Chicana Activism and Reproductive Care: Past, Present, and Future

Based on the Lina-Maria Murillo’s book, Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands, this lecture will center on Chicana and Mexican-origin women activists as they fought to provide care to their communities in El Paso, Texas, throughout the twentieth century. Even as they confronted population control advocates and increased reproductive health scrutiny, they came together to help their families live and thrive opening clinics and organizing residents to demand health care on their own terms. 

Images used with permission from the artist, Christin Apodaca. For more about the artist, please consult this website.

Dr. Lina-Maria Murillo is Assistant Professor in the departments of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, History, and Latina/o/x Studies at the University of Iowa. Murillo has written extensively at the intersections of race, gender, class, and reproductive justice. Her published works include Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the U.S-Mexico Borderlands (UNC Press, 2025) and “Espanta Cigüeñas: Race and Abortion in the U.S-Mexico Borderlands,” winner of 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-directors the Maternal Health and Reproductive Politics Obermann collaborative at UIowa with Professor Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz.