{"id":54,"date":"2012-07-30T13:14:23","date_gmt":"2012-07-30T18:14:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.brown.edu\/modernlatinamerica\/?page_id=54"},"modified":"2012-07-30T13:14:23","modified_gmt":"2012-07-30T18:14:23","slug":"eugenics-narrates-the-nations","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/chapters\/chapter-3-mexico\/moments-in-mexican-history\/eugenics-narrates-the-nations\/","title":{"rendered":"Eugenics in Nation Building"},"content":{"rendered":"

Post-revolutionary Mexican Identity Formation
\n<\/strong>by Francesca Contreas<\/p>\n

The Rise of Eugenics in Latin America<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/em>The concept of of eugenics emerged in the late 19th<\/sup> century in response to elite European American and Latin American apprehension of \u201csocietal degradation,\u201d although it was not until the first three decades of the 20th<\/sup> century that the concept of scientific race improvement gained credence in the region. During this time, the institutionalization of education and medicine coincided with the complex processes of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, changing sexual mores, and increasingly visible and public women\u2019s work\u2014processes which through their sheer magnitude and concentration of people provoked fear amongst the ruling classes. (Stepan 23) Meanwhile, the belief that diseases such as tuberculosis, syphilis, alcoholism, mental illness and venereal diseases were hereditary and racial was gaining popularity.<\/p>\n

Eugenics manifested itself in two distinct strands. The Anglo-Germanic and Darwinian strand of Eugenics, based in Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution and reinforced by Mendelian genetics, believed that genes pass from generation to generation unaltered and that it was thus necessary to prevent \u201cundesirables\u201d from reproducing through methods such as forced surgical sterilization. Despite the tendency to equate this \u201chard\u201d form of eugenics strictly with Nazi Germany, it was first practiced in the United States in the early 1900s where state programs from Indiana to Puerto Rico practiced sterilization on \u201cdefective\u201d populations\u2014a list which included groups like the mentally handicapped and supposedly inferior women of color.<\/p>\n

In Latin America, eugenics developed in the context of a resurgence of nationalisms: first in the aftermath of World War I and once more in the 1930s in the wake of the worldwide depression. Worried about dangers posed by new immigrants and racial foundation of national identities, eugenicists found a role for scientific prescriptions in policy making. (Stepan 18) The French-Latin American-Lamarckian strand of eugenics believed in the \u201ctheory of inheritance of acquired traits,\u201d which said gradual improvements in heredity could be achieved through improvements in the social environment of a state. Devoid of sterilization, this \u201csoft\u201d strand of eugenics emphasized assimilability of the darker skinned masses and labeled alcoholism, criminality and prostitution social pathologies of the poor. Policymakers used education, public hygiene regulations, and criminalization of diseases as methods to force the \u201cundesirables\u201d far away from the elites. This eugenic discourse permeated nation building throughout the Americas\u2014from Brazil to Argentina, the United States to Mexico.<\/p>\n

The Case of Mexico<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In Eugenics Beyond Borders: Science and Medicalization in Mexico and the U.S West 1900-1950<\/em>, Alexandra Stern writes that eugenics in Mexico was shaped by \u201cunique historical patterns such as the tumultuous revolution, Porfiriato connections to French positivism, and scarce state resources for science in general.\u201d A decade of political upheaval, demands for land distribution and constitutional rights during the Mexican Revolution resulted not only in political chaos and social disunity, but also in an opportunity to craft a new sense of nationalism based a renewed sense of identity. Paralleling the material reconstruction of Mexico thus began a cultural-national reconstruction often referred to by national elites as \u201cregeneration.\u201d This would be the moment in which a proud and uniquely Mexican identity would arise.<\/p>\n

This regeneration was inescapably tied however to prevailing understandings of\u00a0 race, increasingly rooted in the concept \u201cmestizophilia.\u201d The main doctrine for nation-state building first introduced during the latter half of the Porfiriato dictatorship of 1876-1910 and formulated explicitly in Andres Molina Enriquez\u2019 1909 Los Grandes Problemas Mexicano<\/em>s, \u201cmestizophilia\u201d laid the groundwork for the reversal of the denigration of the Indian and the portrayal of the mestizo as a half-breed. Andrea Molina Enriquez exalted the mestizo as the ideal cultural and biological byproduct of the fusion of European and indigenous lineages. This notion of mestizaje<\/em>\u2014cloaked in a discourse of inclusivity\u2014 contributed to a transformation of racial, national and socioeconomic boundaries. However, it\u2019s very success and popularity also depended upon exclusion.<\/p>\n

