Independent Lens

Woman

I saw doctors with-- hold up the syringe and say, "You want this shot? You want this shot? Sign. Sign."

Narrator

As a nation, we want to believe that atrocities targeting minority groups are behind us, but victims tell another story.

Woman 2

I don't remember seeing her face. I just remember her voice telling me, "Jita, you'd better sign those papers or your--your baby probably could die here."

Narrator

Homemaker Renee Tajima-Pea reveals the heartbreaking story of the Latino women who came to give birth at L.A. County Hospital and left unable to ever bear children again. Do you know that you've been sterilized?

Man

I couldn't believe that something like this was happening in the United States.

Woman 3

Hundreds of files.

Man 2

To sort of claim that we're part of a greater goal of sterilizing the Mexican population-- I mean, I'm offended by that. These were the pillars of the medical community.

Woman 2

That's not their decision. It's our decision.

Narrator

"No Mas Bebes," now, only on "Independent Lens."

Distant ambulance siren

Woman speaking Spanish

Man

They were extremely fearful, being in that foreign situation and, um, being told that you need an emergency Caesarean section and you can feel blood pouring down your leg, and at that time, signing a consent for a tubal ligation. The doctor walked in and said, "Everything went fine," and I said, "Well, Doctor, what am I going to use? "Am I going to use birth control, or are they going to put me the--whatever I was using before?" He goes, "No, you don't need anything. We cut your tubes," and I said, "Why?" He goes, "Well... you signed for it." I said, "Me?" I go, "I don't remember nothing."

Walter Cronkite

This birth is, in reality, part of a statewide birth control program. The aim is to space out or limit children born to the poor, the poor who cannot adequately feed or clothe the children they already have. To sort of claim that we-- well, we're part of a greater goal of sterilizing the Mexican population that--that immigrates to Los Angeles, I mean, I'm offended by that. That's not what we did. That's not what we discussed. That's not what anybody even intimated. There was shock last month over the revelation that the State of Virginia sterilized thousands of persons between 1922 and 1972 in a program aimed at ridding the state of so-called misfits. Now it develops that similar programs were carried out in some 30 states.

Man

Documents collected from state records indicate the vast majority of the sterilizations took place in 12 states, with California accounting for nearly a third of the total.

Overlapping chatter

Men singing in Spanish

Singing continues

Man

One of the senior residents showed us a tubal ligation book, where you signed up women for a tubal ligation, and he said, "I want to-- "I want you to ask all these girls if they want their tubes tied; I don't care how old they are," and I said, "Did you ask them during labor?" and he said, "Sure, after the eighth pain. That's how it's done, isn't it?" "It's too much pain." I saw doctors ref--hold up the syringe and say, "You know, do you want this shot? Do you want this shot? No mas dolor. This"-- showing the needle-- "This'll take away the--the pain. Sign. Sign."

Ambulance siren

Man

This is the emergency department in Los Angeles County USC Medical Center.

Man 2

This is a war zone. You'd call it the war zone. You'd open the doors to Labor and Delivery, and there would be, you know, women on gurneys laboring, uh, in the hallways because we didn't have enough room. It was rushed. It was last-minute decision-making with a woman who's frightened because all of a sudden, she's told she's got to undergo major surgery. She's being wheeled down in a gurney, and they say, "Look, you got to get a-- got to get a signature. "We're going to go in there and do a tubal ligation. We got to get a signature. Let's--you know, you know," and then so you'd just hand it to her and just, "Sign here." She didn't even read it. The tubal ligation takes place at the end of the Caesarean section. You've sewn the uterus up. The baby's been delivered, mother is stable, and the tubes...get tied-- cut, tied, burned, whatever was done--the idea being that these patients are not to get pregnant again. I just see people behi--uh, passing, and I say, "When are they going to take me? When are they going to take me?" and this lady came up to me, and I--I just--I don't remember seeing her face. I just remember her voice telling me, "Jita, you'd better sign those papers or your baby probably could die here."

Male singer

We hold each other tight In the hope of...

Rosenfeld

I couldn't believe that something like this was happening in the United States.

Panting

Rosenfeld

If you look at the practices of Germany, that was the first thing they did, was to sterilize unwanted Jews, gypsies. My grandfather, who was an Orthodox rabbi, who was a Torah scholar, um, I was always told to talk up if I didn't feel something was right. Just after work, I would spend an hour in typing up these letters and trying to explain what was going on. December 14th, 1974, Congress of Racial Equality,

Reverend Jesse L. Jackson

"Protect indigent women from those doctors." Helen Gurley Brown, Editor, "Cosmopolitan": "Is it involuntary without informed consent?"

