Eugenics and Bio-Power

Inda details the Foucaultian concepts of bio-power, and how political and economic powers seek to control bodies in order to create the most efficient, productive society at least in terms of monetary gains for certain individuals. These same basic principles come into play with both Costantini's article and Chavez's text, where the Latina body becomes the battleground for the insurance of a predominantly white, middle and upper class society. The portrayal of hyper-fertility and the treatment of pregnant undocumented women demonstrates the same fundamental underpinnings that drove the eugenics movements in the United States in the 1900s.

Women's reproduction represents the first way to control and adjust the population to reflect the desires of the most privileged, and in an American context this means, male, white, well-off, able-bodied, etc. The eugenics movement in America solidified the idea that social, physical, and mental desirability were inherently genetic traits that were passed down from generation to generation. With some of the earliest eugenicists in the 1910s came studies tracking "problem families" such as the Jukes, which sought to show the pernicious passing down of inadequacies, thus these women needed to be prevented  from giving birth or ever becoming pregnant (since it was almost always framed as an issue of women's sexuality). Then emerged widespread forced institutionalizing of primarily women who were viewed as "feebleminded," a catch all term that was extremely raced, classed, and gendered, into forced labor colonies, where many of them were non-consensually sterilized. Eugenic movements created the same fears around reproduction as Chavez notes in The Latino Threat, that these people will be economic drains on the welfare systems, etc. The exact same arguments were used by the eugenicists, that by preventing reproduction of epileptics, idiots, the sexually promiscuous, the disabled, etc. the social services would not be overburdened and the white, middle and upper class citizenry would not have to bank role these "less desirable" people.

This desire to control reproduction has shifted, criminals are still at risk as seen by the mass sterilizations in California's prisons, as are the poor, but the newer group is the fear of Latina reproduction, which mirrors the previous tropes of the "Welfare Queen" and even earlier "feebleminded" hypersexaul individual, to create the modern day body that must be controlled. In this case immigration has entered the fray as the easiest way to physically restrain these bodies, without having to sterilize. We limit legal immigration, so only so many Latinos may enter, and those that are undocumented face insurmountable obstacles, which reduces their ability to remain. Thus immigration functions as the preventing force to reproduction on American soil. Undocumented women are deported when giving birth or seeking gynecological care, medical repatriation is disturbingly common, pre-natal care the number one determiner of fetal well-being is denied or inaccessible to undocumented women (and these are all true for many poorer women as well). Ensuring that the financial, cultural, medical, societal, and sometimes physical (as in restraints while giving birth) and biological (sterilizations) the frontiers of reproductive control have shifted their energies to the Latina women, and ensuring that they cannot enter, remain, or give birth in America, or if they do their experience and life of their children will be marred by the attempts of the privileged American society to remain hegemonic.