In the FPP Interview with Nara Milanich, Milanich discusses how parentage testing is a “technology that absorbs the social and political agendas of those who use it,” from the Nazis’ obsession with paternity to recent DNA testing of immigrant families at the US/Mexico border to expose “fake families.” Hear Milanich read live at “What Just Happened: Writers Respond to Our American Crises” at 6pm this Sunday, November 10th at Silvana in Harlem. She’ll be joined by Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Max S. Gordon, David Tomas Martinez, Ed Morales and Sarah Van Arsdale. Silvana is located at 300 W. 116th St near Frederick Douglass Blvd. Admission is free.

After declaring your new book Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father “dazzling in scope and masterfully written,” Steven Mintz says Paternity “delves beneath the quest for certainty to find what we are really looking for in paternity and why it continues to haunt us.” What led you to write a book about paternity?

I was working on a totally different topic when I stumbled across some strange medico-legal texts from the 1930s and ’40s that explored different methods of testing paternity. There was an essay by a Venezuelan lawyer about using hereditary blood types to reveal the father’s identity. A Brazilian dentist claimed to be able to establish paternity by examining the teeth of a man and his putative child. An Argentine treatise described the use of fingerprints to fix paternity.

I was struck by the curious methods proposed. Did they actually work? And when had tests of biological paternity developed? The short answer was that the test we today take for granted, the one that websites promote as 99.9% accurate and pharmacies sell for less than $100, is a very recent development. It dates only from the 1980s, when a British geneticist developed the technique known as DNA fingerprinting.

As a historian of family and gender, I was curious about the social and cultural history of this pre-DNA search for the father. Scholars have written excellent histories of contraceptives, artificial insemination and even sperm banks. To my surprise, no one had written a history of paternity testing. Tracing the rise of testing illuminates changing ideas about family, sexuality, childhood, race, nationhood, and identity.

What are some of the ways that nations have used paternity science for racist or nationalistic purposes, as you write in the book?

The most disturbing case is that of the Nazis. Because the National Socialist logic of racial classification was genealogical, it required that an individual had two known biological parents in order to know the individual’s “race.” The Nazis worried that adoption, illegitimacy, and adultery could obscure parentage and hence racial identity, causing Jewish individuals to be falsely classified as Aryans and Aryans as Jews. Testing paternity thus became an obsession.

But the Nazis’ obsessions inadvertently opened up a potential avenue of escape for their victims. Jews could strategically challenge their own paternity in order to change their racial classification. People went to court claiming, for example, that their true father wasn’t their mother’s Jewish husband, but the Aryan gardener with whom she’d had an affair. It’s likely that thousands of Jews were able to save themselves and their family members using this strategy. In the Third Reich, paternity testing literally became a matter of life and death.

Do you see echoes of this in the United States today, with the Department of Homeland Security’s recent pilot program to test the DNA of migrants on the southern border?

Following the separation of thousands of migrant parents and children on the border last summer, some observers advocated using DNA tests to reunite them. More recently, the government piloted a new “rapid DNA” program to genetically test migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border. The purpose is to expose “fake families,” whom the government claims are falsely posing as kin. I wrote about this practice in a recent op-ed. The testing of immigrant families has become increasingly common, and as I discuss in the book, the origins of this practice lie in the Cold War.

Parentage testing can be used to connect and reunite but also to separate and exclude. DNA has been called a “truth machine,” but this characterization is somewhat misleading. It’s a technology that absorbs the social and political agendas of those who use it.

You teach a class at Barnard College called “Seeking Asylum” that studies the roots of Central American emigration with a particular focus on American empire and policy in this hemisphere. As part of the class, you take students to volunteer with legal aid at an immigrant detention center in Dilley, TX. Tell us about this work.

Beginning in 2014, the border witnessed a surge of refugees from Central America, many of whom were fleeing gangs or domestic violence and arrived seeking asylum in the United States. The surge attracted media attention because it included large numbers of what the administrative lingo called “family units,” mothers with children, as well as unaccompanied minors. In response, the Obama administration built detention facilities specifically for these “family units.” The largest is the South Texas Family Residential Facility, located on a dusty county road in Dilley, Texas, a little over an hour south of San Antonio. While it’s euphemistically called a “family residence,” the facility is in fact a for-profit prison.

While at the Dilley Pro Bono Project recently the facility was at capacity with more than 2,000 mothers and children. A few arrived at the border with the “Caravan” that’s been in the news. Over and over again, we heard from women who fled from their home countries because of imminent harm to themselves and their children—harm from gangs who extort, threaten, and murder community members or who try to recruit young boys as gang members and young girls as “girlfriends.” Many other women were fleeing from violent partners.

What surprised you most about what you witnessed at the detention facility?

The women detained in this facility have been through unspeakable traumas—the violence in their home countries that forced them to leave as well as violence and deprivation on the journey northward, often with very young children in tow. But when they told their stories, the trauma they have the hardest time making sense of was what happened to them once they crossed the border to “safety” in the U.S. With equal parts incredulity and indignation, they recounted how they and their children were warehoused in cement bunkers where they slept on the floor next to overflowing toilets. They described being taunted by Border Patrol agents who threw away food in front of hungry children. Women repeatedly said things like, “I never imagined this could happen in the United States.”

Once they were transferred to the Dilley facility, many women were likewise at a loss to understand why they were there. One woman inquired, “Is this a jail?” And then she asked, “But what have I done?”

Nara Milanich is Professor of Latin American History at Barnard College, Columbia University. She teaches and researches the history of family, childhood, reproduction, gender, and law. Her most recent book, Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019), came out in June and received coverage in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Salon, NPR, Scientific American, CNN, and Time, among other places. The book explores the quest for a scientific proof of paternity and the social questions that, over the course of the twentieth century, these new genetic technologies were called on to answer. One of the book’s arguments is that since the Cold War, genetic tests of parentage have been used in immigration proceedings to fix the racial boundaries of the nation. Milanich has also worked as a translator and legal assistant for Central American mothers and children incarcerated in the country’s largest immigrant detention center, located in Dilley, Texas. She has written about this experience in the Washington Post, Dissent, and NACLA: North American Congress on Latin America. Last semester, she taught a class on the asylum crisis and took her undergraduate students to work in the detention center.