Birth rights: Bolivia's politics of race, region, and motherhood, 1964--2005

This dissertation extends our understanding of the issues of family planning, maternal health, and reproductive choice in Bolivia beyond the shadow of U.S. imperialism and turn-of-the-century Latin American eugenic precedents. I argue that Bolivia's story of family planning policy and program development cannot be limited to a top-down rendering of U.S.-enforced demographic transition and population control. Specifically, I analyze the historically rooted race, space, and gender hierarchies embedded in national sexual and reproductive health policies and programs in contemporary Bolivia, as well as the attempt of a tightly knit elite community of La Paz-based NGOs, feminist organizations, technocratic institutions and health professionals to separate their actions and their agenda from the neo-Malthusian leanings of Bolivia's early family planning practitioners.;I argue that the institutionalization of a family planning and sexual and reproductive health agenda in a post-military dictatorship context required advocates to achieve a language of consensus and a shared history of conceptual, political and personal evolution. This myth of a "clean break" from the alleged forced sterilization of indigenous women, as chronicled by Jorge Sanjines in the 1969 film Yawar Mallku: Blood of the Condor, provided a narrative foundation on which to build a story of progress and change that helped obfuscate unresolved inequities of race and space. Significantly, the La Paz-based community of family planning experts and reformers left unquestioned the continued categorization of Aymara and Quechua-speaking women as the nation's most "problematic" mothers. Furthermore, I argue that the department and city of Santa Cruz functioned both as an analytical foil used by paceno technocrats and health professionals to emphasize the lack of "modernization and development" of highland and valley indigenous communities, as well as a site of ongoing political challenge to the centralization of national decision-making processes in La Paz. By taking into consideration this political and cultural "periphery" I demonstrate the limitations of a sexual and reproductive health and rights agenda as applied from the center outwards.