Transatlantic Demographers: The Italian Influence over Population Policy in Mexico and Spain, 1930–1973

The birth rate is not simply an index of the progressive power of the nation; it is not simply, as Spengler, suggests, “Italy’s only weapon”; it is also that which will distinguish the Fascist people from the other peoples of Europe as an index of vitality and the will to pass on this vitality over the centuries.

—Benito Mussolini

In his book Fatal Misconception, Matthew Connelly explains how transnational institutions and organizations promoting family planning during the twentieth century tried to impose their own ideas about reducing human fertility over different parts of world population. In his own words, Connelly’s book tells the story of “how some people have tried to control others without having to answer to anyone.”¹ But family planning or population control was not the only set of demographic ideas that were being imposed, as Connelly himself mentions in his introduction. There were others trying to impose exactly the opposite idea. This article tells the story of two authoritarian regimes that also tried to shape, or at least influence, reproductive decisions but in a different way than those transnational organizations studied by Connelly: it is the shared story of state-sponsored pronatalism in Mexico and Spain.

The history of population policy in the first half of the twentieth century has focused mainly on the history of eugenics, and a long and useful literature has developed on that topic.² However, in this article I look at something that is deeply connected to eugenics but a bit different: the obsession with population growth as a measure of “social health” and a requirement for economic development. In this sense, this article follows Andres Reggiani’s work on pronatalism in France, since one of the main goals is to treat pronatalism as an intellectually independent trend, although recognizing that there were many particular cases in which pronatalism and eugenics could become allies and even just the same thing.³ It is important to mention that while Reggiani’s work tells the history of pronatalism in French political culture, I will focus on official pronatalism. In other words, this article tells the story of how pronatalism became an official policy, but it does not follow the role of nonstate actors in the evolution of pronatalism, something that would be desirable but would need further research.

This article is also part of a bigger new trend in which we study the transit of ideas across the Atlantic in the 1930s directly from Southern Europe to Latin America.⁴ Most of what has been written about ideas and people interacting across the Atlantic usually focuses on the relationship between Northern European intellectuals or activists and their counterparts in the United States.⁵ I will focus on the intellectual relationship among Italian, Spanish, and Mexican demographers who shared a common set of policy goals.

Comparing population policies in Mexico and Spain is not random since these countries represent an interesting case of similar policies and radically different outcomes. Between 1930 and 1974, the populations of Mexico and Spain grew at very different rates. Mexico grew from just over 17 million inhabitants in 1930 to almost 60 million in 1974. By contrast, Spain grew from around 23.5 million inhabitants to a little more than 35 million in the same period. While these growth trends remained relatively constant over the subsequent decades, the period in question is interesting because the divergence in population growth coincided with a convergence in population policy. This article explains the link: between the 1930s and the 1970s, Mexico and Spain both promoted openly expansive population policies, albeit with different emphases, different timing, and, most important, different outcomes.⁶

The comparison is also interesting because we have similar ideas driving specific policies in two regimes that are assumed to be very different in ideological terms. The similarities are not limited to a concurrence of public policies with similar objectives, but include policies that shared a common intellectual root. In other words, it was not only the policies implemented that resembled one another, but...