A Conversation with Virginia Espino, Historian and Producer of No Más Bebés (2015)

Journal of Feminist Scholarship Volume 11 Issue 11 Fall 2016 Article 4 Fall 2016 Creating Consciousness, Creating a Legend: A Conversation with Virginia Espino, Historian and Producer of No Más Bebés (2015) Anupama Arora University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Laura K. Muñoz Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi Sandrine Sanos Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/jfs Part of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Law and Gender Commons, and the Women's History Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Arora, Anupama, Laura K. Muñoz, and Sandrine Sanos. 2018. "Creating Consciousness, Creating a Legend: A Conversation with Virginia Espino, Historian and Producer of No Más Bebés (2015)." Journal of Feminist Scholarship 11 (Fall): 16-27. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/jfs/vol11/iss11/4 This Special Issue Introduction is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Feminist Scholarship by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Arora et al.: Creating Consciousness Creating Consciousness, Creating a Legend: A Conversation with Virginia Espino, Historian and Producer of No Más Bebés (2015) Anupama Arora, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Laura K. Muñoz, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi Sandrine Sanos, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi Copyright by Anupama Arora, Laura K. Muñoz, and Sandrine Sanos “Inside I feel pain, remembering,” says Carolina “Maria” Hurtado, in Spanish. Consuelo Hermosillo echoes her in English, “It’s like when you bury somebody, you’re always going to carry it in your head.” Whether they speak in Spanish or English, the pain and anger felt by these Mexicanas, who were coercively sterilized in the Los Angeles County–University of Southern California Medical Center in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is palpable. While traumatized, they were not, however, silenced by their pain and spoke up with courage against this injustice as part of a group of ten plaintiffs in the 1978 Madrigal v. Quilligan case, a federal class- action lawsuit filed against E. J. Quilligan, MD, and other hospital obstetricians. The voices of Dolores Madrigal, the lead plaintiff, and other Latina women who participated in the lawsuit are at the center of a recent documentary, No Más Bebés (No More Babies) (2015) by Virginia Espino and Renee Tajima-Peña. Told in a moving manner, interspersed with interviews and a variety of archival Virginia Espino material, the documentary shows these women’s little-known story that resonates with intersectionality across issues—of gender, race, immigration, class, and reproductive choice—of enduring and urgent relevance. Espino and Tajima-Peña have been friends for more than a decade; their mutual interests and their children coincidentally brought them together. Espino, who calls herself a “daughter of California,” grew up in her hometown of Los Angeles. She is a historian by training (taught by Vicki L. Ruiz) and earned her PhD in American History from Arizona State University, where she specialized in Latina and Latino history, as well as public history. From 2008 until recently, she worked as an oral historian for the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Oral History Research. She is now dedicated full time to Moon Canyon Films, the company she and Tajima-Peña created to coproduce No Más Bebés. While No Más Bébes is Espino’s first film, Tajima-Peña has been making films since the 1980s. A professor, writer, filmmaker, and Asian American activist, Tajima-Peña’s corpus revolves around issues of race, immigration, injustice, and the legal system. Currently a professor at UCLA, Tajima-Peña is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and a Guggenheim Fellow (2011) who, in addition to her best-known work, Who Killed Vincent 16 Journal of Feminist Scholarship 11 (Fall 2016) Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Vol. 11 [2018], Iss. 11, Art. 4 Chin? (1987), has made many other films, among them Calavera Highway (2008), Skate Manzanar (2001), Labor Women (2002), and My America... Or Honk If You Love Buddha (1997). She is currently at work on an interactive historical documentary and video-game-based learning project on the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, Building History 3.0. At the fortieth anniversary of the filing of theMadrigal v. Quilligan court case, Tajima-Peña and Espino reassemble and reconstruct the story to remind viewers of a tragic, shocking, and buried episode in our nation’s past and history. The film interviews both the women who were sterilized under duress and the doctors who worked in the hospital. It also focuses on another central figure, one of the attorneys who represented these women, Antonia Hernández, then a recent graduate of the UCLA law school; she, along with Anna NietoGomez, another member of the Chicana feminist