Description
- Abstract:
- This thesis documents how the relationship between race and mental health shaped Mexican youths’ experiences of childhood and young adulthood in California. I argue that eugenics and white supremacist undercurrents within psychology, education, criminal justice, hospitals, and the state and federal governments codified mental health terms- intelligence, feeblemindedness, delinquency, criminality- to track mass numbers of Mexican youth in California towards segregation, educational neglect, labor exploitation, criminal convictions, incarceration, institutionalization, and reproductive sterilization. To identify trends of resistance to these institutional violences, this thesis focuses on the historical community mobilization for Mexicans’ mental and bodily autonomy. My work also argues that in California through the 1920s-1970s, the mutually-reinforcing stigma against both Mexicans and mental illness facilitated the aforementioned violences, which were medicalized as appropriate mental health care. The intersectional stigmatization of “mentally ill” Mexicans dissolved the government’s accountability in the matter.
- Notes:
- Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2022
- Concentration: History
Access Conditions
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- Restrictions on Use
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Citation
Rodríguez, Básil,
"The Racialized Application of Mental Health Care: Historical Experiences of Mexican Childhood in California from the 1920s-1970s"
(2022).
History Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/xakd-m293