Along with Molina Enriquez, anthropologist Manuel Gamio and intellectual Jos\u00e9 Vasconcelos were the thinkers most responsible for transforming the mestizo into the icon of the nation. Former head of the state\u2019s department of anthropology, Gamio was the first to exalt the Indian past and cultural contribution to Mexico. This exaltation was part of a larger flowering of \u201cindigenismo\u201d in the 1920s. Although he rejected sterilization, birth control and marriage, and romanticized the Indian, Gamio was nonetheless an enthusiastic eugenicist, arguing that in order to embark on a project of eugenics for the racial improvement of the indigenous population in Mexico, comprehensive state-sponsored demographic and anthropological studies of the Mexican populace were needed first to ascertain which populations were most assimilable. (Stern 187)<\/p>\n

Jos\u00e9 Vasconcelos envisioned a far superior spiritual eugenics \u201cof aesthetic taste,\u201d la raza c\u00f3smica<\/em>. This new cosmic race would be synthesized from extant racial groups, combining the best aspects of each. In his writings of 1925, Vasconcelos explained that through a process of \u201cconstructive miscegenation,\u201d the ugly Mendelian recessives\u2014what he called the \u201clower types of species\u201d\u2014would be \u201cabsorbed by the superior type.\u201d (Werner 4) The Negro race and other undesirable mixes (including Afro-Chinese) would vanish on their own in order to make room for the beautiful races. In the 1940s Vasconcelos\u2019 obsession with perfect hybridity and dreams of a super race led him to support the project of Nazism.<\/p>\n

Eugenics as a foundation of creating an ideal national citizen in the future necessitated the appropriation of the female body as a reproductive vehicle to give birth to the next generation. This was realized through the implementation of legislation which pushed a public health agenda that criminalized pathologies such as tuberculosis, syphilis and venereal diseases considered hereditary to the poor, dark classes; through institutions which required civil codes and medical examinations for prenuptial registration; and through immigration policies that favored Europeans and prevented the migration of African-Americans to Mexico.<\/p>\n

Far from a disconnected apolitical and haplessly flawed science as many conceptualized, eugenics was used to justify racial segregation and oppression in Europe, North America and also in Latin America. Veracruz was the only state in Mexico to use \u201chard\u201d eugenic methods such as tubal ligations in fashion similar to Nazis; however, this does not mean that it was not still employed by scientists and state officials alike to control human behavior. Eugenic logic was instrumental in the construction of mestizaje. Accordingly, in retrospect mestizaje emerges as a reordering<\/em> of theories based upon colonial evolutionary hierarchies (which posited the superiority of the white race) rather than a rupture with racist European logic.<\/p>\n

The overall celebration and centralization of the mestizo was the driving force behind the national homogenization project of post-revolutionary Mexican educators, anthropologists and scientists alike and can be understood as an inversion of the logic of eugenic purity. Although Mexican revolutionaries set themselves up in opposition to racist-eugenic norms of countries like Argentina and the United States, this did not mean a repudiation of eugenics per se. Throughout this discourse of nation building, the Afro and Chinese-Mexican is unnamed, reflecting the unspoken wish that they disappear.<\/p>\n

*****
\n*****<\/p>\n

Bibliography:<\/span><\/p>\n

Cumberland, Charles C. \u201cThe Sonora Chinese and the Mexican Revolution.\u201d The Hispanic American Historical Review <\/em>Vol. 40, No. 2 May 1960: 191-211<\/p>\n

Dzidzienyo, Anani et al. Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos.<\/em> Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print.<\/p>\n

Hu-DeHart, Evelyn. \u201cLos chinos del norte de M\u00e9xico, 1875-1930: la formaci\u00f3n de una peque\u00f1a burgues\u00eda regional.\u201d Universidad de Colorado en Boulder, from China en las Californias<\/em>. Tijuana, M\u00e9xico: Consejo Nacional Para La Cultura y Las Artes, 2002<\/p>\n

McKeown, Adam. Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900-1936.<\/em>Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.<\/p>\n

Stepan, Nancy. The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, Nation in Latin America<\/em>. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Print.<\/p>\n

Stern, Alexandra. \u201cEugenics Beyond Borders: Science and Medicalization in Mexico and the U.S West 1900-1950.\u201d University of Chicago 1. (1999): Web. 9 May 2010.<\/p>\n

Stern, Alexandra. Unraveling the History of Eugenics in Mexico<\/em>. Archives: Institute for the Study of Academic Racism, 01 08 1998. Web. 9 May 2010. <http:\/\/www.ferris.edu\/HTMLS\/othersrv\/isar\/archives2\/sources\/mexico.htm>.<\/p>\n

Werner, Michael S. Concise Encylopedia of Mexico – African Mexicans<\/em>. Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishing Company, 2001. 3-6. Print.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Post-revolutionary Mexican Identity Formation by Francesca Contreas The Rise of Eugenics in Latin America The concept of of eugenics emerged in the late 19th century in response to elite European American and Latin American apprehension of \u201csocietal degradation,\u201d although it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"parent":38,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"sidebar-page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-54","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/54\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/38"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/modernlatinamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}