Latinx Feminist Thought

Drawing on the influence of Collins’ Black Feminist Thought, this book explores how Latinx feminists create theories about intersecting inequalities via their social movement practice—particularly as these relate to reproductive justice.

Many people in the United States associate reproductive politics primarily with the contentious debates surrounding abortion and contraceptive access. Yet, Rocío R. García argues the United States also has a persistent preoccupation with the reproductive lives of people of Latin American descent, evidenced in debates about undocumented immigration and birthright citizenship, the politics regarding social services to help Latinx families out of poverty, and past and contemporary examples of the coerced sterilization of Puerto Rican and Mexican-origin Latinxs, among many other issues. At the intersections of these reproductive inequalities are a growing group of Latinx feminists in the movement for reproductive justice—a social movement across the United States led by women of color who equally fight for everyone’s human right to have a child, to not have a child, and to parent in safe and healthy conditions. Latinx feminists in the reproductive justice movement mobilize against reproductive inequalities by addressing how the intersections of racism, colonialism, sexism, classism, and other systems of oppression shape Latinxs reproductive lives. In the process, Latinx feminists reveal that reproductive politics are far more expansive and complex than often imagined—that reproduction, just like life, is messy. Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with Latinx feminists in the movement for reproductive justice in California, García reveals how Latinx feminist theories are cultivated in social movements contexts for the purpose of bringing about justice, dignity, and social transformation. García focuses on the cultural processes by which Latinx feminists make politics as they navigate the simultaneity of inequalities to expand understandings of reproduction by centering Latinx feminist thinking.

An essential read for students , scholars, and practitioners in post-colonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, reproductive health care, and Latin American studies, Latinx Feminist Thought invites us all to recognize the centrality of Latinx feminist knowledge to lean into the messiness of being human and make new worlds invested in reproductive justice for all.

Rocío R. García is an assistant professor of sociology in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. Committed to scholar activism, she worked with California Latinas for Reproductive Justice for three years. Her research centers feminist of color activisms, intersectional feminist theories, the sociology of knowledge, reproductive politics, and qualitative methods. In addition to her research on reproductive justice, she has published work examining how women of color make decisions about family formation and the intersections of racial and gender inequalities in the politics that surround academic knowledge production.