(Dis)Placement: Latinx Reproductive Justice as Intersectional Placemaking

• In Event: 4366 - Contemporary Forms of Latina/o Racialization

Abstract

Scholars document the ways in which representations of woman-identified Latinx in media, policy, and public discourse reflect homogenizing controlling images that result in harmful physical, political, and social effects. Less is known about how Latinx contest controlling images through activism. Drawing on three years of ethnographic observations of a Latina reproductive justice organization, I examine how the organization adopts strategies to resist the Latina archetype of the welfare queen, the hyper-breeding welferera. Focusing on their leadership in a campaign to repeal a family caps policy in California, I find that the organization’s strategies resist the controlling image of the welferera in the politics of representational intersectionality through analyses of the reverberating effects of European colonization, Latinx-centered coalition-building, and holistic counter narratives. This article concludes that while the wombs of Latinas are politically constructed as dangerous sites that threaten the U.S. white imaginary, it is imperative to analyze the centrality of activists in creating counter-narratives that allow Latinxs to imagine themselves outside of the confines of controlling images.

Author

• Rocío R. García, University of California-Los Angeles