organization Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional, offered legal assistance to the women.1 In the trial, they argued that under Roe v. Wade (1973) a woman’s right to bear a child was constitutionally protected just as much as her right to abortion. As the film’s director writes, the documentary “attempts to navigate the gulf between accountability, as it is legally defined, and justice—the muddy waters through which policy, gender, race, and ethics travel from the public sphere to the maternity floor and which structure an intimate moment of a woman’s life: birth” (Tajima-Peña 2013). The documentary situates this episode within a broad historical and social milieu, and illuminates how the contexts of Chicano nationalism and white mainstream feminism came to bear on the events. It also directs our attention to how reproduction was racialized by the eugenics and anti-immigration movements in California. It is not surprising, then, to see how, within this environment, the federal government sponsored and supported population-control measures and how family planning programs were abused, leaving racial minority, immigrant, and poor white women most vulnerable. Thus, while the film focuses on Latina women, their story echoes the experiences of Puerto Rican, African American, and Native American women who have all been subjected to sterilization abuse. Emotionally powerful and aesthetically savvy, the documentary tells a story of the politics of reproductive control, of reproductive rights and justice, of tragedy and survival. It is a salute to the courage of the “Madrigal 10”: Guadalupe Acosta, Estella Benavides, Maria Figueroa, Rebecca Figueroa, Maria Hurtado, Consuelo Hermosillo, Georgina Hernandez, Dolores Madrigal, Helena Orozco, and Jovita Rivera. In the following interview, Virginia Espino, historian and producer of the film, speaks about her research on this marginalized episode in history, the challenges and rewards of collaboration, intersectionality, and the story’s importance for Chicana history and reproductive justice. Hidden Histories and the Making of a Film Anupama Arora, Laura Muñoz, and Sandrine Sanos (JFS): We wanted for you to talk a little bit about how you came to the topic of your film, why it became so important, and if there were any difficulties when you were doing the writing, and during the filming as well. Virginia Espino (VE): I learned about this history through Dr. Vicki Ruiz in one of her courses; she was my graduate school mentor, and one of the things she tries to do in her classes is to bring out these histories, these unknown histories, these untold histories, these histories that have been what she calls “hidden in the shadows.” She tries to bring them out of obscurity, so in her lectures she talks about things that generally haven’t been discussed. At that time, in the mid 1990s, it was primarily Chicano historiography. There weren’t a lot of books written about Chicana feminism. Maylei Blackwell’s ¡Chicana Power! only came out in 2013.2 Vicki mentioned the Journal of Feminist Scholarship 11 (Fall 2016) 17 Arora et al.: Creating Consciousness history [of sterilization] in a class, and she mentioned it from the perspective of the activism, the fact that there was a lawsuit. She didn’t talk about it in terms of racism only, but how these women fought back during the Chicano movement, these Chicana activists. I [wound up] in the neighborhood I grew up in, very close to my home, like ten minutes away. But not only that, it was part of my whole surroundings because of the county hospital towers. I don’t know if you’ve been to Los Angeles, but if you’ve ever driven on the 5 freeway or the 10 freeway, you see the hospital looming large across that part of LA. If you stay primarily on the West Side, you’re never going to see it. So it was like a fixture, in my childhood and my youth, and to hear that these sterilizations were taking place at the time when I was growing up, in the 1970s, and I never learned about it, never heard about it, never read about it, I was shocked. I was angry. But at the same time, that is why I was in graduate school and I wanted to do my PhD in history, to learn about these stories, to uncover these stories. So I made it my project, to write my first paper. I think I wrote my very first paper on this issue and Vicki published that later on in Las Obreras journal through UCLA (Espino 2002). So it started there, and became a bigger project with my dissertation. I wanted to tie it into questions and issues of population control. [I looked at] Thomas Malthus and the principle of overpopulation [that] started with him. Some of the ideas that he talks about in regards to Europe and the peasant class, you could see some parallels in the discussions of overpopulation in the 1970s, and some of the ideas that Paul Ehrlich talks about go back to Malthus and Mathusianism; so that’s what I looked at in my dissertation.3 But Vicki is very much interested in how we can write history for the public good, such as public history, museum studies, etc.

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