Dysgenic Moves: Tics, Travels, and Other Transgressions at the US–Mexico Borderlands, 1920s–30s

This paper examines how eugenic field workers, the foot soldiers of the science of better human breeding and living, navigated the scientific rifts and connections among the bodies, minds, and environments of purportedly dysgenic peoples as the United States entered a new era of medical, scientific, and technological modernity. This paper focuses on mobility as both a geospatial and kinesthetic concern. Geospatially, eugenicists deemed the constant movement of human subjects of genetic study—whether for migration, leisure, or boredom—as a sign of dysgenic or unfit biological makeup, attributing such locomotion to a lack of education and racial inferiority. Kinesthetically, eugenic field workers scrutinized individuals’ bodily movements, interpreting erratic gestures or shifts as paradoxical byproducts of excessive exposure to civilization. To regulate and contain these perceived disorders, they developed specialized technologies for mapping, tracking, and pathologizing movement while also devising behavioral interventions to either halt inmates’ reproductive abilities or to get them closer in image and comportment to the ideal of their respective racial prototype. These concerns are evident in eugenic family histories of delinquent boys from Whittier State School (WSS) in southern California during the 1910s and 1920s, where the institution’s proximity to the US-Mexico border, just 130 miles away, heightened anxieties about potential white American biological, cultural, and political degeneracy. Case studies from WSS illustrate how the nation’s eugenic fixation on behavioral control, especially locomotive restraint, extended beyond ideological concerns to the minutiae of individuals’ sensorimotor abilities.