The article explores the reception of eugenics in Argentina in the 1930s. It aims, first, to place eugenics as a topic of expert and public concern against the background of the “demographic fears” associated with the decline of the birthrate among the white population and the closing of European immigration that followed the world depression. Second, it underscores the role played by Italian and German cultural and scientific transnational networks in the reception and dissemination of medical ideas of race improvement. Based upon previously overlooked sources of the Prussian state archives, the essay seeks to revise conventional “neo-Lamarckian” explanations about Latin America’s (and Argentina’s) alleged immunity to negative eugenics. By examining the activities of the Asociación de Biotipología, the debates of the Second Pan-American Conference on Eugenics, and the academic exchanges fostered by the Deutsche-Iberoamerikanische Ärzteakademie, the article argues that Argentine medical practitioners were much more receptive to eugenic sterilization than previously claimed. As they made great efforts to separate it from other “unscientific” forms of racism, they lent credibility to practices which, as recent research has shown, many of them had adopted on allegedly therapeutic grounds.

This article seeks to outline the main features of the stereotype of family promoted by the emblematic institution of the Argentine eugenics movement, the Argentine Eugenics Society (Sociedad Argentina de Eugenesia), an organization founded in 1945 that remained active in the country until the 1970s. It explores the conduct expected both of the man/husband and of the woman/wife, and shows the principal behaviors required to constitute the ideal family, the outlines of which were based on set of sexual moral with an eminently religious bias.

This article analyzes the ruptures from and continuations of eugenicist ideology in the work of Salvador de Toledo Piza Jr., a geneticist and professor at the Escola Superior de Agricultura “Luiz de Queiroz.” Documentary research involving articles, correspondence, and notes from this former director of the Boletim de Eugenia investigates the reshaping of eugenics in the post-1945 context, a time when Piza Jr. began to publicize evolutionism. While Piza Jr. stopped publicly defending eugenics in latter half of the twentieth century, he maintained his racialized notions into the 1950s, corresponded with eugenicist groups in the 1960s, and supported a hierarchical interpretation of human evolution until the late 1980s.

After decades of efforts to build a more inclusive and democratic world, it appears that the "old ideas" of eugenics have not gone away. Some of these ideas may have been hiding in the archives, but others were not. They continue to provide terminologies and explanations for a number of issues relating to poverty, education, access to health care, and disability. During the recent Covid pandemic, ideas of economic and social productivity flowed readily from a eugenic vocabulary which, although pruned of its openly racist metaphors nevertheless carried echoes of past practices and patterns of discrimination against individuals based on age, race, and gender. Eugenics, it seemed, could be resurrected as easily by politicians as by ordinary people. The main aim of this thematic Dossier, published by Revista Brasileira de História, is to give visibility to an academic debate that is often seen through the prism of its national traditions. Our shared conviction is that it is necessary for scholars of eugenics to go beyond the confines of their own national canons and engage with collaborative work. More importantly, scholarly engagement with anti-eugenic activism must also be constantly and systematically maintained, as current work on the legacies of eugenics continues to generate new ways of responding to ongoing demands for reproductive, social, and racial justice. Legacies of eugenics are pervasive and enduring. Racial prejudice, biologi

Introduction to "Present-days eugenics", monographic issue of "Contemporanea. Rivista dell'800 e del 900"