 Natalie Lyra is an interdisciplinary scholar and assistant professor in the Department of Latina Latina Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include the politics of reproduction, histories of medicine, and the ways that struggles for racial and reproductive justice intersect. She is an expert on eugenic sterilization, member of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, and author of the book, Laboratory of Deficiency, Sterilization, and Confinement in California, 1900 to 1950s. In her presentation, Who is Unfit? Centering Race and Disability in Histories of Eugenics, Professor Lyra outlines how in California's Pacific colony, ideologies of racism and ableism converged in the label of the unfit. Her discussion will outline the history of the Pacific colony, dynamics of resistance and consent, and how racism and ableism play into the decision to institutionalize and into the decision to sterilize. Thank you for that introduction. Hello everyone. I want to start by thanking those of you that are joining us virtually and express my appreciation to the organizers of the symposium. What I want to do today is really bring our attention to race and disability as essential lenses of analysis for understanding histories of eugenics, specifically for understanding how eugenic notions of who was considered unfit for reproduction, unfit for the rights and privileges of citizenship, and unfit for freedom were really shaped by already existing racist and ableist ideologies. And the way that I'm going to do that today is by focusing on one case study. So pictured on the right side of the slide is a black and white image of a landscape view of mountains and several buildings that made up the California state institution at the center of this presentation, which is called Pacific Colony, established in 1927 near present day Pomona Pacific Colony was described by its supporters as a quote, great humanitarian project and quote, and really this institution represented what many considered to be the most scientific and advanced thinking on how to deal with issues of poverty, dependency, delinquency and immorality in the state. And Pacific Colony was really supported by eugenic research on feeble mindedness and quote, unquote, mental defect. The institution was one of two that was constructed in California to warehouse people that were labeled feeble minded, and one of thousands of similar state institutions constructed throughout the country during the late 19th and early 20th century, by examining Pacific Colony, particularly how this disability label of people mindedness was constructed, and how it worked to categorize people as eugenically unfit, and by also kind of looking at how this label was implemented, and theories of feeble mindedness were implemented, and how they work to justify some of what are considered the most violent eugenic practices, so sterilization and institutional confinement. By looking at this history, we really get a sense of how notions of race and disability converge. So I want to start with a quick overview of, you know, what I'll do is start with a quick overview of disability as a lens of analysis and how I apply this lens to understand eugenic notions of fitness and who was unfit. And then I'll go into the case study of Pacific Colony, looking at three aspects of the history of feeble mindedness. So we'll look at knowledge production around this disability label, its gendered application, and then its implementation. I'll also talk a bit about how disability and this disability lens can help us reframe our analysis of resistance and defiance in relation to particularly eugenic institutionalization and sterilization. And then what I'll do is I'll end with some thoughts on eugenic legacies. So most people understand that race is a social construction, right? But many might not be as familiar with the notion of disability as a social construct. And so in lieu of doing a deep dive into the literature of disability studies, I just want to highlight a couple of things that are really essential and really shape my analysis in this presentation. So my research is grounded in critical disability studies, and it applies the assertion that disability is a socially and historically informed construct. Of course, this is not to say that physical, biological, and neurological differences do not exist. Of course, they exist among humans. But the assertion made by disability scholars is that those differences are, and their meanings and consequences, right, that they are informed by social and historical context and that they change over time. So given this point, critical disability scholars, study scholars assert that we need to study disability not as this kind of fixed biological reality, but more so as a concept that works to signify and shape relationships of power. And this assertion also urges us to recognize and study the ways that disability labels, like people-mindedness in this presentation, have historically been used to justify inequality and discrimination, both for people that have disabilities, people with disabilities, but also for other marginalized people. And that works by attributing disabilities to them, right? So some historical examples of this include antebellum-era pro-slavery arguments, right, that asserted that enslaved Black people were mentally unfit for freedom, and then argued that slavery needed to continue, right? So that's one example. Another example would be arguments against extending suffrage and the right to vote to women that were based on arguments that women were a mentally and biologically inferior gender. So those are some of the examples that we can see historically how disability gets attributed to other marginalized groups in arguments about inequality and barring freedom and participation in civic life. The other important point that I want to highlight is that in line with what intersectional feminism has taught us is that disability functions alongside other subjectivities. So in her work, disability theorist, Nirmala Ervillas points out that disability has historically functioned as a, quote, ideological linchpin in the constitution and reconstitution of social differences, quote, along the axes of race, gender, and sexuality. And so this image, I think, is really illustrative of this point, and what we have in this image is a table that lists eugenic criteria for sterilization by state. So we have a list of states, and then, you know, the criteria that is pulled from this eugenic sterilization state laws. And so we see from this list the legal and medical criteria