In Mexico eugenics grafted onto long-standing racism towards the indigenous and mestizo (mixed indigenous and Spanish) populations, as well as nineteenth-century anxieties about social and public health problems brought about by rapid urbanization and industrialization. The catastrophic population decline caused by the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), of an estimated two million people, made public health initiatives urgent. Although Mexican eugenics was largely preventive, that is, focused on improving the existing population through education and improved public health, negative measures, including forced sterilization, had strong advocates.

Eugenic ideas circulated in print from 1910, but it was in the post-revolutionary period that eugenics shaped debates and state policy. For example, the 1917 “Law of Family Relations” depicted marriage as a eugenic act and sought to prohibit marriage for people with conditions deemed dangerous to public health, such as habitual drunkenness. The country’s first major eugenics event was the 1921 Mexican Congress of the Child: delegates debated improving maternal health, immigration “whitening” policies and, by a small margin, voted for sterilization of criminals. Over the next decades, resolutions from this congress helped set the agenda for the public health revolution.

During the 1920s, puériculture, a French form of eugenics targeting women and children, oriented reforms. The Public Health Department’s School Hygiene Service built playgrounds, offered puériculture class to young women and dispatched health visitors to poor neighbourhoods to train future mothers. Puériculture so dominated eugenics that the Mexican Eugenics Society for Racial Improvement (1931-1972), emerged as an offshoot of the Mexican Puériculture Society (founded in 1929).

Eugenics and Race
Mexican eugenicists, whose ranks included public health workers, politicians, lawyers, medical professionals, members of the judiciary and criminologists, expressed contradictory views about Mexico’s ethnic diversity. Some eugenicists believed that the solution to Mexico’s low-density population and high mortality rates was to encourage European immigration, as part of a whitening strategy. Non-European immigrants were a different matter. Mexico’s Chinese population suffered xenophobic persecution in this period: in Sonora State, a 1923 law prohibited Mexican-Chinese marriages, while some cities were legally segregated. Little enforced until the Great Depression, segregation measures offered opportunities for extortion. The persecution culminated in forcible expulsion in 1931, and the Chinese population fell from 18,000 in 1930 to 5,000 in 1940. Others, however, saw promise in Mexico’s diverse population. Former minister of education, José Vasconcelos, argued in The Cosmic Race (La raza cósmica, 1925), that a “spiritual eugenics,” combining the best traits of Europeans, Africans, indigenous people and Asians, was happening in Mexico. He still assumed, however, that the European component enabled the “cosmic race’s” success. Other eugenicists actively downplayed the importance of race. By the 1940s, Alfredo Saavedra, founder of the Mexican Eugenics Society, argued that Mexico needed healthy citizens and that no human group was more genetically problematic than another: humans had to be studied holistically, including their environment, social influences and genetic inheritance. But denying a “racial” problem did not undermine eugenics: some eugenicists argued that psychopaths and the irredeemably criminal should be euthanized and “inferior” Mexicans, such as the insane, epileptics, prostitutes and those with cancer, should be sterilized.

Eugenics’ Influence in Practice
While proposals for euthanasia were never legally implemented, the Eugenics Society’s stance influenced sexual and reproductive education programs, restrictions on prostitution, public health campaigns about venereal disease and the legal stipulation of a prenuptial certificate (1935), which reiterated the restrictions of the 1917 Law of Family Relations and the 1926 Sanitary Code. Alcoholism, discussion of which was implicitly racial because of long-standing associations between indigenous people and drunkenness, remained a public health concern. Alcohol abuse was understood to cause inheritable mental illness and criminal behavior. Veracruz State was at the forefront of eugenic measures, legislating prohibition and, in 1932, passing a eugenic sterilization law, the only one in Latin America, which allowed for the sterilization of recidivist criminals and those with hereditary diseases. There is no definitive evidence, however, of its implementation.

Legacies of Eugenics
Despite the decline of racialized eugenics, eugenics adapted. In 1951, the Public Health Department founded a genetic counseling service for its employees, notwithstanding poor understanding of genetics amongst Mexican eugenicists, who continued to believe in Lamarck’s inheritance of acquired characteristics well into the 1970s. In this century, the United Nations has condemned Mexico for forced sterilizations: in Guerrero, in 2001, 14 indigenous people were sterilized without consent by the state’s health department. There have also been claims of forced sterilization of indigenous women from Hidalgo State. In 2011, a member of Mexico’s House of Representatives sought to tighten the existing legislation preventing forced sterilization, by making those who practice it liable for prison. Eugenics has also become about private choices: elite Mexicans seek out fertility treatment in the United States, which allows embryo selection for genetic traits. Thus, Mexican eugenics is not a historic relic, but rather continues to influence aspects of private choices and public health approaches.

-Patience A. Schell

• Camacho, J. M. S. (2009) Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland: The Mexican Chinese Transpacific Journey to Becoming Mexican, 1930s-1960s. Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 4: 545-577.

• Stepan, N. L. (1991) "The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

• Stern, A. M. (2011) “‘The Hour of Eugenics’ in Veracruz, Mexico: Radical Politics, Public Health, and Latin America’s Only Sterilization Law.” Hispanic American Historical Review 91(3): 431-443.