Eugenetics in Latinamerica

Eugenics in Latin America
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American

History
Alexandra Minna Stern
Subject: Cultural History, Social History, Science, Technology, and Health
Online Publication Date: Dec 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.315
Summary and Keywords
Eugenics emerged in Latin America in the early 20th century on the intellectual
foundations of 19th-century social Darwinism and positivism, and expanded in contexts
influenced by Catholicism, nationalism, and transnational scientific exchange. Although
the extent and objectives of eugenic policies, practices, and organizations varied across
the region, Latin American eugenicists tended to subscribe to neo-Lamarckian principles
of environmental modification, foreground puericulture or infant and maternal care, and
support new techniques of human measurement associated with biotypology. Overall,
eugenics in Latin America was less extreme than in Anglo and Nordic countries, rarely
resulting in sanctioned policies of compulsory sterilization or euthanasia. It was an
integral component of programs designed to combat infectious ailments, especially
sexually transmitted diseases, and to ameliorate national health indicators. This overlap
meant that eugenics sometimes was less visible as a stand-alone movement, and that its
tenets were absorbed with little friction into public health and social welfare
infrastructures and campaigns. At the same time, eugenic racism was expressed in calls
for immigration restriction that reverberated across Latin America, most notably in the
1910s and 1920s. In retrospect, eugenics in Latin America contributed both to
exclusionary policies that stigmatized certain social groups and to overarching campaigns
for health and wellness that were backed by a diverse political spectrum that could
include feminists, Socialists, and military leaders.
Keywords: eugenics, public health, nationalism, puericulture, immigration, race, gender, reproduction,
sterilization
The Emergence of Eugenics
Page 1 of 22
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

(latinamericanhistory.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only;
commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
date: 07 June 2018

Sir Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883, combining the Greek eu (good or
well) with the root of genesis (to come into being, be born) and adding a suffix. Over time,
Galton fine-tuned his definition, and in 1909 described eugenics as a science that “deals
with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race, also with those that
develop them to the utmost advantage.”1 Galton formulated eugenics as an
interventionist science that would encourage breeding among society’s putatively
superior classes and discourage procreation among those classified as inferior. However,
he provided few details about actionable policies or legislation.
By the early 20th century, as processes of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration

intensified around the globe, many social reformers became enamored of eugenics and
began to apply ideas of heredity and biological improvement to their own cultural milieus.
Advancing work in statistics and biometrics, the 1900 “rediscovery” of Mendel’s pea plant
experiments and the solidification of classical genetics contributed to the growth of
eugenics movements.2 In Latin America, these forces played a critical role in stimulating
interest in eugenics. Yet the intellectual and scientific bedrock laid down in previous
decades by both European scientific influences and what one scholar has called “creole
science” set the stage for the extension of eugenics into the arenas of medicine, public
health, law, and the social sciences.3 By the 1910s, professional societies devoted to
eugenics began to appear throughout Latin America, and public health departments and
initiatives increasingly bore a eugenic stamp. Subsequent decades saw the
implementation of an array of laws and practices shaped by hereditarian ideas of racial
and reproductive fitness. Into the 1950s, eugenics was a critical facet of social hygiene
and welfare throughout Latin America; many of its legacies are palpable today even as its
signature features of racial bias and reproductive control often are viewed as
undemocratic and antithetical to human rights.
Page 2 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

Race, Nation, and Mestizaje

Initially, eugenic ideas were most evident in debates about race and nationalism, as elites
across Latin America considered possible pathways toward modernization and the
coveted goal of “progress.” Latin American elites often found themselves in the
paradoxical position of employing the tools of imperial science, which were saturated
with assumptions of racial purity and racial hierarchies, to imagine how their mixed-race
societies could become modernized and biologically robust. Approaches to this dilemma
differed from country to country. Some intellectuals placed their hopes on the hybrid
vigor of the mestizo/mestiço, while others remained wedded to an implicit or explicit
privileging of whiteness.
This variation is illustrated by comparing how Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile
tackled the racial question at the outset of the 20th century. In Mexico, during the reign
of Porfírio Díaz (1876–1910) a cadre of intellectuals known as científicos drew from
Comtean positivism and social Darwinism to anxiously envision a Europeanized society
that would trend toward whiteness in phenotype and culture. From the perspective of
most científicos, people with indigenous, African, or Asian ancestry were roadblocks to
progress that either should be excluded or wholly absorbed into a whitening body politic.4
In the early 20th century, this rendition was challenged by a generation of revolutionary
literati such Andrés Molina Enríquez, whose 1909 book Los grandes problemas
nacionales rejected the veneration of whiteness and instead elevated the mestizo as the
superlative type that would lead Mexico stalwartly forward. José Vasconcelos popularized
this viewpoint as part of post-revolutionary doctrine in the 1920s with the publication of
his well-known book La Raza Cósmica.5 In fin-de-siècle Brazil, these countervailing
positions vied for intellectual dominance, as thinkers such as Sílvio Romero, Raimundo
Nina Rodrigues, and Euclides da Cunha fretted about the implications of miscegenation
and its impact on Brazil’s prospects for entering the pantheon of civilized nations. While
Romero was sanguine about the future of the resilient Brazilian mestiço, da Cunha was
more skeptical about the ability of the more isolated backlanders (or sertanejos) to fully
acculturate into modernizing Brazilian culture.6 These dueling positions continued to
characterize Brazilian eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s, as it oscillated from championing
racial democracy to excoriating certain nationalities and ethnic groups.7
In Chile, many prominent intellectuals regarded European immigration as the catalyst for
demographic betterment. However, the ideas of scientists such as Nicólas Palacios
provided an increasingly attractive counterpoint. Palacios, a physician, was buoyant
about his country’s mixed-race future, providing a detailed profile of the virtues of la raza
chilena, an amalgam that combined European ancestry with the regal stock of the
Mapuche Indians.8 In Argentina, where indigenous- and African-ancestry populations
comparatively were much smaller, whiteness and modernization remained largely
inseparable. Leaders formulated policies that heavily promoted immigration from certain
countries in Europe, with a preference for Anglo and Nordic nations, and over the
Page 3 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

