Creating “Modern” Families in Mexico City
Lara Braff
U Chicago
At 8:30 am, a young woman rushes into a Mexico City fertility clinic. She
is breathing heavily and a thin veneer of sweat glitters on her forehead. This
is her second in vitro fertilization cycle, so she knows this clinic’s schedule
well and knows that she is late; she was supposed to arrive promptly at
8:00 am for an ultrasound exam.
Between gasps of breath, she explains her late arrival to the other women
in the waiting room: “There was so much traffic this morning! I left my
house very early. But it took me more than two hours to get here.” Another
woman nods emphatically: “Yes, yes, yes! There was lots of traffic. My
husband drove us here, and it took us a very long time.”
She pauses, then adds: “In reality, we are many here... and
people still want to have more children— like we do!” They laugh.
During the course of my recent fieldwork in Mexico City, people
often spoke about assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) as
being somewhat out-of-place in this crowded context where
fertility control—not facilitation— remains a public priority.
Even as they struggled to conceive, the men and women I knew
expressed anxiety about current reproductive practices and overpopulation.
In fact, they would tell me that the “real problem” was not infertility—the condition
that ailed them—but rather that “people here still have too many children.” In an effort to
make sense of their use of ARTs, they grappled with the contradiction
between their concerns about the “population problem” and their personal desires to
have their “own” child.
One such effort, described here, involved co-opting idioms of modernity—
often associated with limiting reproduction—to justify using ARTs in terms of new familial
ideals. Mexican Fertility Clinics and Population Politics
In many ways, fertility clinics in Mexico are similar to those elsewhere in the world. They offer high-tech treatments, including in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination, intended to help people conceive.
Such treatments can be physically invasive and emotionally exhausting, as well as financially costly.
They are often perceived as elitist luxuries that perpetuate social stratification, as
wealthier patients can more easily go to high quality clinics, undergo multiple treatment cycles, and
utilize technologies and services (like donated gametes) that are difficult for the less wealthy to
access.
Nevertheless, recent studies conducted in the Global South— such as Marcia Inhorn’s work in
Egypt and Elizabeth Roberts’s work in Ecuador—show that ARTs are increasingly used by people
of limited resources who find ways to pay for them, such as by borrowing from friends and family.
Regardless of people’s (in)ability to financially afford ARTs, in these and other societies the social pressure
to reproduce can be quite high as having children is locally construed as integral to a person’s
gender identity, kin relationships and societal participation.
In addition to financial constraints, patients in Mexico City fertility clinics also contend
with the tension between their own assisted reproductive practices and the historically entrenched
discourse on the “population problem” that shapes current views of reproduction.
In the early nineteenth century, leaders of the newly independent nation aimed
to expand and whiten Mexico’s population by encouraging European immigration. Although
large numbers of Europeans never arrived, Mexico’s nativeborn population grew rapidly as
mortality rates fell and fertility rates rose.
After a heavy loss of life during the Mexican Revolution, efforts to re-grow the nation were
overtly pronatal in accordance with the prevailing nationalistic ethos that located the greatness
of Mexico in its large families and expansive population. By the 1960s, population growth
came to be seen as a national liability and high fertility rates were targeted as its insidious cause.
Beginning in the mid-1970s (when most of my informants were born), the government launched
massive family planning programs promoting contraceptive use and extolling the virtues of small families.
Such programs are now credited with the sharp decline of the fertility rate from 6.8 children
per woman in 1970 to about 2.2 children per woman today.
However, this rate—hovering just above replacement level—has not entirely quelled population-related
anxieties. As Carmen, a public health official, told me:
We are still in the process of the demographic transition ... The goal that Mexico had for 2006 was to get
to a fecundity rate of 2.1. We did not get there. One-tenth is easily said, but one-tenth means several
years ... And all of our indicators [of family planning] went down because we let our guard down
and because we were a conservative government. So, we are re-doing it.
And still we are not in a replacement situation. Mexico’s population continues to grow. We are
many millions and each minutefour children are born. So, I still cannot sing victory.
The nation’s low—but allegedly not low enough—fertility rate continues to concern state officials
because it is seen as both the main cause of population growth and a sign of stalled modernization (ie,
an “incomplete” demographic transition).
These views are based on a measurement that conveys information about quantified, cumulative
reproductive behaviors. Yet, in practice, the fertility rate is usually disaggregated as public health interventions
target the sexual practices of specific groups, like the indigenous and urban poor, who are said
to be major contributors to population growth.
Justifying ARTs through Modern Familial Ideals Though few of my informants
directly cited the national fertility rate, many of them did feel acutely aware of the so-called population
problem, especially as they squeezed onto packed subway trains or sat bumper-to-bumper
in stalled traffic en route to the fertility clinic. Their daily experiences of a crowded public sphere,
along with exposure to campaigns promoting contraceptive use, reminded them of the social conundrums
rooted in the existence of too many bodies.
Hence, some saw their own concentrated, costly, high-tech efforts to have children
as socially out-of-place. Striving to justify their use of ARTs, they often portrayed it as a “modern”
way not just to reproduce but also to create a family and, more specifically, to create a modern
Mexican family—one fortified by strong marital bonds and affective ties within the nuclear household.
A woman, whose husband went to work in the US for one year so they could afford fertility treatment,
explained to me why she was using ARTs: “For the love of my partner. And to have a child,
to feel what it is to be a mother...So many reasons! But, mostly, for love.”
Likewise, one man told me: “I feel that having children is the culmination of the [marital]These individuals, like others, sought to justify their use of ARTs by invoking modern marital ideals.
relationship.”
As Jennifer Hirsch describes, one way that Mexican youth today self-consciously inhabit modern
gendered identities is through the formation of companionate marriages. Such marriages, in
contrast to traditional marriages of the past, include features like mutual friendship, trust and both
emotional and sexual intimacy between spouses. Hirsch argues that this global marital ideology is not
simply mimicked or directly internalized by people in Mexico; rather, it is co-opted in culturally specific
ways.
Likewise, the people I knew seemed to localize and mobilize similar modernist romantic ideals
in order to justify using ARTs in a context where fertility control is prioritized and population-related
anxiety is palpable, yet where having children remains personally and socially valued. It was one
of several ways that they negotiated the tension between sociopolitical pressures to control reproduction
and their own labored efforts to conceive.
Ultimately, their experiences illuminate how reproductive desires, population politics and
modernist ideals converge around the local use of ARTs, molding this now global technology into
distinctively Mexican forms.
Lara Braff is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. She is currently writing her dissertation on
the cultural meanings and social implications of ARTs in Mexico City. Her fieldwork there was supported by
a Fulbright-Hays grant.
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