In this talk, Dr. Lina-Maria Murillo (University of Iowa) will discuss her new book Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (UNC, 2025). Dr. Vicki Ruiz (Emerita, UC Irvine) will provide comments. Refreshments will be served.

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.

Sponsored by the Department of Society, Environment, and Health Equity; the Department of History; the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies; the Center for Ideas & Society; and the Latino & Latin American Studies Research Center.