Reproducing Empire

Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico

Laura Briggs

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780520222557
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520936317
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization.

Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine colonialism and globalization because for the past century it has been where the United States has expressed and fine-tuned its attitudes toward its own expansionism. Puerto Rico's history holds no simple lessons for present-day debate over globalization but does unearth some of its history. Reproducing Empire suggests that interventionist discourses of rescue, family, and sexuality fueled U.S. imperial projects and organized American colonialism.

Through the politics, biology, and medicine of eugenics, prostitution, and birth control, the United States has justified its presence in the territory's politics and society. Briggs makes an innovative contribution to Puerto Rican and U.S. history, effectively arguing that gender has been crucial to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and more broadly, to U.S. expansion elsewhere.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Colonialism: Familiar Territory
• 1. Sexuality, Medicine, and Imperialism: The International Traffic in Prostitution Policy
• 2. Sex and Citizenship: The Politics of Prostitution in Puerto Rico, 1898–1918
• 3. Debating Reproduction: Birth Control, Eugenics, and Overpopulation in Puerto Rico, 1920–1940
• 4. Demon Mothers in the Social Laboratory: Development, Overpopulation, and “the Pill,” 1940–1960
• 5. The Politics of Sterilization, 1937–1974
• 6. “I like to be in America”: Postwar Puerto Rican Migration, the Culture of Poverty, and the Moynihan Report
• Epilogue: Ghosts, Cyborgs, and Why Puerto Rico Is the Most Important Place in the World
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index