Speaker: Sergio Lopez
Title: The Hidden Cost of Terror-Driven Repatriations: Infant Mortality and the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Campaign
Abstract: In the 1930s, the US government started a campaign to push millions of Mexican Americans (including citizens) to leave the country. This ‘repatriation’ campaign worked by creating a deliberate climate of fear in the Mexican-American community. Because of a lack of health measures, the effect of this repatriation campaign on the health of the Mexican-American population has remained largely unknown. Building on recent work, we use childhood sex ratios from the US census as indicators of infant mortality. We find that the repatriation campaign was associated with a roughly 50% increase in infant mortality among the Mexican-American population who remained in the US.
Maggie Hendrix
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