Reproduction on the Border: Oral History and Women on the Margins

Oral history is crucial in attempts to reimagine and complicate the history of women’s reproductive health.  Too often those on the margins of society—women of color and poor women—are doubly marginalized in history due to the dearth of sources documenting their stories. This paper discusses the use of oral histories in the study of women’s reproductive health and rights along the U.S.-Mexico border, specifically in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, during the twentieth century. The voice of a Mexican nurse-midwife in Ciudad Juárez describing her work at an abortion clinic along the border in 1950s Mexico, and the ex-director of El Paso’s Planned Parenthood, a working class white woman from the Midwest, who left just two years before the organization permanently shuttered its doors in 2009, unveil the ways women on the edges of nation-states confronted, rebelled against, and reconciled with state forces as they sought to control their reproductive capacities throughout the last century.  In similar cases, Chicana activists in 1970s El Paso recall working in the barrio and fighting for a more inclusive and autonomous reproductive rights movement, and a San Francisco-based abortion activist’s recollection of her work with Mexican doctors in Juárez as they funneled hundreds of women into the city for illegal abortions in the 1960s. At times contesting the written record, these captivating narratives reveal new pathways to a more inclusive and diverse reproductive health history by focusing on communities in the borderlands and women on the margins of the nation.