Woman

Nobody knew. He will tell you that he went to many places, seeking anyone to listen to them, and he finally ended up in the Legal Aid office of Model City. It's on Brooklyn Avenue, and it just so happens that we listened. Hernndez: I am a kid out of East L.A. I had just graduated from the UCLA School of Law and had started working at an organization called the Center for Law and Poverty, and I remember one day, Dr. Rosenfeld, with all his curly hair, coming in, stating that he was a doctor at L.A. County USC, and that he had information that indicated that doctors were sterilizing women, predominantly Latina, Spanish-speaking women, without their consent.

Rosenfeld

I went through the tubal sterilization book at L.A. County, and then asked the woman who was in charge of medical records to pull up the charts. Hernndez: All I remember is these boxes with hundreds of files. Hundreds of files.

Radio deejay

3:04. Good afternoon... Hernndez; I must have spent months, literally-- I used to have a little Datsun-- driving up and down Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, East L.A., trying to find these women. All we had was hospital records, um, nothing else, and many of the women, the statute of limitations, the time to file, had expired. There were many, many more women.

Woman 2

Uh-oh.

Speaking Spanish

Woman 2

These beans have cheese. Everybody eats cheese? Heh heh! I had plans to have a lot of kids. Like my sister says, "I don't know how you handle all the kids." I could babysit, I could cook a big pot of food, and it's no problem for me. That was my plan, to have probably--probably 5, 4 or 5. My husband wanted 10, but I don't want--it was too much. Some women didn't know anything. Some of them signed right in the midst of labor. Some of them don't even remember signing, and the scribbling. Um, and so I--here I is, this young lawyer, going into somebody's home, and for the first time telling them, "Do you know that you've been sterilized?"

Carol

My mom does not speak English. She understands some. When we were growing up, no matter where we went, there was always one of us 5 to translate for my mom. We'd get on the bus, and we'd go to the hospital. We'd get on the bus and go downtown.

Man

I arrived in Los Angeles. I had no clue what Hispanic culture, language, mors, anything.

Women speaking Spanish

Neuman

We met our junior and senior residents. We had approximately an hour orientation, and they said, "Go."

Chuckles

Neuman

Patient interaction was a little more difficult for me.

Rosenfeld

Most people wouldn't believe it unless they heard it directly, so I went around with a couple of investigative reporters from the "L.A. Times" when I would talk to other doctors. "One thing I picked up this year "was a whole new prejudice. I didn't have anything against Mexicans when I came here." Um, another doc said-- Dr. Foster--"Yeah, "All they do is screw, drink, and drive. '59 Chevys with ruffles on the top with baby boots."

Hermosillo

If you speak English, they treat you one way. You don't speak English, they treat you another way. That's how I see it.

Antonia

Finding common words to explain medical terms-- medical terms that I myself did not understand-- and then explain to them because, you know, they--they truly believed. I mean, it was a common misperception coming from Mexico. Yeah, tying of the tubes. The--you know, if the patient spoke English, she would say, "Well, what we can do is we can tie your tubes." We didn't say, "We're going to tie and cut your tubes." It was "tie your tubes," and so that's--and-- and so some people believed that, "Well, if they're tying my tubes, they can come untied." One of the women shared with me that she had heard the term "esterilizacion," and so she always thought, when they translated the word to her at the hospital, that it was a cleaning. Sterilization, that it was a cleaning of the womb or something; she understood it to be that.

Narrator

A resolution of the American Medical Association states that an intelligent recognition of the need for population control is a matter of responsible medical practice. Tubal ligation can be accomplished either vaginally or abdominally. It has no effect on menstruation or ovulation.

Benker

So the ideology is "we're saving the planet by keeping these people from reproducing any more than they already are."

Man

Pop, pop There's another pop There's another pop Overpopulation It's a tricky situation A pop, pop, there's another pop Overpop, another baby boom but there isn't much room...

Woman

"The Population Bomb" was a call to arms to stop having so many children. The book had a huge impact on the general public. It was really the impetus for kind of creating the population control lobby, uh, that was cemented in the 1970s and still exists to this day.