decades sought to restrict arrivals from southern Europe and Asia, with pronounced
animus toward Jews and Chinese.9 Whatever tact they took toward the questions of race,
nation, and mestizaje, leading intellectuals across Latin America applied the frameworks
of evolutionary, and increasingly eugenic, theories to imagine pathways of societal
improvement.
There were two overarching trends at play in the period from the 1870s to the 1930s. On
one hand, Latin American countries enacted immigration restrictions against blacks,
Jews, Southern Europeans, Asians, and those deemed dysgenic and/or diseased.10
Sometimes these were issued as outright bans, as with Brazil’s 1937 visa exclusions of
persons of “Semitic origin,” and sometimes as confidential circulars, as was the case with
Mexico’s 1926 bans on gypsies and persons who constituted “a danger of physical
degeneration for our race.”11 However, in nations that bemoaned dropping fertility rates
and evinced a dire need to increase the population in terms of “quality and quantity,”
limiting entrants was a tricky strategy met with equal amounts of accord, ambivalence,
and opposition. Depending on the time and region, Latin America eugenicists were as
likely to embrace a pronatalism predicated not on the influx of desirables from afar but
on greater propagation of superiors from within. Especially after the 1920s, there was
growing acceptance that mixed-raced populations had great eugenic potential. How to
extract the eugenic diamond from the hereditary rough was one of the most pressing
questions for many Latin American eugenicists, who chose distinct practices and policies
to address this formidable challenge.
Page 4 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

Contours and Influences

Although eugenics had heterogeneous proponents in Latin America, including lawyers,
educators, social scientists, and life scientists, the majority were health professionals,
most commonly physicians with an awareness of the interplay between health and society.
Whatever their political persuasion, these physicians tended to view social problems
through a hereditarian lens, concerned that transmissible “racial poisons” would defile
coming generations. Given long-standing French influences in science and medicine, the
pervasive albeit uneven reach of Catholicism, and a tradition of faith-based eleemosynary
organizations, emergent eugenicists were primed to adapt the scientific theories of Jean
Baptiste Lamarck, which posited that inherited traits could be acquired. In the same way
that the giraffe’s neck grew longer as it stretched to reach the leaves of acacia trees,
biological organisms could be modified, for better or worse, by their surroundings.
Lamarckism held sway in the Americas and parts of Europe, and served as a foundational
pillar for the making of what scholars refer to as “Latin eugenics.”12
As Nancy Leys Stepan showed in her path-breaking The Hour of Eugenics, and scholars
have continued to demonstrate, although Lamarckian eugenics might have been “softer”
when compared to its Mendelian cousin, it could still undergird immigration and
marriage restrictions.13 Stepan introduced the term preventive eugenics to describe the
Latin American variant of eugenics, and this rubric has proven analytically resilient ever
since. Preventive eugenics supported interdictions and prohibitions. Its Lamarckian logic,
however, offered good reason for optimism: if the environment could be made more
salubrious, then even downtrodden populations could be improved through efforts to
stamp out degenerating diseases, enhance the health of mothers and infants, and
encourage good nutrition and physical fitness.14
By the mid-20th century, the Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired

characteristics had been refuted, and supplanted by Mendelism, which sustained that
hereditary traits were transmitted across generations with no possibility of environmental
alteration. Today, Lamarckism is viewed as an inaccurate theory of adaption and
evolution, even though epigenetics clearly shows that genes can be affected by
exogenous inputs such as radiation, carcinogens, or the nutritional status of the
intrauterine environment. Nevertheless, the triumph of Mendelism was not a
straightforward process. Even in the Anglo and Nordic countries where it found greater
purchase, Mendelism unfolded alongside gentler approaches to heredity such as
euthenics and constitutional medicine. Both strains of eugenics—Lamarckian and
Mendelian—banked on technoscientific solutions to fix perceived social problems, yet
they bifurcated when it came to the elimination of adverse genes through systematic
state-sanctioned programs such as sterilization or euthanasia. To date, there is no
evidence that “mercy killings” of so-called defectives (infants or adults) occurred in Latin
Page 5 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

America, and an autochthonous sterilization policy became law solely in one place,
Mexico’s eastern state of Veracruz.
Despite the ascendancy of Lamarckism, Latin America was not devoid of Mendelian ideas.
At various points in the first half of the 20th century, eugenicists in Cuba, Brazil, and
Mexico invoked Mendelian theories of unchangeable heredity, often wielding them to
endorse immigration restriction and surgical sterilization, and, on rare occasion, selective
euthanasia. For example, in his 1929 Licoęs de Eugenia, Brazilian Renato Kehl denounced
racial intermixing and proposed anti-miscegenation marriage laws as well as the
“sterilization of degenerates and criminals,” a strategy he agreed was “radical” but “often
necessary.”15 This kind of rhetoric was spoken by a minority of Latin American
eugenicists, at times adding a harder discursive edge to proposed measures and at other
times serving as a foil for the articulation of policies more in keeping with Lamarckian
approaches.
The Cuban eugenicist

Domingo Ramos (Figure 1)
was the foremost example
of the Mendelian
orientation in Latin
America. Ramos
maintained a close
relationship with U.S.
eugenicists, above all
Charles Davenport, who
directed the Eugenic
Records Office in Cold
Spring Harbor, New York.
Ramos attempted to
transplant U.S. eugenics to
Click to view larger
Cuba and Latin America.16
Figure 1. Portrait of D.F. Ramos.
He headquartered his
Source: Eusebio Hernández y Pérez and Domingo F.
Ramos, Homicultura (Habana, 1911). efforts at the Pan
American Central Office of
Eugenics and Homiculture, which he founded under the auspices of the Pan American
League in the 1920s. This organization convened its inaugural meeting in Havana in
1927, attracting representatives from fifteen countries. At this point, Argentina and Brazil
had active eugenics organizations, whereas efforts in Guatemala and Bolivia were limited
to infusing hereditarian ideas into public health and welfare programs.17 Ramos
presented the “Code of Eugenics and Homiculture,” which he had drafted with Davenport
and which came as close to replicating U.S. eugenic priorities as any proposal that
circulated among Latin American eugenicists. This wish list, replete with policies
associated with negative eugenics, was debated intensely. Ultimately, the majority of
Latin American eugenicists rejected its recommendations, bristling at the theories of
white superiority that underlay calls for immigration quotas and balking at the scientific
Page 6 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

rationales for compulsory sterilization. This debate reoccurred at the Second Pan
American Conference of Eugenics and Homiculture, held in Buenos Aires in 1934, where
a similar proposal met even harsher resistance.
Eugenic Organizations and Networks

