Lina-Marie Murillo

media release: A Room of One's Own is thrilled to host Lina-Maria Murillo and Kelly Marie Ward for this talk on Histories of Reproductive Care and Justice. Lina-Maria Murillo's new book Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands will be central to this talk. 

This is an in-person event at A Room of One's Own Bookstore.

About the Book

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.

About the Author

As a feminist historian who has found an intellectual home in women's and gender studies, Lina-Maria Murillo has forged a path uniting some of the most challenging topics of today and reexamining complex historical narratives that undergird our understanding of the past. Drawing from her training in borderlands and women's history, cultural and ethnic studies, regional studies, resistance studies, and women's and gender studies, Murillo deftly connects the past to the trials and tribulations of today to examine how we got here. Her attention to white supremacist movements and changing demographics, as well as resistance movements for reproductive health and liberation, shows how she connects seemingly inchoate networks that reveal a much more intertwined reproductive world. 

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Her fierce critiques of those attacking reproductive justice and the freedom of gender expression to foment hate and score political leverage, of those peddling eugenics and racist ideologies to stall and reverse so-called population decline, and of those nurturing nativist sentiments to quell the appetites of the aggrieved masses, all aid in achieving a more rounded understanding of some of the most charged contemporary issues we face today.

In conversation with Dr. Kelly Marie Ward, Dr. Murillo will share excerpts from her recent book Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands and share how she came to write the book.

Kelly Marie Ward is an assistant professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin Madison.