for mandated sterilization and how it really revolves around these disability labels, right? So we see people mindedness very frequently across the states. We also see insanity, epilepsy, idiocy. And so you'll notice that none of these state laws explicitly said that people that we will target for sterilization are going to be poor people or racialized folks or immigrants or promissuous women. Those are not the, that's not the language that's used in the laws. The language that's used in the laws are these disability labels. And so, you know, we see kind of how the labels work to mobilize and legitimize and even, in a lot of cases, naturalize already existing racial class and gender prejudice. And we see how that plays out in looking at the demographics of who was targeted for eugenic sterilization. I'll make a last point here that this is an important departure from some histories of eugenics that situate people mindedness as, you know, ignorance as bad science and as merely a misunderstanding about intellectual disabilities. So, you know, these histories kind of situate this disability label as kind of a mistake that lives in the past. But really what critical disability studies urges us to do is to recognize disability labels like people mindedness as part of a broader set of social categories that work together and worked within a larger system of power that, you know, was used to naturalize social hierarchies and justify not only inequality, but also these very violent medical and state interventions. So Pacific Colony is a useful case study here because it illustrates how eugenic theories of people mindedness were both developed and implemented. So much of my research on Pacific Colony comes from these scientific research studies that were conducted in support of the institution. So before the institution was built, a group of progressives, eugenic researchers in various fields, including psychology, education, juvenile, legal studies, produced a body of research on the need to institutionalize folks labeled people minded and why the state needed to fund the construction of Pacific Colony. So a bulk of my research revolves around this body of literature that proceeds and supports Pacific Colony. And then later on, once the institution opens, it becomes a site of continued research, right, where graduate students and advanced researchers come and continue their work on this disability label. And so it becomes a site where this theories of people mindedness are developed, also where they're implemented, right? This is where people labeled people minded are confined, where they receive different types of treatment and where they are sterilized. But it's also an important case study because it gives us a sense of the ways that disability and race came together through the targeted institutionalization and sterilization of Mexican origin youth. So I'll share some descriptive data here. Several thousand people were confined to Pacific Colony over the years. So my research really focuses on when Pacific Colony opened in 1927 and, you know, the arc of its history into the 1950s. In the 1950s, it changes its name. There are some, you know, important changes that happened then, but that is kind of like the chunk of time that I look at. And so several institutional records show that Mexican origin youth, both men and women who were largely in their teens and early twenties, were committed to the institution at rates that exceeded their population in the state at the time, which was between 6.5 percent and 8 percent. So, for example, a California Bureau of juvenile research study estimated that the Mexican population in the institution was 15.3 percent. In 1935, so that's the population in 1935. In 1947, the institution's psychology department reports that Mexicans made up 21.2 percent of the institution's population. And my analysis of admission ledgers collected between 1927 and 1947 shows that 21 percent of the over 4,000 people admitted during this period were labeled with an M, which signified Mexican sterilization patterns mirrored admission patterns and my analysis of over 2,000 sterilization requests processed by Pacific Colony between 1928 and 1951 shows that Mexican origin youth made up almost a quarter of all sterilization requests. And in 1943, they made up 37.5 percent of all sterilization requests. So how did this convergence of race and disability come to be? And how did this disability label of people-mindedness work to really funnel Mexican origin youth into the state institution where they could be sterilized? So one of the principal supporters of Pacific Colony was famed American psychologist, Louis M. Terman. And pictured here, we have an image of Terman and an image of his widely read book, The Measurement of Intelligence. And so Terman is largely known for his translation and revision of the Benet-Simon intelligence tests. He also participated in lead army intelligence testing during World War One and later on gained some fame around a longitudinal study that he was doing on people that he labeled geniuses. And so, you know, Terman was very invested throughout his career in measuring intelligence and he viewed intelligence as a scientific and logical approach to determining social rank and social value. And so he developed what became really widely used methods for determining determining an individual's intelligence level, which he and other eugenicists believed were inherent, right? That a person's intelligence level was inherent, that they, you know, were born with this intelligence level, that intelligence was largely immutable and that intelligence was hereditary. And some of the methods that they used were, you know, intelligence testing and gathering and estimating IQ scores, gathering social data to kind of inform IQ scores and also gathering family histories. And they, you know, Terman and folks who worked on measuring intelligence and labeling people according to their intelligence really use these methods to rank people along kind of a continuum, a rank system of intelligence that really ranged from genius, right, at the very top, normal average and kind of feeble-minded and low intelligence at the bottom. And eventually this rank system becomes more nuanced and people of low intelligence in particular are kind of further ranked and given diagnoses that we now see as derogatory terms, but that were, at that time, kind of these official diagnoses, including idiot, imbecile and moron. So Terman asserted that, you know, this, that intelligence was socially important, right, that it was an important scientific approach