Care Conversation with Lina-María Murillo
Jennifer Nash, Jocelyn Olcott, Saskia Cornes, Tania Rispoli
26 August 2025Join us for a conversation between historians Lina-María Murillo and Sarah Deutsch. Drawing from her new book “Fighting for Control” (UNC Press), Murillo will explore the long arc of reproductive justice organizing in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and the cross-border practices of care and resistance that continue to shape it.
A conversation with Lina‑María Murillo and Sarah Deutsch
Drawing from Murillo’s book Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (UNC Press)
Friday, September 26 · 12:00–1:30 PM ET
Revaluing Care Lab, Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, C106
Join us for a critical conversation on how Mexican-origin women in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez are building resilient networks of reproductive care and activism amid decades of surveillance and political pressure. Murillo and Deutsch will trace transborder histories of resistance and collective care that illuminate the ongoing struggle for reproductive justice.
Co-sponsored by the Franklin Humanities Institute, the History Hub, the Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South (LSGS), and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies (GSF)
Full Description of the Book
The first birth control clinic in El Paso, Texas, opened in 1937. Since then, Mexican-origin women living in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez have confronted various interest groups determined to control their reproductive lives, including a heavily funded international population control campaign led by Planned Parenthood Federation of America as well as the Catholic Church and Mexican American activists. Uncovering nearly one hundred years of struggle, Lina-María Murillo reveals how Mexican-origin women on both sides of the border fought to reclaim autonomy and care for themselves and their communities.
Faced with a family planning movement steeped in eugenic ideology, working-class Mexican-origin women strategically demanded additional health services and then formed their own clinics to provide care on their own terms. Along the way, they developed what Murillo calls reproductive care—quotidian acts of community solidarity—as activists organized for better housing, education, wages, as well as access to birth control, abortion, and more. Centering the agency of these women and communities, Murillo lays bare Mexican-origin women’s long battle for human dignity and power in the borderlands as reproductive freedom in Texas once again hangs in the balance.