Ehrlich

I am a doomsayer because I do believe doom is coming. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death, in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.

Man

When you talk about family planning back in the Seventies, it was a really big deal, and there were lots of lobbying interests, nonprofit organizations that wanted to make sure that we had population under control. Donald Rumsfeld, the White House counselor, said today Washington eventually would have to do something about this country's rapidly growing population. For example, he said, it'll have to decide about persuading or coercing its citizens to have fewer children. That's where the money was coming from, and there was a lot of it in the late 1960s, early Seventies. Public institutions were able to apply for money from a variety of new federal programs. In its generalities, it was a great idea, uh, provided a service that, uh, people in--in the lower end of the economic strata simply did not have before. This was a great idea, and it just shows you what can happen, the unintended consequences of an unregulated flow of money. Four weeks ago in Montgomery, Alabama, two black sisters-- Minnie Relf, 14 years old, and Mary Alice Relf, 12 years old-- were sterilized. They were operated on at a clinic which gets money from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity. Later, the children's mother, who is illiterate, said she had put a mark on a paper agreeing to something, but not sterilization. I remember vividly talking to some of my--my buddies who were from the South, you know, who said, "Well, in Mississippi we call it a Mississippi appendectomy." You know, a woman would-- African-American woman would go into a Mississippi hospital and then told that she had acute appendicitis and come out sterilized, you know? It happened to--to--to-- to white, poor people from Appalachia. It happened to poor, black people. It happened to poor, Latino people. It was--it was that sense of--that these poor people were having too many babies. I remember realizing that a class action lawsuit was the only way that we could go to court to try to stop the practice.

Woman

Nurseries are jammed with newborn babies, and county USC officials predict they'll be delivering twice as many babies this summer as years past.

Frank Reynolds

President Nixon signed a bill today setting up a commission to study population growth in the United States. He said it's a highly explosive problem, and he named John D. Rockefeller III of New York to head the commission.

Walter Cronkite

The program now amounts to more than $4 million, an additional million from foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller. My name is, uh, Edward J. Quilligan-- Ted Quilligan. Um, at the time the case was going on, I was head of the Woman's Hospital.

Rosenfeld

Dr. Quilligan was extremely prominent in the field, you know, probably the top two or 3 highly regarded, uh, chiefs of obstetrics and gynecology in the United States. He came from Yale.

Blanchette

He set an ethical standard that our-- our responsibility was to take care of the patient. Dr. Quilligan was, you know, a revered and loved and respected outstanding leader, and remains so, uh, today. I mean, we all--you know, we all revered the Q. I don't think there's one resident who went through that program while he was the chair that didn't love that man.

Benker

We're assigned to the obstetrics rotation, so we all had our little, white coats and our stethoscopes, and Dr. Quilligan came out. He was--he had been brought from Yale to head this new women's hospital, and came out and took us on a little tour and said in a very proud way that they had just gotten this big grant to see how low they could cut the birth rate of the Negro and Mexican population, and we were just floored. I mean, we just, uh-- I think that's a ridiculous assertation. I--you know, I don't know anybody that was pushing family planning, particularly on any-- at least to the best of my knowledge-- on any particular group or any particular population. I think every woman deserves the right to make a choice. But why were they doing it for? I feel that they were doing it to Hispanics, but I mean, were they doing it for not supporting these kids at the, uh--in the future, or were they getting money at the hospital for doing more sterilization? I always kept those questions in me. I--I never get those answers.

Rosenfeld

Dr. Edward Quilligan at, uh, Los Angeles County Hospital, after I complained to him, this would be the third time. I wasn't there for each one of them. I doubted seriously if they were forced into sterilization. Uh, the doctors who were there told me that they weren't. I believed them. I showed him charts. I went up, and I showed him charts. I said, "See, this woman never desired sterilization," and then there was a note-- "She still refuses sterilization," and then by the fourth note-- "Patient agrees to sterilization." He brought up a problem and, uh, we looked into the problem. Um, I have no idea what his motivations are.

Blanchette

Dr. Quilligan wouldn't have known what was going on down there because, you know, uh, he's upstairs, you know, and the chief residents are running the service. So we, as residents, were the ones that were responsible, you know, to-- to take care of these patients. 'Cause he could have stopped it completely after that. He could have--you know, all you have to do is to tell the resident, "OK. "If--if I catch you doing this one time, you'll be thrown out of the program." It would have never happened again, but it kept happening.