There was sparse Latin American participation at the three major international eugenics
conferences that occurred in 1912 (London) and New York (1921 and 1932). Mexico sent
delegates to the first and second meetings, but only Ramos, Davenport’s acolyte,
attended all three. To a great extent, this reflected the ideological divergence between
U.S. and West European eugenicists and their Latin American counterparts. To carve out
their own national programs and build a transnational network, Latin Americans
participated in a range of eugenic organizations—some of which proudly carried the term
eugenics in their names, others that pursued eugenic objectives in their work, and others
whose interests were distinct but overlapped with hereditarianism. The 1910s saw the
establishment of several organizations representative of the first two categories,
including the National Homiculture League in Cuba (1913), the Argentine Eugenics
Committee (1914), the Argentine Eugenics Society (1918), and the short-lived São Paulo
Eugenics Society (1918). Organizational activity continued in the 1920s with the
establishment of the Argentina League of Social Prophylaxis (1921), the Brazilian Mental
Hygiene League (1923), the National League of Hygiene and Social Prophylaxis in Peru
(1923), and the Mexican Puericulture Society (1929). A subsequent wave of groups
appeared in the 1930s with the founding of the Mexican Eugenics Society for the
Betterment of the Race (1931), the Brazilian Central Commission of Eugenics (1931), and
the Argentine Association of Biotypology, Eugenics and Social Medicine (1932). During
the 1940s this pattern came to a close with the founding of the School of Integral
Eugenics and Humanism in Argentina’s Population Institute (1943) and the wartime
resurrection of the Argentine Eugenics Society (1945). There was a much longer list of
organizations with eugenic interests in the fields of mental hygiene, children’s health,
reproductive health, and criminology, just to name a few. Reflecting the sexism of the
professional world, most eugenicists were men. Nonetheless, several women held
leadership positions. In Mexico, the psychiatrist Matilde Rodríguez Cabo ran the Child
Psychology Department at the National Asylum in Mexico and was very active in the
Mexican Eugenics Society. In Peru, Irene Silva de Santolalla, a Catholic mother, wife, and
homemaker who penned advice books for women about “well-constituted families,”
promoted puericulture through education, served as vice-president of the National
League for Hygiene and Social Prophylaxis, and received international accolades for her
eugenic endeavors.18 Many more women fostered and sustained eugenics as nurses,
teachers, and civic volunteers.
Page 7 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

In addition to these nationalist groups, there were Pan-American and Latin eugenics
organizations founded in the 1920s that served as networks of expertise and scientific
exchange. At the forefront of this list were the Pan American Congresses on Eugenics and
Homiculture, held in Havana (1927), Buenos Aires (1934), and Bogotá (1938), although
this final gathering near the eve of World War II appears to have been quite subdued. On
the global scale, the Latin Federation of Eugenics Organizations reached beyond Latin
America to include organizations that scoffed at Anglo-Saxon or Nordic approaches to
eugenics. Established in 1935, this federation counted representatives from Argentina,
Belgium, Brazil, Catalonia, France, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Romania, and
Romandie.19 In 1937, it held its sole meeting in Paris. This international body adhered to
a self-proclaimed “Latin” eugenics, but this did not make its perspective monolithic.
There were considerable, sometimes acrimonious differences around the issues of
reproduction, sexuality, and immigration. What member countries shared were deep-
rooted traditions of Catholicism and stronger or looser attachments to Lamarckian
theories of heredity.
In addition to organizations and conferences, there were many vocal advocates of

eugenics who held positions of authority in politics, medicine, or law. For example, in
Peru, renowned professor of hygiene and Lima congressman Carlos Enrique Paz Soldán
lobbied for and then served as director of the Board for the Defense of Children, and later
of the National Child Institute, both of which were epicenters of puericulture work.20
Trained as a physician, Paz Soldán effectively translated eugenics into medical clinics and
public health programs.21 Paz Soldán was instrumental in the convening of two important
conferences on eugenics in Peru in 1939 and 1943, the second of which, even in the midst
of World War II, drew physicians and reformers from a dozen countries.22 He championed
puericulture and the biological vigor of mestizo populations, and his resounding
endorsement helped to cohere these as core principles of Latin America eugenics.23
Page 8 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

Puericulture
Concerns about racial mixture and social degeneration often compelled Latin American
physicians to turn their attention to reproduction, childhood, and motherhood—that
nexus where future generations are born and nurtured. Eugenicists hoped to intervene in
this intimate domain by encouraging scientific standards and norms of care, and
promoting practices that diminished the likelihood that debilitating conditions and
behaviors would be perpetuated across generations. Known as puericulture, this
approach was one of the hallmarks of Latin eugenics and was embraced by Latin
American eugenicists across the scientific and ideological gambit.
The French physician Alfred Caron coined the term puericulture in the 1850s, and several
decades later doctor Adolphe Pinard popularized and infused it with a hereditarian
slant.24 Soon it traveled across the Atlantic via scientific networks, gaining a deep
foothold in Latin America. Indeed, eugenics (eugenesia in Spanish and eugenia in
Portuguese) and puericulture (puericultura) regularly appeared as twinned terms and
acted in mutually reinforcing ways. For example, the Mexican Puericulture Society (1929)
served as the springboard, in terms of ideas and personnel, for the formation of the
Mexican Eugenics Society (1931). In Cuba, Ramos and his colleague Eusebio Hernández
Pérez used puericulture as the template for homiculture, which they debuted in a 1911
publication. A uniquely Latin American manifestation of eugenics, homiculture is defined
as a science that linked “human fitness to a nation’s capacity for peace, order, and
prosperity.”25 Two years later Ramos and Pérez established the Homiculture League—
Cuba’s primary eugenics organization.
Puericulture melded nationalism with a focus on childhood and reproduction that often
fixated on the bodies of women. To a great extent, this worked to reinforce medicalized
and patriarchal norms about feminized bodies and roles: women were expected to be
breeders for and mothers of the nation. However, feminists also could commandeer the
tenets of puericulture to assert their moral and embodied authority as mothers and
reproducers. This dynamic was on stage at the Feminist Congresses in Yucatán, Mexico,
in 1916 and 1917, when eugenic themes of human improvement merged with feminist
calls for greater reproductive freedom.26 Puericulture could support softer and harder
eugenic policies and practices. It animated the healthy children (niños sanos) contests
that were held in cities and towns throughout Latin America and the Caribbean in the
early 20th century and provided a rationale for milk stations and pediatric nutrition.27
The scientific norms of puericulture also were evident in the concerted roll-out of mental
testing in schools throughout Latin America as educators sought to measure cognitive
aptitude among the youngest generations. In Latin America and across the globe, these
psychometric instruments usually reinforced racial and class inequalities, generating
results that classified poorer and darker-skinned children as inherently less intelligent
than their wealthier and fairer counterparts.28 Efforts to quantify children mentally and
physically were in vogue in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s, and coalesced
Page 9 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

