AHA Session 83
Conference on Latin American History 14
Conference on Latin American History 14
Friday, January 7, 2022: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Rhythms Ballroom 3 (Sheraton New Orleans, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Hanni Jalil, California State University, Channel Islands
Papers:
Comment:
Natalie Kimball, College of Staten Island, City University of New York
Session Abstract
From midwifery in early twentieth-century rural New Mexico and the ways it challenged Anglo racial homogenization and the rejection of folk medical practices, to the formation of The Free School of Obstetrics and Nursing (1920-1936) in Mexico City which gave midwifery students greater autonomy and independence in their training and challenged the authority of the revolutionary state in Mexico, to the rise of puericulture and the politicization of motherhood and child-rearing practices in mid twentieth-century Colombia, this panel explores the ways that gender, motherhood, midwifery, medicine (both western and folk) and public health campaigns informed processes of state formation across the Americas. Focusing on how medical doctors, midwives, mothers, public health officials, legislators, and communities debated their role and participation in transforming individual bodies and the body politic, the three papers offer examples of the lack of homogeneity in the process of nation-building where old and new understandings of the human body, medical intervention, the public and domestic sphere, the roles of women and men in these spheres, the importance of rural and metropolitan regions, the reach of government programs, and the role of the state in shaping national identity were framed, advanced, and contested. Acknowledging both commonalities and differences in the different regional and national contexts, this panel centers the role of women in reproducing the nation. Women embodied and performed these nation-building processes through reproduction at multiple levels. Physically, as objects of medical knowledge, subjects of medical intervention, and protectors of female bodies; intellectually, as recipients and communicators of new medical and sanitary knowledge; socially, as guardians of tradition and agents of change; legally, as targets and proponents of reforms; and morally, as guardians responsible for turning children into citizens. With examples from across the Americas, this panel examines the historical continuities and regional differences of the reproductive knowledge and practices that shaped national Latin American identities at home and abroad. This panel will appeal to scholars interested in the history of women, reproduction, public health, nationalism, and citizenship in Latin America, Mexican American communities in the US, Colombia, and Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century.
See more of: AHA Sessions