Re/producing Legitimacy: Midwifery and Indigeneity in the Yucatán Peninsula
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is rooted in ten years of collaboration and eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with both professional and traditional midwives in the Mexican states of Quintana Roo and Yucatán. This project takes a historicized approach, tracing current configurations of race and gender in Mexico through over one hundred years of nationalist intertwinements with science, medicine, and public health projects to illuminate how Indigenous epistemologies are trivialized and marked for elimination by biomedicine. Midwifery in Mexico is a precarious profession and tradition, and over the past ten years a multiplicity of government and NGO actors have attempted to shape, constrain, support, and eliminate Indigenous midwifery practices throughout the country, sometimes simultaneously and through the same programs and laws. This research, based in a midwife-run birth house in Quintana Roo and tracing particular local, national, and international networks that midwives in seemingly peripheral places draw upon to sustain their work, examines how global health priorities such as the Millennium Development Goals become appropriated through local government programs to promote and extend nationalist projects of ethnic and racial homogenization. Through a reproductive justice framework, I reveal how this agenda inherently promotes the elimination of Indigenous midwifery practices while entrenching systems that are particularly violent for Indigenous women, a reality embedded in historically-mediated racial logics deployed by both advocates and critics of midwifery. By blending an analysis of participant observations of births, pre-natal appointments, activist meetings, Secretariat of Health midwifery training workshops, and midwifery conferences, with a focused attention to the peninsula’s history as a site of Indigenous uprising during the Caste War and as a continued site of racial imaginaries and erasure via the tourist industry, I argue that histories of Indigenous dispossession in the Yucatán are intimately linked to Indigenous women’s experiences of birth and the precarious right to practice traditional midwifery.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".