ximena lópez carrillo
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In 1966, researcher Charles Meisgeier reported that the Mexican-descent population in Texas had disproportionately high rates of intellectual disability, which required the state mental health authorities to design different mental health intervention programs for the Mexican parts of the state. Meisgeier’s report was part of a body of scientific literature in the 1960s that pathologized Mexicanness, racialized disability, and eventually contributed to making a wide mental health desert in South Texas. These works often attributed the Mexicans’ supposed proclivity to their socioeconomic standing, their history of immigration and mobility, poor education, and cultural practices that prevented them from receiving professional medical help at an early age.
This talk revisits the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation Archives to show how the process of pathologization of Mexicanness got translated into the state’s mental health policy during the 1960s and 1970s. It also reflects on the value of historical archives to remember and reinterpret the past, to counter harming racial discourses, and to identify the impact of discriminatory state practices on people’s daily lives. My reflection comes one year after the Customs and Border Patrol requested permission from the National Archives to destroy all their medical records after 20 years.
Ximena López Carrillo is Lecturer in Latinx Studies in the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. Her teaching interests include the history of medicine and mental health, the construction of race in the United States, migration, and the politics of health and disease. Her current project examines the emergence of a Latinx mental health activism during the 1960s and 1970s as an attempt to correct the pseudoscientific theories associating Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans with mental illness and criminality. By tracing the intellectual debates of psychiatrists and psychologists in Texas, California, and New York, she examines the role of mental health discourses in the construction of the Latinx identity and the inter-ethnic alliances between Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans Her research was showcased in Nexos-(Dis)capacidades, a blog about mental health, disability, and health policies.
She has worked at the Stony Brook Center for Civic Justice to create the Academy of Civic Life, a humanities-focused pre-college program for underserved high school students on Long Island, New York. She coauthored the article “Los Pacientes del Manicomio La Castañeda y sus diagnósticos. Una historia de la clínica psiquiátrica en México, 1910-1968,” and contributed the chapter “La Psiquiatría Infantil en la Secretaría de Educación Pública y la Emergencia de la Educación Especial”to the edited volumen La Psiquiatría Más Allá de sus Fronteras. She has also written about the history of intellectual disability in Mexico.
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