regionally into a series of Pan American Child Congresses (launched in 1916), the related
establishment of the International Institute for the Protection of Childhood in Montevideo
(1927), and the passage of Uruguay’s emblematic Children’s Sanitary Code (1933). 29
Throughout Latin America, the emphasis on puericulture was directly tied to pronatalism
and panic over the need to populate both urban areas and vast expanses of land with the
right kind of human stock. In Argentina, Arturo Rossi was one of many eugenicists who
was deeply concerned about dropping fertility rates, which were most pronounced in
Buenos Aires. According to Rossi, urbanization was taking a dysgenic toll on middle-class
and working-class Argentine women, who were not procreating at acceptable rates. Thus,
the burden of eugenic pronatalism was placed on women, who were pressured to
reproduce and expected to birth vigorous children.30 On the flip side, noncompliant
women could fall under intense scrutiny. Once identified as threats to the nation, such
women required regulation, containment, and rehabilitation. Whether taking a
prescriptive or proscriptive approach, puericulture strove to make women responsible
citizens, and children healthy and normal subjects for the nation. These eugenic
objectives stimulated the formation of Venezuela’s National Puericulture Service (1936)
and the creation of visiting-nurses programs that incorporated puericulture into
curriculum and demonstrations. Visiting nurses traversed the cities, hamlets, and remote
countryside of Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela spreading the eugenic
gospel of puericulture and scientific motherhoood.31
Preventive Eugenics
Rather than viewing eugenics as either positive or negative, Nancy Leys Stepan proposed
preventive eugenics as a framework to contextualize policies and practices implemented
in Latin America. In her words, preventive eugenics strove to advance “the nation by
cleansing from the milieu those factors considered to be damaging to people’s hereditary
health.”32 Preventive eugenics resonated with Lamarckian approaches and did not draw
stark boundaries between nature and nurture in terms of public health interventions.
Following Lamarckian theories, Latin American eugenicists understood many diseases
whose etiologies were microbial, such as tuberculosis or syphilis, and complex behavioral
conditions, such as alcoholism, as hereditary. Across Latin America, eugenicists and
public health workers referred to these hereditary threats as “racial poisons” and
dedicated a great deal of time to crafting crusades to extirpate them (a 1942 Mexican
campaign against “racial the poison” of tuberculosis in shown in Figure 2). The vice-
president of the São Paulo Eugenics Society aptly encapsulated this vision when he
proclaimed boldly that “to sanitize is to eugenize,” underscoring that hygiene and public
health were the motors of hereditary betterment.33 This approach extended to mental
hygiene as well. For example, in Bolivia, eugenically minded physicians were particularly
Page 10 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

concerned about the hereditability of psychiatric conditions and designed strategies to

control them.34
Preventive eugenics
targeted both single and
married women and men,
especially those suspected
of carrying “racial
poisons” that might
endanger the biological
integrity of the nation. The
National League of
Hygiene and Social
Click to view larger Prophylaxis (1923) was
Figure 2. Depicted is an anti-tuberculosis campaign formed in Peru when a
that represented one prong of Mexico’s neo-
Lamarckian eugenics movement. group of university
Source: Jose Alvarez Amezquita, Miguel E.
physicians and female
Bustamente, Antonio Lopez Picazos, and Francisco activists joined forces with
Fernandez del Castillo, Historia de la Salubridad y de the Red Cross to
la Asistencia en Mexico, Tomo II (Mexico, D.F.:
Secretaria de Salubridad y Asistencia, 1960). systematically confront the
“deadly trinity” of
35
alcoholism, syphilis, and tuberculosis. In Cuba, in the 1940s, prominent physician José
Chelala Aguilera took to the radio and popular press to instruct newlyweds on strategies
to achieve marital compatibility and sexual and reproductive fitness, with the end goal of
producing vigorous offspring.36
Across Latin America, women viewed as sexual transgressors were targeted by national
and local legislation that sought to regulate prostitution and medically monitor and treat
venereal diseases. However, men were not left out of this equation. Notably, in the 1920s
and 1930s, eugenicists focused on men as vectors of degenerating diseases that
demanded detection and surveillance. Errant men poised to spread “racial poisons” into
the next generations captured the campaigns of Peru’s National League of Hygiene and
Social Prophylaxis. Similarly, in Argentina, the passage of the 1936 anti-venereal law
expanded on existing regulations of women’s bodies to target working-class men, whose
inebriated debauchery and loose sexuality ostensibly were undermining national well-
being.37
Prenuptial certificates were another important manifestation of preventive eugenics in

Latin America. These documents required that intended couples submit to medical
examinations to determine if either one was suffering from sexually transmitted diseases
such as syphilis or gonorrhea or from ailments such as tuberculosis. By the early 1930s,
four Latin American countries (Brazil, Mexico [Coahuila state], Panama, and Peru) had
approved mandatory prenuptial exams, and seven had laws on the books that invalidated
marriages if one of the spouses was diagnosed with a transmissible disease (Bolivia,
Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Peru).38 During the 1920s and 1930s,
Page 11 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

