Policing the Maternal: Puerto Rican and Cuban American Literature and the Legacy of the Cold War

This dissertation considers the role of literary representations of the maternal in the development of late-twentieth-century American literature by Latinas and focuses on the complex ways in which these contemporary figurations of mothering are haunted by a historical consciousness of policed maternity, particularly in relation to controlled fertility during the Cold War. Exploring the Latina writer's preoccupation with maternity during the Latino Literary Boom of the late twentieth century, this project seeks to understand why significant histories of maternal containment, including periods of coerced sterilization and state controlled parenting are almost universally absent from literary texts that often seek to recover, reclaim, and retell the history of major waves of Latin American immigration to the US at the height of the Cold War. Building on recent discussions of the Cold War's profound influence on white women's bodies, my dissertation considers the lost narratives of maternal interventionÌ¢‰âÂ'particularly with regards to the sterilization campaign (1937-1965) in Puerto Rico in which over one third of the island's women were sterilized and the Peter Pan program (1960-1962) in Cuba wherein over 14,000 Cuban children were relocated to US orphanages. By tracing the trope of maternity through the texts of several key Latina authors in light of the political implication of these absent narratives, I will argue that through the representations of motherhood we can find the legacy of these unwritten narratives and the embedded codes through which the silence about these historical realities speak. Through an engagement with recent scholarship in the field of Latina/o studies, second and third-wave feminist theory, and the history and politics of the Cold War, this dissertation furthers recent trends in Latina scholarship that seek to provide a historical framework for what Frances Aparicio and Susana Chavez-Silverman theorize as the tropicalization and neo-colonization of the Latina body. By historicizing images of maternity in Latina literature in the context of twentieth century immigration as a Cold War phenomenon, this project also seeks to intervene in important debates by Cold War historians about the influence of the Cold War on constructions of domesticity and femininity in the US.