«100 million people reading and speaking Spanish are anxious to have your message»: Margaret Sanger in Puerto Rico (1925-1960)

The article reflects upon the multiple overlaps between contraception politics and eugenics through Margaret Sanger’s journey in relation to Puerto Rico. The island presents different peculiarities, as a crucial intersection between birth and population control, which seem to, in this case, live in a sort of mutual justification and symbiosis. It functioned as a prototypical laboratory for imperial relations between the United States and Latin America, and since the 1930s has been a hub for surgical sterilization, which reached overwhelming figures in the following decades: almost a third of women of reproductive age. Medium term dynamics will be explored in order to understand how this practice, fully justified by eugenics, has been legitimized and exported by the liberal-democratic power par excellence: the United States. I will also go back to the roots of the concept of “overpopulation”, which constitutes an important precedent of the logic of containment during the bipolar world and its complex political implications. The decade-long relationship between Sanger and Puerto Rican health professionals will reach its peak during the highly controversial contraceptive pill trials: an ulterior confirmation of the long trajectory of this country as «social laboratory».