Argentine eugenicists devoted a great deal of energy to instituting prenuptial medical

certificates, which they folded into the passage of the 1936 anti-venereal prophylaxis law,
and managed through the National Institute for the Prophylaxis of Venereal Diseases.39
Preoccupations with venereal diseases (VD) were the stepping stones to the passage of
Latin America’s only home-grown sterilization law—in the Mexican state of Veracruz,
enacted in 1932 by governor Adalberto Tejeda, an outspoken anticlerical Socialist. This
law represented the culmination of a string of legislation that sought to criminalize
“public women” and tamp down on VD, especially in the cities of Xalapa and Veracuz.
Sterilization was seen as a natural extension of sexual and reproductive control that
would cleanse the populace of deadly diseases and their noxious affects. Tejeda
established a Section of Eugenics and Hygiene to administer the sterilization law,
although existing historical records indicate that few if any operations occurred under its
purview.40
The one region were sterilization was instituted as large scale policy was Puerto Rico,
claimed as a U.S. colony in the 1898 Spanish-American War, and by the early 20th
century, a site that produced worries about over-population among U.S. imperialists. In
the first few decades of the century, an uneasy alliance existed among eugenicists with
strong U.S. ties and Puerto Rican feminists who sought to increase access to birth
control.41 If in the 1930s most Latin American eugenicists rejected sterilization, the
strong hand of the United States in Puerto Rico pushed the island in the opposite
direction. In 1937, birth control was legalized and a sterilization law was passed that
permitted involuntary procedures. By the 1970s, approximately one-third of women had
undergone tubal ligations. Puerto Rico’s strikingly high sterilization rate reflected the
successful implementation of a neo-eugenic program of population control on the island
and among Puerto Rican communities in New York City. Nevertheless, this story of top-
down reproductive dominance is complicated by survey research that suggests that many
Puerto Rican women reported satisfaction with their tubal ligations.42 Rather than negate
the eugenic aspects of Puerto Rico’s extensive sterilization regime, these findings reveal
the complex relationship between choice and coercion when women with limited
resources have access to permanent birth control.
Page 12 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

Biotypology
In order to improve society, eugenicists needed to determine who was fit and unfit,
healthy and unhealthy, prepared to progress and doomed toward evolutionary regression.
To compile this scorecard, eugenicists around the globe were at the forefront of
developing new modalities of classifying and labeling. In Latin America, this enterprise
was inextricably linked to biotypology, which rejected discrete racial categories—strongly
associated with doctrines of white superiority—and instead sought to classify human
types based on a multiplicity of human capacities. This approach allowed Latin American
eugenicists to pursue the dream of the biological betterment of mixed-race populations
through the application of ostensibly more neutral scientific methods. Although a handful
of well-placed researchers in the United States conducted biotypological studies, usually
under the umbrella of constitutional medicine, biotypology had broad and magnetic
appeal in countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. If French
influence was evident in the popularity of puericulture, then biotypology demonstrated
the far-reaching impact of Italian science and medicine in Latin America during the mid-
century.
Starting in the 1930s, Latin American eugenicists embarked on major projects to measure
and classify urbanites, rural dwellers, and indigenous groups, among others,
incorporating the biotypological schemes developed by their Italian colleagues.43 In their
hunt for universal types, biotypologists employed myriad devices, such as spirometers,
stethoscopes, Rorschach inkblots, blood -sampling kits, ergographs, dream analysis, and
personality and temperament tests. They often began their investigations by gauging
physiological and anthropometric indicators such as chest-limb ratio, thyroid metabolism,
head shape, pulse, and ergonomic response. Through the utilization of laboratory and
medical instruments and statistical methods, and an allegiance to more expansive
theories of human biology, biotypologists mapped human differentiation on distributional
continuums. Many biotypological categories circulated in the mid-century; however, some
of most common were ectomorph/endomorph/mesomorph, introvert/extrovert, and
hyperkinetic/hypokinetic, terms still popular today.
Argentine eugenicists were perhaps the most taken with biotypology, which was
showcased in the name of that country’s premier eugenics organization and its scholarly
journal. Indeed, it was at the Italian Hospital in Buenos Aires in the 1930s that a cadre of
physicians connected to the Italian Argentine Institute solidified not only the activities of
the Argentina Association for Biotypology, Eugenics and Social Medicine but also a
polytechnic school and allied academic facilities. Argentine eugenicists incorporated the
typologies of Nicola Pende and Corrado Gini, with their visible fascist overtones, into
their mission to identify ideal biotypes.44
Page 13 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

Biotypology never acquired such institutional standing in Brazil, but nonetheless was
employed enthusiastically by an array of social scientists and physicians who relied on the
frameworks of Pende, as well as Giacinto Viola and Mario Barbàra (see Figure 3).
Biotypology was central to the anthropological search to identify the quintessential
Brazilian “normotype” or normal man, the subject of dozens of specialized books and
manuals, and secured a solid foothold in Rio de Janeiro’s School of Medicine. Biotypology
also influenced Brazilian clinical medicine, particularly cardiology, as physicians sought
to correlate specific biotypes with particular diseases.45 An analogous pattern was at play
in Argentina, where biotypology left a profound mark on the field on endocrinology.
Physicians interested in hormonal etiologies explored the conditions that ostensibly made
some women superior breeders for the nation. Looking closely at clinic records, one
historian has found that during the 1930s, biotypology and endocrinology converged in
some clinical settings to offer a scientific rationale for extralegal sterilizations of women
who were labeled dysgenic and unlikely to produce robust children.46
Mexican biotypologists
followed along a similar
vein, enamored of Viola’s
biotypes, whose tripartite
model consisted of short
types, long types, and
normal types.47 In
addition, Gini, an Italian
statistician who wanted to
apply demographic tools to
Click to view larger encourage pronatalism,
Figure 3. “The Biotypes of Giacinto Viola.” fomented biotypological
Source: Waldemar Berardinelli, Tratado de
efforts in Mexico. In the
biotipologia e patalogia consitucional (Francisco 1930s, Gini spent a good
Alves: Rio de Janeiro, 1942). deal of time in Mexico
training scientists, who
then fanned out to realize studies in Oaxaca, Guerrero, Jalisco, and Michoacán.48
Although biotypologists proclaimed that their tools were free of racism, when these
techniques were employed to differentiate between indigenous groups, some groups were
inevitably deemed more assimilable and civilizable than others, most notably the Otomís,
who were categorized as deficient short types. These findings, in turn, were incorporated
into plans for demographic growth and change, demonstrating that biotypology produced
its own set of hierarchies inflected by race and class.49
Legacies
Page 14 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