to social organization, and he advocated for the use of intelligence testing in schools, right, so it could be used to determine who could benefit from education and who should be segregated into different classrooms that it was useful in labor and in industry to determine who would make a good manager, a good boss, a good supervisor, a good capitalist, and alternately, you know, who should be relegated to kind of low-wage menial labor that it was important in civic life to determine who deserved the right to vote. And of course, that it was important in reproduction, right, because intelligence was seen as hereditary, you know, figuring out someone's intelligence level was important to determining whether they should be allowed to reproduce or not. Terman and other eugenicists asserted that intelligence, particularly low intelligence, was, you know, had broad and severe social implications that many large social problems, including poverty, crime, and immorality, were caused by feeble-minded people whose low intellectual capacity caused what they referred to as, quote, economic incompetence and what they also described as kind of socially deviant behavior. So within this broader theory of intelligence, feeble-mindedness came to represent really an individualizing of and biologizing of large social issues. And to address this problem, Terman and other eugenicists advocated for institutionalization, finding out who these feeble-minded people were and warehousing them in state institutions and sterilization, right, ending the reproduction of feeble-mindedness by preventing the feeble-minded from reproducing. And so Terman used his research and the research of his colleagues to really push for the construction of the Pacific colony. And so a lot of his research also kind of, particularly his studies on IQ scores, asserted that racialized folks, particularly racialized folks in California, were more likely to have low intelligence, right? And so he starts kind of making connections between low intelligence and race. And his research is proliferated by his students and other researchers in the state. So here I have some quotes from, the first is from a 1915 legislative support that was actually a research report that was in support of Pacific colony by J. Harold Williams, who was a student of Terman's. And he asserts that, you know, a third to a half of delinquency in California can be prevented by segregation in their early years of feeble-minded children, right? So using the science to support, then to make the case that the state needed to construct Pacific colony. The second is also from Williams, who conducted a study in California tested youth that were confined to juvenile delinquents, juvenile reform schools. And he asserts that with the IQ scores that he collected, that black and Mexican youth showed a greater tendency to delinquency because of their low intelligence. And this assertion is echoed by the third quote, Mary B. Henry, who was an educator and who also kind of does a study and among students and under her, in her school system. And the conclusion of that study that she that she kind of highlights here is that intellectually, the Mexican children are consistently inferior to American children. And that this is not due to a language factor. But that disappears to be real native inferiority. And so, you know, we see kind of the creation of a theory that not only posits that racialized people are, and particularly black and Mexican youth in California are inherently of low intelligence, but that that low intelligence causes deviant behavior, right? That they're more prone to engage in, you know, socially deviant behaviors. And this symptomology is very gendered. And so for young men, you know, young men who get caught up in the juvenile court system, you know, criminality becomes a really big factor. And so we see this, for example, in this sterilization request, for a 16 year old Mexican origin boy, whose family history is described of being quote, low Mexican type, and his clinical history really highlights this history of thefts and malicious malicious mischief, right? And so engaging in petty crimes, even status crimes like truancy, school truancy, become symptoms of people mindedness that then get turned into rationales for institutionalization and sterilization. For young women, deviant sexuality is a predominant theme. And so we see this here with this young woman who is, let's see, 16 years old. And what it says is that she has been committed to Pacific colony to keep her from contacting men, that she's also suffering from a chronic issue in her left leg, and that, you know, it's important for her to be, you know, confined in order to keep her from contacting men, right? So the implementation of this convergence of disability, race and gender was severe in the lives of Mexican origin youth, you know, I went over some of the disparities in a previous slide. And so, you know, one of the consequences of being labeled, people minded is that you could be institutionalized and early on in the, you know, late 19th century institutionalization was proposed as a reproductive control measure. And so here, I'm, you know, citing Nicole Rafter who talks about these institutions as, you know, prophylactic institutions. But even with sterilization, given that residents lived in sex segregated quarters, and were constantly supervised, we see that, you know, being confined was one way that these folks reproduction is managed, right? Under California law, anyone committed to state, a state institution could be sterilized at the discretion of the superintendent or the clinician. And it was also used as a precondition for release. So once committed to a state institution, you become a ward of the state. And decisions around release and treatment are really left up to institutional authorities. And for many people that were institutionalized, and whose parents or family members want to tap and release, sterilization becomes a prerequisite for release. The last way that this theory was kind of implemented at Pacific Colony was through an effort at making the feeble minded productive. And so despite assertions about their incompetence, residents were largely they sustained the institution through their labor. So they did most of the cooking, they did most of the cleaning, and they even cared for the other residents. And so on the right of the slide, on the left of the slide, you see one of the buildings that where folks were confined. On the right of the slide is a black and white picture of several cribs in a Pacific Colony nursery. And we see