White Parteras: Birthing Modern Midwifery in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1976-2000

This paper examines homebirth midwifery training on the US-Mexico border during the late twentieth century.  Scholars are just beginning to craft the U.S. history of modern midwifery and homebirth movement, one to date centered on White middle-class midwives and childbearing women. To expand and reframe this history, this presentation will consider the space and bodies of the borderlands in the production of the U.S. homebirth movement.  Since the first national conference of lay midwives, held in El Paso, Texas in 1977, hundreds of aspiring midwives from throughout North America have traveled to the border city to train in clinics where they can attend a large number and variety of births in a short amount of time.  Students who train on the border have been predominantly Anglo, while the women and infants on whose bodies they learn are ethnic Mexican.  Graduates have gone on to become leaders of the national movement in the U.S. to professionalize and expand midwifery and to produce authoritative “scientific” knowledge on homebirth and midwifery care.   This paper centers race in the examination of the border as a birthplace of modern midwifery and homebirth training.  This topic will be linked to the near elimination of ethnic Mexican midwives in the region and the current development of El Paso as a coveted site for medical training and research.