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Matters of Choice: Puerto Rican Women's Struggle for Reproductive Freedom by Iris López. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008, 184 pp., $65.00 hardcover, $25.95 paper.
Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women's Reproduction by Elena R. Gutiérrez. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008, 199 pp., $55.00 hardcover, $21.95 paper.
REBECCA MARTINEZ
Elena R. Gutiérrez and Iris López in their recent monographs, respectively titled Fertile Matters and Matters of Choice, both discuss the practice of coercive sterilization among Latinas. Both authors provide an historical context in which to analyze the development of this practice: For Gutiérrez in Los Angeles, California, among Mexican-origin women and for López in Brooklyn, New York, among Puerto Rican women. However, each maintains a different emphasis in approaching the study of sterilization and the accompanying perceptions about Latina hyperfertility and reproduction. López spends much time analyzing women's personal stories through extensive ethnographic interviews focusing on women's agency and constraints in the sterilization process, while Gutiérrez largely provides a content analysis of various documents (legal, newspaper, organizational, and health policy) in order to understand the ideological constructs that gave way to the institutionalized practice of coerced sterilization. Given that both texts cover the topic of sterilization among Latinas, I will address the ways in which these projects are complementary and yield a rich and complex understanding of the issue among diverse Latina populations that face similar struggles of racism, classism, and sexism albeit in differing historical and geographical contexts.
Elena R. Gutiérrez, an assistant professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, gathers a diverse and impressive number of sources to show how it is that the "problem" of Mexican-origin women's fertility and reproduction came to be constructed as such and the consequences that this framing has had for reproductive freedom and justice. As she states, "This is not a study of the fertility of Mexican women per se, but an investigation of the sociohistorical context within which such a topic, and the structures that shape it, become significant" (7). Using a social constructionist framework, arguing that, "social problems do not objectively exist, but are fundamentally conceived by certain interests within a particular context" (6), her analysis centers on the power of...