On a fall morning in East LA in 1974, Dolores Madrigal and her husband, Orencio, were eating breakfast listening to Ranchera radio station KWKW when a news segment that would change her life came on the air.
The couple heard about 100 people protesting in front of the Los Angeles County University of Southern California Medical Center to denounce the hospital’s long history of sterilizing low-income women without their consent. . The rally was held in the wake of a lawsuit filed by three Mexican-American women against Boyle Heights Hospital, alleging they were victims.
After hearing this story, Madrigal, 40, asked her husband out loud. “Was she one of those women?”
The previous year, the couple had welcomed the birth of their second son, Sergio, at the hospital. But before labor started, Madrigal fought off waves of nurses asking if she wanted her fallopian tubes tied. She finally signed the paperwork in a daze from the prodromal contractions, but quickly forgot about it.
A visit to the hospital the day after the KWKW report confirmed that documents had authorized doctors to sterilize madrigals.
She and her husband had dreams of a large family. Instead, Orencio turned to alcohol. Dolores became so depressed that others had to take care of her young sons for months.
But in 1975, a lawyer representing Mexican-American survivors of forced sterilization tracked her down and filed a lawsuit against the University of Southern California, accusing doctors of violating her client’s civil right to have children. When asked if she wanted to join the lawsuit, Madrigal immediately said yes. She became lead plaintiff.
“Dolores was kind of the cheerleader of the group,” said Antonia Hernandez, former president of the Mexican American Legal and Educational Fund and the California Community Foundation. She was one of the attorneys who represented 10 women in the case, officially titled “Madrigal v. Quilligan.” “She said, ‘They did this to us, you’re screwed.’ [and it’s not right]”
Although the lawsuit failed, it was a landmark event. The California Department of Health Services immediately began providing sterilization information in English and Spanish. Hernández became an icon of the civil rights movement, focusing on fighting for Latinos throughout most of his career. Gloria Molina, president of the Chicana organization who agreed to pay the plaintiffs’ legal costs and appeared with Madrigal at the press conference announcing the lawsuit, went on to forge a pioneering career as an East Side politician.
In 2018, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors formally apologized to all the women who were forcibly sterilized at the University of Southern California. Four years later, a monument bearing their names was dedicated there. Madrigal v. Quilligan is still taught in universities and told in academic literature as a cautionary tale about the fallacies of eugenics and public health, and the plaintiffs are hailed as reproductive rights heroines.
Dolores Madrigal (right) and Gloria Molina at a 1975 press conference announcing a class action lawsuit against Los Angeles County Southern California Medical Center for sterilizing 10 Latino patients without their consent.
(Ben Allender/Los Angeles Times)
“Dolores’ courage was extraordinary,” said Virginia Espino, who wrote about the incident in her 2007 doctoral thesis. “She literally defended our right to exist.”
But when Mr. Espino decided to co-produce a documentary about the incident, “No Más Bebés,” shortly thereafter, the namesake was nowhere to be found.
Espino asked parishioners at Sacred Heart Church in Lincoln Heights, where Madrigal faithfully attended Mass for decades, about her whereabouts and informed other Catholic parishes across Los Angeles. A private investigator finally discovers that Madrigal lives in Las Vegas with her eldest son, Oren, who was unaware of his mother’s tragic historical past until he answered the investigator’s call.
“I asked my mom, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And she really didn’t have an answer,” Oren told the Times in a recent interview. “But maybe it would have been better if she hadn’t done that, because the younger me would have been too angry. I’m still angry. But she told me that. After that, I wanted to cherish my mother and her trauma more than ever.”
Dolores Madrigal died of natural causes in Las Vegas on November 9th. She was 90 years old.
Madrigal was born in the small Mexican town of Vila Purificación and immigrated to the United States in 1965, Oren said. Oren said Madrigal legalized her status with the help of a white family where Dolores was caring for her developmentally disabled son.
In East LA, she reunited with her childhood sweetheart, Orencio. They married in 1971 and gave birth to one son after another.
“He was so happy,” Madrigal said of her husband in “No Mas Bebes,” and home videos showed her cooking in the kitchen and Orencio playing with their sons. After the couple found out that she had been secretly sterilized, “all our plans fell apart”.
Hernandez first met Madrigal in 1975, when he coldly knocked on Madrigal’s door after learning of Madrigal’s plight from documents provided to him by a whistleblower at the University of Southern California.
“She had a zest for life. She was happy, active and took no shit from anyone,” Hernandez recalled. “He was someone I couldn’t open up to when I had to testify.”
This is what the county-Southern California attorneys tried to do during their trial before a federal judge because the 10 women’s attorneys did not believe they would receive a fair trial from a jury. It is. At one point, the defense team presented a document Madrigal signed just before giving birth to Sergio, which featured her signature next to the phrase “I never want children.” According to Hernandez’s deposition, Madrigal said she did not remember signing the document, but reiterated that she was “in a lot of pain and very scared” at the time.
The former lawyer said he only had intermittent contact with Madrigal after the incident because it was “too painful for everyone involved.”
Madrigal continued to work as a teacher’s aide at Lincoln High School in Lincoln Heights, before retiring in the mid-1980s to care for her sick husband and two sons who had joined gangs.
“Thanks to my mother’s prayers, my brother and I are still alive,” Oren said. “When I was in prison, she was one of the first in line. She stood in line for six or seven hours just to see us for 15 minutes. She didn’t have much money. They didn’t have it, but they sent it all to us.”
After living in the Los Angeles area for decades, Madrigal moved to Las Vegas in the 2000s to be near his sisters while his sons served time in prison. When Oren finally came out, the two moved in together. He remembered his mother “with a great sense of humor and sarcastic wit” who doted on Hercules, a Chihuahua-dachshund mix, and loved attending daily Mass.
“I made friends as I rode the bus every day and went on an adventure,” Oren said. But Espino has long noted that her depression “suddenly made sense” when the private investigator she hired to track her in the “No Mas Bebes” case contacted Espino. Espino said Oren persuaded his mother to appear in the film, but her mother only agreed to a one-day interview and refused to promote or attend screenings of the documentary, which was first released in 2015 and was nominated for an Emmy Award. It is said that he did.
“She exposed herself in a very public way in the ’70s,” Espino said. “It took a lot out of her. [Madrigal] I never wanted to do it again… She was shy but fiercely courageous. She felt she was being treated unfairly and wanted people to know that. And she wanted the public to know that this violation happened not only to her, but also to many others. ”
Oren watched only part of “No Más Bebés” at home and turned it off “because it was too painful.” His mother had never seen it.
“Sadly, many immigrants, many women, just accept the abuse and don’t do anything about it,” he says. “She didn’t accept what happened to her. She did something about it.”
Madrigal is survived by his sons Oren and Sergio; four grandchildren, Jose Angel, Jimmy, Esteban and Andrea; and a sister, Antonia Nunez. Andrea is due to give birth to her first child next year.
