Reproducing Choices: Navigating Latina Controlling Images in Reproductive Politics

Scholarship that documents how race, gender, class, migration, and sexuality manifest in social movements tends to focus on identity-based movements that mobilize on a single identity. However, we know less about burgeoning... [ view full abstract ]

Scholarship that documents how race, gender, class, migration, and sexuality manifest in social movements tends to focus on identity-based movements that mobilize on a single identity. However, we know less about burgeoning social movements that prioritize how the intersections of these identities maintain inequalities and state violence. Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic observations of a Latina reproductive justice organization, I argue that this organization employs intersectional policy and cultural strategies to challenge six controlling images unique to Latinas. What I term images of (1) the domestic (disposable) worker; (2) the self-sacrificing (Catholic) mother; (3) the breeder; (4) the spicy (cisgender) Latina; and (6) the Mexican Latina abound in national discourses and guide the work of intersectional reproductive justice activists as they shift mainstream discourses on reproduction outside of biological ‘choice’ to re-center reproduction around the necessary conditions for Latinas/os to achieve self-determination. The foreignization of the ‘Other’ for Latinas is an ideological process that emerges and ties these controlling images together in ways that are unique to Latina communities and carry specific policy implications. In this paper, I map the theoretical contours that make up these images and analyze how Latina activists construct nuanced policy and cultural strategies to mitigate their deleterious effects. I conclude with a discussion of the potential for a Latina reproductive justice lens to provide the theoretical foundation for a pan-ethnic Latina feminist interpretive framework.