Paper Short Abstract:

In this paper we discuss our analysis of how the multifaceted practice of mobile procreation is embedded in the cultural organizing mobility of the liminal Mexican-US borderlands.

Paper Abstract:

An extended literature (among others, Frohlick, 2007, 2015; Marre, San Román and Guerra, 2018; Marre and Briggs, 2009; Piscitelli, 2010, Simoni, 2015) includes, under the umbrella of “assisted procreation technologies” and/or “third party reproduction” (Howell and Melhuus, 2007) adoption and assisted reproductive technologies, such as insemination, in vitro fertilization with gamete and embryo donation, surrogacy and transnational sexual relations. These procreation technologies usually imply the need of assuming a degree mobility, from ways of transcending own cultural status quo, mindsets, traditions and taken for granted conventional social ways of reproducing, to physical displacements, travel, migrations or movements to other countries, either of humans or any human biological material. Beck (2012) exemplary illustrated procreative mobilities as “civil as well as scientific practices in the medical domain that do relations beyond the boundaries of states, societies or institutions by moving people, knowledge, ideas as well as biomedical ‘things’”. In this paper we discuss our analysis of how the multifaceted practice of mobile procreation is embedded in the cultural organizing mobility of the liminal Mexican-US borderlands. The research is based on a longitudinal intermittent multidisciplinary fieldwork produced between 2015 and 2022 in Ciudad Juarez (Mexico)-El Paso (US) borderland.