Man on tape recorder

OK.

Spaking Spanish

Woman speaking Spanish

Man

I was an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, UCLA. I got a call from Antonia, who said that they had this case. She asked me what would the effect of the sterilizations would be, and I answered on the phone, "I think that would be very serious." About 90% of them come from rural areas. They had come from very large families, and it was highly likely that their-- that their value on having children would be very high, and so, therefore, when that opportunity was disrupted by the sterilizations, that they would suffer--suffer grievously, and so for the next 6 months or so, I worked on the case. I did interviews.

Velez-Ibanez speaking Spanish

Woman

Si.

Woman sighs

Woman speaking Spanish

Velez-Ibanez

Si. Some of them felt that, as a woman, that was the end of their lives, that their husbands was-- were going to leave them because they were no longer-- quote, unquote--"women." They could no longer produce, and part of how they saw their function as women was the ability to produce children. Some of the women-- uh, at least in 3 cases, if I remember correctly-- were termed, uh, yeguas by their husbands, that is, a--a sterile horse. I remember that while we were sitting in--in the living room and I was explaining, um, the husband came in and looked at this strange woman in his house, and she changed the subject and then whispered to me that I was not to say anything.

Speaking Spanish

Hernandez

It was one of the most traumatic experience for me, you know, having to deliver this terrible news and then having to explain to them that the reason I'm there telling them this is because I want them to consider participating in a lawsuit to stop the practice.

Child

That's right here.

Speaking Spanish

Raul speaking Spanish

Child

This is all news to me.

Speaking Spanish

Child

Ay, no, mami. Ay.

Orencio

I never knew what they did to my mom, which is probably good because if-- You know, the kind of person that I used to be, you know, I definitely would've done something to the body, you know? You know, I would have probably hurt the other person, you know, and hurt the person who-- who did that to my mommy.

Woman on TV

Not too long ago, Delores Madrigal considered her life a fairy tale. After living in Los Angeles for 6 years, she rediscovered her childhood sweetheart... At age 37, they were married. Wow, that's amazing. That's when her life became a nightmare. Several weeks later, they learned that the operation had been a permanent sterilization.

Hernandez

This case was an extraordinarily intense time.

People shouting

Hernandez

It was just the beginning of the emergence of the civil rights movement in the Latino community. You have to do something now. Anything is better than just sitting back and--and saying, "Well, don't do this. Don't do that."

Carol

During that time when it was a lot of the Latino movements that were starting to happen, being in East L.A. and having my mom as my backup, everybody knew we were

speaks Spanish

Carol

. Kids, they knew that those kids you don't mess with. She didn't take anything from anybody, even though she didn't speak the language, and she always told us, "You keep fighting for what you want. You don't let anybody tell you."

People shouting

Hernandez

So you're coming into an environment where you're literally, you know, challenging the status quo, and by a group of powerless, poor women coming out of the barrio.

Molina

We were talking about abortion rights, about all of the issues of feminism at that time. The Chicano movement, unfortunately, it was all led by men and very, very much a very sexist kind of approach. So when we raised these issues to many of our brothers in--in the Chicano movement, it was always considered a secondary issue, which was really an angry-- I mean, we were their workers, as well. We wanted to create a waiting period for a sterilization. Why? Because we wanted to make sure everyone had truly informed consent. This was totally offensive to white feminists. The feminists wanted sterilization upon demand. They basically opposed our--our waiting period. They weren't really taking into account that if you're Spanish-speaking or if you don't speak English, how you were being denied a right totally.

Woman

That's the year of Roe versus Wade. That's the year that women are beginning strongly to ask questions about their entire reproductive lives, but I don't think people had thought of coercive sterilization as part of the picture...

Hernandez

And, quite frankly, I didn't care whether they agreed with it or not. I--you know, I was not there to please them. I was there about protecting the rights of poor women who, under very vulnerable circumstances, were being abused.

Gutierrez

A woman should be able to decide to terminate her child bearing or to also have the resources to have as many children as she wanted. So in this way, Chicano feminist activists really redefined reproductive politics during the 1970s.

Hernandez

We are suing HEW for noncompliance or nonenforcement, nonmonitoring of the, uh, sterilization regulations. Also, the consent forms in Spanish at a-- and at a reading level that the individual can understand.

