anthony Kargoll · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great :)