Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the U.S-Mexico

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, 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. Murillo lays bare Mexican-origin women’s long battle for human dignity and power in the borderlands as reproductive justice in Texas once again hangs in the balance.

Lina-Maria Murillo is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, (UNCP 2025), examines the histories of reproductive control and violence against Mexican-origin women and how they organized to create spaces of reproductive care and liberation throughout the twentieth century. Murillo’s latest article, “Espanta Cigüeñas: Race and Abortion in the U.S-Mexico Borderlands,” won the 2023 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship in Signs: A Journal of Women and Culture in Society. Her research is supported by several grants and fellowships, including from the American Association of University Women (AAUW), American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Ford Foundation. Murillo also co-directs the Reproductive Justice Collaborative with Professor Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz.

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Host or Publisher UCL Institute of the Americas