Between the Law and the Birthing Room: Medical Legislation and Midwife Certification in New Mexico, 1880–1940

The historiographical narrative of medical professionalization in the United States is one of dominance and control. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, western medicine replaced folk medicine, while licensed physicians became the ideal healthcare provider over traditional healers and midwives. However, this transition relied upon Anglo racial homogenization and infrastructural development that regions within the United States could not always replicate. Most notably, New Mexico did not experience the same pattern of medical professionalization, as rural Mexican American communities in the state found western medicine inaccessible and unaffordable. Women, in particular, continued to rely on traditional Mexican American midwives (parteras), resisting the transition of the birthing room from the home to the hospital. Parteras maintained the practice over the course of the twentieth century, occupying a liminal space between medical authority, legality, cultural practice, and reproductive autonomy. From the state’s initial development of medical legislation and regulation, legislators included exceptions and provisions that allowed parteras to continue their work, creating spaces within medicine and the law to certify and authorize parteras. Even while New Mexican government representatives strove to present the state as modern and American, they could not directly follow the traditional model of professionalization that barred midwives from the birthing room because of infrastructural limitations and cultural preference toward curanderismo. My paper will examine this provision, as parteras adapted to and navigated shifts in medical legislation. In so doing, it will address how the law and public health measures developed in response to and in consideration of parteras and the women who relied on their services. To do so, it will pinpoint and examine individual parteras as they encountered legislation that simultaneously sought to certify and phase out the healers and their practice.