Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women's Reproduction

Four. “More Than a Hint of Extraordinary Fertility. . . .”: Social Science Perspectives on Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproductive Behavior (1912–1980)

Chapter Four “More Than a Hint of Extraordinary Fertility. . . .” Social Science Perspectives on Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproductive Behavior (1912–1980) Before judging exaggeratedly high or low fertility . . . it is essential that “the validity of knowledge taken for granted” be always and continually exposed, examined, and brought into question. Carole C. Marks, “Demography and Race” I n a 1973 article published in the academic journal Social Biology,1 demographer Peter Uhlenberg remarked that “the strikingly high fertility of Mexican Americans relative to the dominant pattern in the United States has received almost no sociological or demographic analysis.”2 Noting that no other racial or ethnic group in the United States has maintained a fertility rate comparable to that of Mexican Americans (not even Native Americans, who were often charged with excessively high fertility rates), Uhlenberg queried social scientists’ lack of attention to these distinctive population characteristics. In fact, fertility data for persons with Spanish surnames in five southwestern states were first compiled in 1950.3 Moreover , as the “high fertility” of Mexican-origin women did not yet exist as a documented statistical certainty, substantive explanatory efforts remained inchoate in the demographic imagination. This was soon to change. Prior to 1970, social science journals hardly mentioned the fertility rates of Mexicanorigin women. By 1980, the first large-scale data on the fertility of Mexicanorigin women had been collected, and the seeds of a nascent demographic subfield were sown.4 This chapter outlines the origins of the social scientific and demographic research on the fertility of Mexican-origin women. It provides an assessment of the production of social scientific knowledge on this topic until 1980 and argues that demographic research during this decade not only established T4292.indb 55 T4292.indb 55 7/27/07 7:22:43 AM 7/27/07 7:22:43 AM fertile matters 56 the social and intellectual significance of the fertility rates of Mexicanorigin women, but also fundamentally contributed to the construction of Mexican-origin women as a quintessentially “hyper-fertile” population. To present a systematic analysis of the demographic literature on Mexicanorigin women’s fertility, I first review early publications and other social scientific inquiry into their reproductive behavior. By providing the initial observations, analyses, and questions upon which demographers constructed further research, I detail a long-standing social scientific interest in what came to be described as the “unusually high” fertility of women of Mexican origin. Moreover, I show how this characterization was informed by the racialized assumptions of assimilation and modernization. Early Research: Modernization and Assimilation During the early twentieth century, local governments in the southwestern United States initiated attempts to document the birthrates of Mexicanorigin people because of concerns that these rates were relatively high. Although large-scale national data on Mexican-origin people had not been compiled at the time, a report prepared in 1930 by members of the Mexican Fact-finding Commission used State Bureau of Vital Statistics data on Mexican births to compare levels of Mexican-origin and Anglo-American fertility. Analysis of previously unsegregated data found that by 1930, Mexican-origin births equaled one-sixth of the total births in the state.5 Data compiled by the Los Angeles County Health Department showed even more drastic statistics: Mexican-origin births rose in proportion from approximately one-twelfth of the total childbirths in Los Angeles County during 1918 to nearly one-fifth in 1927.6 At the time, Mexican-origin people comprised only 8 percent of the population in Los Angeles, leading one scholar to surmise that “all indications are that in spite of a high death rate, the Mexican rate of natural increase is high because of the large excess of births.”7 Preliminary social scientific research in the 1930s similarly identified the noticeably high birthrates of Mexican and Mexican-origin women.8 The first study to focus solely on Mexican-origin women’s lives paid significant attention to their reproductive behavior and introduced the enduring construct of Mexican women as hyper-fertile baby machines. Initially published in the journal Sociology and Social Research in 1931, sociologist Ruth Allen’s ethnographic study of 294 Mexican female farm laborers in central Texas depicted the women she studied as passive, fatalistic, and unquestioning T4292.indb 56 T4292.indb 56 7/27/07 7:22:43 AM 7/27/07 7:22:43 AM social science perspectives 57 of their life-long service to men.9 Moreover, Allen claimed...