Although the explicitly racist statements of past eugenicists would not be acceptable
today, there are many aspects of eugenics that have left visible marks on Latin America’s
political, social, and health landscapes. Most notably, there remains a strong tradition of
puericulture in most Latin American countries. Indeed, the term still is regularly used to
describe pre- and post-conceptive childcare in popular and medical language. In addition,
the quest to identify a biologically coherent mestizo, which captivated Mexican
intellectuals such as Enríquez and Vasconcelos in the early 20th century, has been at the
forefront of the development of genomics of Mexico, most notably with the founding of
Mexico’s National Institute of Genomic Medicine, which launched the Mexican Genome
Diversity Project to identify the mestizo genome in the 2000s.50 While the upshot of this
search need not be eugenic, the roots of this typology can be traced back to the heady
days when race, nation, and mestizaje captivated scientists and intellectuals. Biometric
systems, with strong affinities to biotypology, also have proven resilient. Argentina began
its long love affair with biometrics in the early 1900s, and it continued unabated during
the extended eugenics era (1910s–1950s) and the military dictatorship (1976–1983) with
its obsession with identification cards (fichas) to track dissidents. More recently, during
her presidency, Cristina Kirchner spearheaded a major initiative to apply biometric
fingerprinting to all citizens, creating a database that could be cross-referenced with
other institutional and medical records, thus assembling the kind of biotypological
registry that would have been lauded by the eugenicists of yesteryear.51
Nevertheless, Argentina also has been home to one of the most poignant uses of genetics
in the pursuit of social justice. During the dictatorship, the military seized the young
children of “subversives” and placed them surreptitiously in upright, conservative
families (in their words, familias bien constituidas). This reconditioning strategy was
transferred directly from the playbook of Francoist Spain, where, ironically, Lamarckian
eugenics was invoked to justify the appropriation of the children of Republicans and their
resettlement in “proper” Christian homes. By the early 1980s, these children could
reclaim their biological families by using newly developed genetic tests (first
mitochondrial DNA and later autosomal DNA tests) that confirmed the degree of genetic
relatedness among separated grandparents, grandchildren, and more distant relatives.52
To date, this technique, which stands at the crux of the human rights work of the
Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, has helped reunite 120 grandchildren (of an
estimated 500) with their grandparents and extended kin. Similar uses of DNA testing are
underway in Brazil to reunite and offer reparations to families in the case of children who
were taken from parents interned in leper colonies in the mid-20th century based a logic
of eugenic quarantine.53 In Peru, female indigenous leaders await similar justice in the
form of official recognition and perhaps reparations for the tens of thousands of tubal
ligations performed in the 1990s under president Alberto Fujimori as part of a population-
control program that targeted Indian women and was financially supported both by
domestic funds and international agencies.54
Page 15 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

Discussion of the Literature

The foundational monograph is Nancy Leys Stepan The Hour of Eugenics (1991),
published more than twenty years ago, which showed in illuminating detail the histories
of eugenics in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. Stepan persuasively described the
emergence of “Latin eugenics” across the region, as well as in sister European countries
such as Spain, France, and Italy. She also foregrounded preventive eugenics, which
constituted an interventionist approach to controlling human heredity with deep roots in
Lamarckism and possessed the capacity to succeed in officially Catholic countries.
Preventive eugenics provided a framework for contextualizing matrimonial eugenics and
prenuptial certificates in Latin America, as well as the commensurability of eugenics and
public health campaigns against “racial poisons.”
Since the publication of The Hour of Eugenics, the field has expanded dramatically to
include scholarship based on much more extensive archival research in Argentina, Brazil,
and Mexico, including studies that explore different regions of those countries. Essential
reading includes the two chapters on Latin America in Philippa Levine and Alison
Bashford’s The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (2010), an edited volume that
also includes many references to and examples of Latin American eugenics in the
thematic chapters, and the anthologies edited by Marisa Miranda and Gustavo Vallejo,
above all, Una historia de la Eugenesia: Argentina y las redes biopolíticas internacionales,
1912–1945 (2012). Other notable works include A History of Family Planning in Peru
(2014), in which Raul Necochea López situates Peruvian eugenics in a layered fashion
that highlights the unexpected role of Catholicism in the region, and the co-authored
Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective (2014) by Marius Turda and Aaron Gillette,
which provides a useful overview of general and specific contours of Latin eugenics, with
sustained attention to its Latin American variants.
In addition, a wealth of book chapters and articles examine eugenics in Cuba, Peru,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, and Chile, exploring themes of politics, motherhood,
racism, demography, and immigration. These appear in Spanish, Portuguese, English, and
sometimes Italian and French; accessing research on cutting-edge scholarship on
eugenics necessitates a multilingual and multi-sited approach. Despite the plethora of
newer work, in-depth studies are much more limited for Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela,
Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic. Even without dedicated eugenics societies, these
countries incorporated hereditarian ideas and practices into public health programs, and
their historical experiences deserve further examination.
Primary Sources
Page 16 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

There only are a few archival sources that contain a substantial amount of material
related to eugenicists or eugenic organizations in Latin America. These include the
papers of the founder of the São Paulo Eugenics Society, Renato Kehl, which are housed
at the Casa Oswaldo Cruz in Rio de Janeiro, and the papers of the Eugenic Records Office
and Charles Davenport, both at the American Philosophical Society Library in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which contain materials related to Domingo Ramos and the
Pan American Congresses on Eugenics and Homiculture.
Perhaps the materials most frequently consulted to reconstruct the histories of eugenics
are the journals published by eugenics societies and allied scientific, health, and civic
organizations, of which some copies exist in libraries in Latin America, the United States,
and Europe. Historians of eugenics rely intensely on these published periodicals, as well
as books written by key historical actors. Increasingly, through WorldCat and other online
catalogues, journals as such Eugenesia (Mexico), Eugenia (Brazil), and Anales de
Biotipologia, Eugenesia y Medicina Social (Argentina) can be accessed via interlibrary
loan or in digital form.
Secondary and complementary research on the role of eugenics in medicine, law, social
sciences, and education can be explored in national, state, and local archives throughout
Latin America. Scholars utilize a combination of these sources in conjunction with a solid
foundation of published primary sources to reconstruct the history of eugenics on smaller
and larger geographical and thematic scales. For example, legislative and judicial records
can be consulted to track eugenics legislation and implementation; public health records
can illuminate the role of puericulture campaigns, anti-venereal-disease efforts, and
visiting-nurses programs; educational records can reveal the development of mental
testing and the growth of eugenic norms of intelligence; and the records of relevant
academic units, such as demographic institutes and anthropology departments, often
contain data pertinent to uncovering the adaption of biotypology among Latin American
scientists and social scientists.
Further Reading
Dávila, Jerry. Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Eraso, Yolando. “Biotypology, Endocrinology, and Sterilization: The Practice of Eugenics

in the Treatment of Argentinian Women during the 1930s,” Bulletin of the History of
Medicine 81.4 (2007): 793–822.
FitzGerald, David Scott and David Cook-Martin. Culling the Masses: The Democratic
Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2014.
Page 17 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