there's an attendant towards the front of the photo. But in the back, you can't see it very clearly. But towards the back of this image, you see a plain clothed person who is likely a resident of Pacific Colony. And so one of the cruelest ways that, and one of the most contradictory ways that notions of disability and labor intersect here in Pacific Colony is that at the same time that institutionalized people were seen as unfit to reproduce unfit to have children of their own, they were charged with caring for young and even infant residents of the institution. Many of these infants and young people had specialized needs. And so there's this very clear contradiction, you know, that arises in the institution around this question of labor and whether people can be productive or not. Pacific Colony also developed a practice of industrial parole is what it was called. Where institutionalized people who were deemed, you know, fit enough to potentially be released, and who were sterilized, were placed in labor or work placements outside of the institution on parole. And so they were often leased out as domestics, young women were leased out as domestics to largely middle class and upper class households in the area. Young men were often leased out to ranch hands, others went to work in different sanitariums. And so, you know, this really highlights the way that the institution worked to kind of make people productive, but not reproductive, right, and kind of creates a pipeline for people with disability labels into low wage and so called low skilled work. So in addition to kind of thinking about race and disability and its function within the institution, I've also, you know, thought about the ways that disability can inform our analyses of resistance and agency in this context. And so, you know, some of the ways that people defied sterilization and institutionalization was by simply, you know, refusing to comply with orders, another way included refusing to consent. So individuals themselves were not asked to consent for sterilization. But family members were. And so family members often refused to sign consent forms. Of course, this wasn't a very effective because under the law, consent was not a requirement. And so oftentimes even if a family member refused to sign a consent form or expressed a desire not to have someone sterilized, sterilization would continue would proceed. And the last thing is escapes. So escapes were prevalent. Young people would literally either on their own or in collaboration with other other institutionalized people devise ways and devise plans or escape. And so what we're looking at here is kind of some reports of escapes from institution for the people minded. And these often happened when residents were working, right? So in the first example, we see John Martinez, who was working on a gang detail in the vegetable garden on the institution grounds, said he was going to go get a drink and didn't return, right? Another young man was working also in the vegetable garden and left with John, right? So these two likely escaped together. And then the third person, a young woman, Rosario, who was working in the yard, and she escaped through by cutting a hole through the window, right? And so, you know, these behaviors, this defiance, this disobedience escapes were all talked about and very pathologizing terms by institutional authorities, right? These were often used as further evidence for why these young people needed to be confined and why they needed to be sterilized. But really thinking about, you know, how these were some of the only ways that young people could express discontent and could really challenge this practice kind of helps us switch our, our lens of analysis here, right? And so thinking about reading against the grain of these kind of pathologizing assertions around these behaviors, and really thinking through, you know, a lens of disability and racial justice here. So I want to, you know, conclude by thinking a bit about eugenic legacies, and highlighting just three recent examples. So the first revelations that in the 2000s, hundreds of women were sterilized in California women's prisons under the rationale given by the doctor that performed these sterilized that they were unfit to reproduce because of their criminal behavior, which is why they were imprisoned. And because any children that they would have would likely become a burden to the state, right, that there were concerns around dependency and that sterilization was more, more economical than allowing these women to have more children. The second example, a recent example, include comments by Kenosha Wisconsin Sheriff made in 2018. And he was talking about a recent uptick in burglaries. And this sheriff asserted that men that were accused of shoplifting should be quote, warehoused for life, to stop them, at least some of these males from going out and getting 10 other women pregnant. And so this, you know, is kind of a sort of repetition of this idea of delinquency, or this time together of delinquency, criminal behavior, and reproduction, right? And this, I think, quote, highlights the ways that confinement continues to be used, kind of our thought of and seen as a way to manage reproduction of certain people who are seen as unfit. And then the last example that I'll share is very recent revelations by an organization in Georgia in September of 2020 that really revealed different types of human rights abuses occurring in an immigrant detention center that included unwanted hysterectomies. And so again, thinking about how, you know, reproductive and human rights continue to occur in settings of confinement, like Pacific colony. And so, you know, what I want to suggest here is that, you know, if we analyze the history of eugenic sterilization and some of these legacies through the lenses of race and disability, we're kind of, you know, we're urged to not only trace the come the consistencies, right? But also kind of understand the ways that reproductive injustices are replicated over time, particularly through what seems to be very enduring logics, sustained by shifting and overlapping ideologies of race, disability and gender that affect the reproductive lives of people who continue to be deemed unfit, you know, over time, and trying to figure out, you know, what those enduring ideologies are and how we might start to deconstruct them, why they continue to be held by, you know, certain physicians who work with prison populations and other confined populations. And I'll leave it there. Thank you once again. And I look forward to our discussion.