This conference invites scholars, activists, and artists to look at what we can do to address the legacies of eugenics across Latin America.

 

Across these two days, we will be looking at how eugenics and its ramifications has played out in different national and regional contexts across Latin America to such painful (and often deadly) effect. But equally important, we will look to highlight the brave work that survivors, activists, scholars and artists have carried out and tirelessly continue to carry out to expose acts carried out in the name of (or in the shadows of) eugenics, and fight for justice for those that have been most targeted by such ideas and practices.

 

As this pandemic moment exposes the stark inequalities and inequities in our society, we encounter a global resurgence of eugenic thinking and practices and the urgency of these discussions are unprecedented. But likewise across Latin America, whether in the battle for justice for the 300,000+ women sterilized in Peru, around the mass mobilization and subsequent process for rewriting of the constitution in Chile, in disability activism fighting back against an increasingly ableist and supremacist governance of Brazil, in the collective imagining and building of a post-genocide Guatemala, or in the fight for reproductive justice in Puerto Rico, a new momentum for confronting such legacies across Latin America is being generated unseen anywhere else.

 

The conference ultimately invites participants and audiences alike to consider, in understanding of this history and its prevalence today, what as a collective across Latin America can be done to confront such legacies of eugenics moving forward, and what can be built in its place.