Resisting Carceral State Memory Production: Tracing the Life of Concepcion Ruiz (Poster 6)

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

In the early 20th century, the U.S. American landscape experienced a political movement that allowed pseudoscience to be implemented as law. California Chapter 720 of the Statutes of 1909 (also recognized as the California Asexualization Act) granted the state the authority to implement eugenic-based practices across schools, medical sites, and other asylums designed for the “feebleminded.” My dissertation study highlights the impact of eugenic thought and practice in contemporary K-16 public learning environments situated in East Los Angeles. I explore how the socialization of objectification is linked to eugenic educational practices of control, containment, and surveillance that have affected Latina women's access to their sexual citizenship throughout time, space, and place. Through historical newspapers, genealogy records, and oral histories, I restory (Mishler, 2004) the life of Concepcion Ruiz, a sixteen-year-old girl of Mexican-origin who was sterilized at Sonoma State Home of the Feebleminded in California in 1930. In 1932, yearbook records report her graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School located in Lincoln Heights, California. This poster presentation intentionally uplifts a countermemory (Foucault, 1977) of Concepcion’s life before and after the coerced procedure to challenge the dominant memory of her and her lineage produced by the carceral state. For the analytical conversation offered in this presentation, I am guided by Critical Social Theory (Collins et al, 2021) and a Reproductive Justice (Ross & Solinger, 2017) lens to make sense of the life and death of Latina girls and women who exist within the boundaries of state-sanctioned violence.

Author

• Gabriela G. Corona Valencia, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author