Lina-Maria Murillo is Assistant Professor in the departments of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and History at the University of Iowa. She is completing her first book titled Fighting for Control: Race and Reproductive Health Activism in the U.S-Mexico Borderlands. She examines the tensions between advocates for population control and those committed to greater reproductive access for the majority Mexican-origin women in the borderland. She focuses on the history of Planned Parenthood’s population control rhetoric that racialized Mexican-origin women’s reproduction and shines a light on the unknown history of Chicana activism that challenged racialist reproductive health tropes in the movement. Several fellowships and grants including the AAUW American fellowship, the Boston Medical Library Fellowship in the History of Medicine at Harvard and the Schlesinger Library Research Grant at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University provided funding for this study. Her article, “Birth Control, Border Control: The Movement for Contraception in El Paso, Texas 1936–1940” is forthcoming with the Pacific Historical Review.
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