Felicia Jeter

The group is also seeking damages, and there's a possibility that criminal charges will be filed later. Felicia Jeter, KNBC News, Los Angeles.

Hermosillo

Honestly, deep inside, I didn't thought she was going to get anything accomplished, but I said, "Doesn't harm to try," and I was shocked when-- when she did everything because she was young. She had--I think it was her first year. I said, "Well, I don't have the time. The kids are small and--" but I said, "I'll find the time to help other people "because what they did to me, they shouldn't do it. "They should never do it, no matter if the welfare "is supporting them, no matter if they're on Medicare. "I don't care. That's one of the right-- personal rights that we, as a woman, have to defend."

Distant siren

Hernandez

It took us about a year and a half to prepare the case. In retrospect, it was a Goliath and David. You have the county with all its resources, and you have Charlie and me....severely affected by the operation. They've suffered severe depressions. We sought to tie that pattern of practice as being a violation of the civil rights as recognized by Roe versus Wade that women had an individual right to procreate.

Frank Cruz

These are 3 of the 10 women who sued federal and state officials, doctors at County USC Medical Center for violating their constitutional rights to have children. We are saying that it was not a free, uh, informed, or voluntary consent, and that, thereby, the civil rights of these women were violated. From the federal courthouse, Frank Cruz NewsCenter 4. I was a reporter at NBC. I think '74, '75 is when the class action suit was filed, and then the trial didn't start until '78.

Hernandez

In the courts, at random, you're given a judge. So we tried the case before the federal Judge Jesse Curtis.

Man

The premise of the trial and the premise of the publicity aspect was that there was a conspiracy at L.A. County Hospital and this is social engineering and that it was organized and it came from the top, from Quilligan. Nothing could be further from the truth. That's what I really think that's what their agenda was, to-- I won't say, and I don't know, but I think that they thought little gods, that they can do everything and repair the world, something, but that's not a way to do it. Well, the ultimate responsibility is with me because I'm running it, um, but it comes up through a chain of command and goes down through a chain of command. I--obviously, I, as an individual, can't be present at every counseling session.

Dreifus

I did go and interview Dr. Quilligan. He really didn't understand what had gone on there that was morally problematic. I don't feel he felt he had done harm or that people under him had done harm. I think he was genuinely puzzled.

Cruz

Could we just in general terms ask you what the hospital's position is on all of this? We were practicing good medicine. The physicians, who I know personally, were all very fine physicians. I got to argue the motion that I had filed that was successful in getting Drs. Quilligan and Freeman dismissed from the case because of their position as basically supervisors and not being individually involved with the plaintiffs. When Dr. Quilligan and Dr. Freeman are not parties to the lawsuit, we can only look at the individual doctors who were named as defendants and who were actually served and were there. This was specifically 10 plaintiffs suing 10 defendants.

Man

Most are Spanish-speaking. They claim they signed consent forms they didn't understand.

Neuman

It was horrible to have your name splashed on the front page of the "L.A. Times," to have headlines questioning your motives as to what you're doing. I knew personally I had not done anything. I could not for the life of me think of any of my colleagues who would have deliberately done this. We busted our--ahem--in order to provide care for a lot of people and got sued for it.

Hermosillo

When I was going to court, I was mad. I was mad. I wasn't getting welfare. My husband had a job. I was here since 1953. I came in legal, and I speak English. That's--they don't have no rights. That's not-- that's not their decision. It's--it's our decision.

Nabarette

She was at the tail end of labor where she was really experiencing a lot of pain and discomfort and just wanted to give birth to her child, and they had her sign the-- the form while in the gurney and wrote, "No mas hijos per vida." It means, no more babies for life.

Vaessen

There's a lot of emotion that goes on in those cases, but, particularly when you're on the defense side, you have to look at what the facts are and how it can be explained, and that's why I said that the documentation is so important. The doctors, uh, if all they're going to do is look at a piece of paper and not think about who the patient is or what language the patient speaks or where the patient came from, then, yeah, they can quite honestly to themselves, uh, rationalize by saying, "Well, I had a piece of paper."

Carol

One day, she said that she had to go to the court. As you come inside and you stay inside, you don't go back outside. You eat because I don't know how long it's going to be.

Hernandez

Their testimony was so compelling that sometimes when they were testifying, there were tears in the courtroom.

