UCLA

In the early 20th century, the U.S. American landscape experienced a social and political movement that allowed pseudoscience to be implemented as law. Emblematic of this was the California Chapter 720 of the Statutes of 1909, colloquially known as the California Asexualization Act. This piece of legislation endowed the state with expansive power to institute eugenic-inspired protocols across various institutional landscapes, including schools, medical facilities, and asylums crafted to manage and control those deemed "feebleminded." The study illuminates how deeply rooted practices of control, containment, and surveillance – all derivatives of a eugenic mindset – have persistently interfered with Chicana/Latina women and girls’ access to sexual citizenship. This interdisciplinary exploration exposes the continuity of such institutional impositions in the American Southwest, with this study spotlighting Chicana/Latina experiences with eugenic violence in California between 1909 and 1979 and from 2009 to the present. Furthermore, it underscores the enduring influence of eugenic violence on sex and health education discourse in K-12 learning environments and its impact on the daily lives and experiences of Chicana/Latina girls navigating these spaces.

I use an extensive data corpus to integrate archival records from various special collections, individual and community pl�ticas, oral histories, and digital media. The objective is twofold: first, to trace and expose the echoes of eugenic violence permeating academic, familial, and religious social spaces; second, to highlight and celebrate the acts of Chicana/Latina resistance against this pseudoscientific oppression. This research is timely as the current legal landscape involving women’s reproductive agencies mirrors policy, social, and public health efforts utilized in the last century to justify the total dominance of the sexual agency of Women and Girls of Color. Moreover, this study will make a valuable contribution to educational research at the intersection of pedagogies of pleasure and desire in K-12 sex and health education discourse, histories of public health and medicine in education, and eugenics.