Gomes, Ana Carolina Vimieiro. “The Emergence of Biotypology in Brazilian Medicine: The
Italian Model, Textbooks, and Discipline Building, 1930–1940.” In History of European
Universities, 19th and 20th centuries. Challenges and Transformations. Edited by Ana
Simões, Maria Paula Diogo, and Kostas Gavroglu, 361–380. New York: Springer, 2015.
Hochman, Gilberto, Nisía Trinidade Lima, and Marcos Chor Maoi. “The Path of Eugenics
in Brazil: Dilemmas of Miscegenation.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of
Eugenics. Edited by Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, 493–510. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010.
Miranda, Marisa and Gustavo Vallejo, eds. Una historia de la Eugenesia: Argentina y las
redes biopolíticas internacionales, 1912–1945. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2012.
Necochea López, Raul. A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru. Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
Schell, Patience A. “Eugenics Policy and Practice in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico.” In
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Edited by Alison Bashford and Philippa
Levine, 477–492. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Stepan, Nancy Leys. The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Stern, Alexandra Minna. “‘The Hour of Eugenics’ in Veracruz, Mexico: Radical Politics,
Public Health, and Latin America’s Only Sterilization Law.” Hispanic American Historical
Review 91.3 (2011): 431–443.
Turda, Marius and Aaron Gillette. Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective. London:
Bloomsbury, 2014.
Notes:
(1.) Francis Galton, Essays in Eugenics (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1909), 35.
(2.) Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford, “Introduction: Eugenics and the Modern World,”
in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, eds. Philippa Levine and Alison
Bashford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–26.
(3.) Stuart McCook, States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the
Spanish Caribbean, 1760–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).
(4.) Alan Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940,” in The Idea
of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940, ed. Richard Graham (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1990), 71–113.
Page 18 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

(5.) Alexandra Minna Stern, “From Mestizophilia to Biotypology: Racialization and

Science in Mexico, 1920-1960,” in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, eds. Nancy
Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin A. Rosemblatt (Raleigh: University of North
Carolina, 2003), 187–209.
(6.) Gilberto Hochman, Nísia Trinidade Lima, and Marcos Chor Maoi, “The Path of
Eugenics in Brazil: Dilemmas of Miscegenation,” in The Oxford Handbook, eds. Levine
and Bashford, 477–492.
(7.) David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martin, Culling the Masses: The Democratic
Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2014).
(8.) Sarah Walsh, “‘One of the Most Uniform Races of the Entire World’: Creole Eugenics
and the Myth of Chilean Racial Homogeneity,” Journal of the History of Biology 48 (2015):
613–639.
(9.) Pedro Zarini, “La Utopía Eugenista en la Argentina (1900–1950),” in El mosaico

argentino: Modelos y representaciones del espacio y de la población, siglos XIX–XX, dir.
Hernán Otero (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2004), 425–466.
(10.) FitzGerald and Cook-Martin, Culling the Masses.
(11.) FitzGerald and Cook-Martin, Culling the Masses, 220: Beatriz Urías Horcasitas,
Historias Secretas del Racismo en México (1920–1950) (Mexico City: Tiempo De Memoria
TusQuets, 2007).
(12.) Marius Turda and Aaron Gillette, Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective
(London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
(13.) Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin
America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
(14.) Stefan Pohl-Valero, “‘La raza entra por la boca’: Energy, Diet and Eugenics in
Colombia, 1890–1940,” Hispanic American Historical Review 94.3 (2014): 455–486.
(15.) Quoted in Hochman, Lima, and Maoi, “The Path of Eugenics in Brazil,” 501.
(16.) Patience A. Schell, “Eugenics Policy and Practice in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico,”
in The Oxford Handbook, eds. Levine and Bashford, 477–492; Armando García González
and Raquel Álvarez Peláez, En Busca de la Raza Perfecta: Eugenesia e Higiene en Cuba
(1898–1958) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1999).
(17.) Marisa A. Miranda, “La Argentina en el scenario eugénico internacional,” in Una

historia de la Eugenesia: Argentina y las redes biopolíticas internacionales, 1912–1945,
eds. Marisa Miranda and Gustavo Vallejo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2012), 19–64.
Page 19 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

(18.) Schell, “Eugenics Policy”; Raul Necochea López, A History of Family Planning in
Twentieth-Century Peru (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), chap. 2.
(19.) Turda and Gillette, Latin Eugenics.
(20.) Necochea López, A History of Family Planning, chap. 1.
(21.) Walter Mendoza and Oscar Martínez, “Las Ideas Eugenésicas en la Creación del
Instituto de Medicina Social,” Anales de la Facultad de Medicina 60.1 (1999): 55–60.
(22.) Miranda, “La Argentina.”
(23.) Juan Pablo Murillo Peña and Gustavo Franco Paredes, “Nuestra tragedia biológica:
La eugenesia peruana y su participación en el escenario internacional,” in Una historia,
eds. Miranda and Vallejo, 287–329.
(24.) William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in
Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
(25.) Quoted in Schell, “Eugenics Policy,” 478.
(26.) Alexandra Minna Stern, “Responsible Mothers and Normal Children: Eugenics,
Welfare, and Nationalism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, 1900–1940,” Journal of Historical
Sociology 12.4 (1999): 369–397.
(27.) Elisa M. González, “Nurturing the Citizens of the Future: Milk Stations and Child
Nutrition in Puerto Rico, 1929–1960,” Medical History 59.2 (2015): 177–198.
(28.) Jerry Dávila, Diplomas of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
(29.) Anne-Emanuelle Birn, “‘No More Surprising than a Broken Pitcher?’ Maternal and
Child Health in the Early Years of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau,” Canadian Bulletin
of Medical History 19.1 (2002): 17–46.
(30.) Pedro Zarini, “La Utopía Eugenista en la Argentina (1900–1950),” in El mosaico

argentine, dir. Hernán Otero, 425–466.
(31.) Necochea Lopez, A History of Family Planning; Birn, “No More Surprising”;Steven
Palmer and Gladys Rojas Chaves, “Educating Señorita: Teacher Training, Social Mobility,
and the Birth of Costa Rican Feminism, 1885–1925,” Hispanic American Historical Review
78.1 (1998): 45–82.
(32.) Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics, 17.
(33.) Quoted in Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics, 90.
(34.) Ann Zulawski, Unequal Cures: Public Health and Political Change in Bolivia, 1900–
1950 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
Page 20 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

