‘[T]he Slaughterhouse of El Paso’s Future Citizens:’ Mexican American Infant Mortality as Elimination in the Texas Borderlands, 1911-1950
Heather Sinclair, The Pennsylvania State University
This paper examines high ethnic-Mexican infant mortality in the early twentieth-century borderlands—a rate as much as 10 times that of “American” infant deaths--through a settler colonial lens to argue that it served as a strategy of elimination. It explores the contradiction between the rhetoric of “babysaving” espoused by Anglo elites in El Paso, Texas, symbolized by the Cloudcroft Baby Sanitarium, and their actual abandonment of ethnic Mexican infant life that resulted in one of the highest urban infant mortality rates in the nation.
Respondent: Natalie Lira, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Registration
This event is free, but all participants must register in advance and space is limited. Please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend.
About the Borderlands and Latino/a Studies Seminar
This seminar provides a forum for works-in-progress that explore topics in Latino/a and Borderlands studies.
The seminar’s coordinators are María Eugenia López-García (University of Illinois at Chicago), Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez (University of Illinois at Chicago), and Emiliano Aguilar (University of Notre Dame). The seminar’s co-sponsors are Indiana University’s Latino Studies Program, Northwestern University’s Program in Latina and Latino Studies, The Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, the Center for Latino Research at DePaul University, the Katz Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago Latin American and Latino Studies Program.