Velez-Ibanez

Ya acabo la cancion. "My song is finished"-- a phrase that one of the women used in which she said basically that the sterilization had, um, finished her song of life. It's trauma. It's like combat. These women were suffering from post-traumatic stress. He told us, "Do you know that they operated? You are not to have any more children?" and--and we were surprised. More surprised than anything, it was my husband because right away, he looked at me immediately. My husband, his reaction, he had a lot of family here. He didn't want none of his family to know. He told me very clearly-- no interviews, no talking. I went to the hearing only, the hearing in court, and-- and I didn't ever got a chance to testify. I did not--was not allowed through my husband to continue. He--he just say, "We're moving, and I don't want to hear any more about it." I stay in the marriage because of my children. The kids suffer, I suffer. He was talking to me, positive things. "Do you--are you married, and do you have kids?" "Yes, I have 3 kids," and he told me, "Do you think they're going to be happy when--" "when you die?" If you see a patient for the first time who's in labor, uh, who has a large number of children and one of the things you discuss with her is the possibility of tubal ligation, I think it's perfectly appropriate. No private doctor ever would go up to a woman in a private hospital while she was in labor and ask her if she wanted to get her tubes tied. He, you know, would have gotten probably thrown out of the hospital and got sued by the patient.

Cruz

Had it not been for him, I don't think any of this would have surfaced. He was that crucial. Subsequently over the years, he was ostracized by the, um--they got rid of him from the hospital. and uh, he, uh-- he paid the price dearly for it as a--you know, for having spoken out and so forth.

Woman

This surgeon, who asked to remain anonymous because he feared reprisals from other doctors, says that...

Rosenfeld

They did file a complaint to take away my license, saying that I gave hospital information out to third parties, I mean, essentially letting these women who were sterilized-- letting them know that they were sterilized.

Hernandez

No local doctor wanted to testify against the practice. It was the old boys' network. Nobody wanted to testify against these doctors. These were the pillars of the medical community. It was so un-American. Uh, it was so violative of, uh, due process. I really firmly believed that the doctors, the individual doctors in these cases, did what they said they did. This is a lot of he said/she said, and no one knows exactly what was said. Attorneys for the women say they expect the case to be completed next week. Then it'll be up to the judge to determine if the doctors were guilty.

Cruz

I got word at least, being the only television reporter that covered the, uh--the story, uh, that Judge Curtis was going to come down with a decision that afternoon.

Hernandez

When we got called that the decision was in, I remember him ruling from the bench. and the reason I remember, the clerk is just, you know, where attorneys sit. I was--he was right in front of my face, and so I remember the two things-- the judge's face and the clerk's face. Even his clerk was shocked that we had lost the case. I remember rushing out of the courtroom, and, in fact, Frank followed me, and I remember wanting to cry... and I remember Frank saying, "Do not cry. You be strong. "You're going to be on camera. We're going to interview you. You got to project strength."

Velez-Ibanez

What the judge did, the reason he allowed me to testify, was that he could use the rationalization of a subculture in a way to blame the women for their feelings of being sterilized. He had already set me up in his questioning, so therefore his decision was that the doctors could not have known that they would be damaged by sterilization because they belonged to a subculture that had taken the anthropologists 6 months to figure out.

Cruz

Justice grinds exceedingly slow and fine sometimes. You know, it played a role changing society's thinking about that issue and the medical profession changing its ways and the County Hospital having to change its ways. The federal government has agreed to provide consent forms in English and Spanish, and the state has agreed to provide bilingual counselors at county hospitals. In retrospect, it was good that they-- they enacted the class action suit because what it did, it then--it challenged this nation to look and say, "You know what? We were wrong." Informed or voluntary consent... Didn't win it through the court case, but we won it through regulatory changes, but as to the specific women of the women that were involved in this case, they received no remedy.

Velez-Ibanez

This is an interview that I did on May the 22nd of 1978 of, uh, Mrs. Hermosillo.

Hermosillo on tape speaking Spanish

Velez-Ibanez on tape speaking Spanish

Hermosillo on tape speaking Spanish

Velez-Ibanez

The way I felt when I was young, it doesn't change, really, it--the way I feel in my heart now that I'm older, but it--it's there all the time. It's like when you bury somebody. You're always going to carry it on your head.

Speaking Spanish

Singing in Spanish

Hermosillo

I want her to have liberty on doing what she wants, going to school wherever she wants, decides how many kids she wants.

Maria speaking Spanish