(35.) Necochea López, A History of Family Planning.
(36.) Sarah R. Arvey, “Sex and the Ordinary Physician: Cuban Physicians, Eugenics, and
Marital Sexuality, 1933-1958,” Journal of History of Sexuality 21.1 (2012): 93–120.
(37.) Natalia Milanesio, “Redefining Men’s Sexuality, Resignifying Male Bodies: The
Argentine Law of Anti-Venereal Prophylaxis, 1936,” Gender & History 17.2 (2005): 463–
491.
(38.) Andrés H. Reggiani, “Depopulation, Fascism, and Eugenics in 1930s Argentina,”

Hispanic American Historical Review 90.2 (2010): 283–318.
(39.) Milanesio, “Redefining Men’s Sexuality.”
(40.) Alexandra Minna Stern, “‘The Hour of Eugenics’ in Veracruz, Mexico: Radical
Politics, Public Health, and Latin America’s Only Sterilization Law,” Hispanic American
Historical Review 91.3 (2011): 431–443.
(41.) Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in
Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
(42.) Iris Lopez, Matters of Choice: Puerto Rican Women’s Struggle for Reproductive
Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).
(43.) Sergio Silva-Casteñeda, “Transatlantic Demographers: The Italian Influence over

Population Policy in Mexico and Spain, 1930–1973,” Journal of Policy History 27.2 (2015):
220–249.
(44.) Eugenia Scarzanella, “Los Intelectuales Italo-Argentinos: ?Un Posible Liderazgo

Étnico? La Asociación Argentina de Biotipología, Eugenesia y Medicina Social (1930–
1943)” in De Europa a las Américas: Dirigentes y liderazgos (1880–1960), eds. Alicia
Bernasconi y Carina Frid (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2006), 99–112.
(45.) Ana Carolina Vimieiro Gomes, “The Emergence of Biotypology in Brazilian Medicine:
The Italian Model, Textbooks, and Discipline Building, 1930–1940,” in History of
European Universities, 19th and 20th centuries. Challenges and Transformations, eds.
Ana Simões, Maria Paula Diogo, and Kostas Gavroglu (New York: Springer, 2015), 361–
380.
(46.) Yolando Eraso, “Biotypology, Endocrinology, and Sterilization: The Practice of

Eugenics in the Treatment of Argentinian Women during the 1930s,” Bulletin of the
History of Medicine 81.4 (2007): 793–822.
(47.) Stern, “From Mestizophilia to Biotypology.”
(48.) Silva-Casteñeda, “Transatlantic Demographers.”
Page 21 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

(49.) Deborah Dorotinsky, “Para medir el cuerpo de la nación: antropología física y

visualidad racialista en el marco de la recepción de la biotipología en México,” in Una
historia, eds. Miranda and Vallejo, 331–365.
(50.) Carlos López Beltrán, Vivette García Deister, and Mariana Rios Sandoval,
“Negotiating the Mexican Mestizo: On the Possibility of a National Genomics,” in Mestizo
Genomics: Race Mixing, Nation, and Science in Latin America, eds. Peter Wade, Carlos
López Beltrán, Eduardo Restrepo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2014), 85–108.
(51.) Dante Avaro, “Citizen Traceability: Surveillance à la Argentina,” Journal of Power,

Politics, and Governance 2.3 and 4 (2014): 93–113.
(52.) Gustavo Vallejo and Marisa Miranda, “Eugenesia, genética y derechos humanos en
la Argentina del siglo XX,” in Genética y Derechos Humanos: Encunetros y
Desencuentros, comp. Víctor Penchaszadeh (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional, 2012),
107–138.
(53.) Claudia Fonseca, “Time, DNA and Documents in Family Reckonings,” Vibrant:
Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 12.1 (2015).
(54.) Necochea López, A History of Family Planning.
Alexandra Minna Stern
Department of History, University of Michigan
Page 22 of 22

date: 07 June 2018

Eugenetics in Latinamerica

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Eugenetics in Latinamerica

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Eugenics in Latin America

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American

Summary and Keywords

The Emergence of Eugenics

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

By the early 20th century, as processes of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

Race, Nation, and Mestizaje

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

Contours and Influences

By the mid-20th century, the Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

The Cuban eugenicist

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

Eugenic Organizations and Networks

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

In addition to organizations and conferences, there were many vocal advocates of

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

concerned about the hereditability of psychiatric conditions and designed strategies to

Prenuptial certificates were another important manifestation of preventive eugenics in

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

Argentine eugenicists devoted a great deal of energy to instituting prenuptial medical

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

Discussion of the Literature

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

Eraso, Yolando. “Biotypology, Endocrinology, and Sterilization: The Practice of Eugenics

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

Necochea López, Raul. A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru. Chapel

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

(5.) Alexandra Minna Stern, “From Mestizophilia to Biotypology: Racialization and

(9.) Pedro Zarini, “La Utopía Eugenista en la Argentina (1900–1950),” in El mosaico

(10.) FitzGerald and Cook-Martin, Culling the Masses.

(17.) Marisa A. Miranda, “La Argentina en el scenario eugénico internacional,” in Una

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 07 June 2018

(19.) Turda and Gillette, Latin Eugenics.

(20.) Necochea López, A History of Family Planning, chap. 1.

(22.) Miranda, “La Argentina.”

(25.) Quoted in Schell, “Eugenics Policy,” 478.

(30.) Pedro Zarini, “La Utopía Eugenista en la Argentina (1900–1950),” in El mosaico