Thousands of Latinos were sterilized in the 20th century. Amid COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, they remember – USA TODAY

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Consuelo Hermosillos 22-year-old granddaughter didnt want to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

The office worker at a special needs center was afraid the shot would prevent her from ever getting pregnant.

The mistrust didnt form out of thin air.

In 1973, Hermosillo, an immigrant from Mexico, worked a smallcatering business at home while her husband bartended and unloaded appliances at a department store. In November of that year, the 24-year-old went to a hospital for an emergency caesarian section to give birth to her third child.

The baby would be her last.

Hermosillo was sterilized without informed consent atthe Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center.

You better sign, or your baby is going to die, she said a nurse told her.

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Her signature is scribbled on aform allowing the procedure, but she doesnt remember signing, saying she was medicated. She didn't know she was sterilized until a doctor's appointment later when sheasked for birth control.

A whistleblower a residentphysician later let go by the hospital leaked that the practice occurred on many women. Hermosillo became one of 10 Mexican and Chicana plaintiffs in the landmark Madrigal v. Quilliganfederal class-action case, which grabbed headlines in the mid-1970s.The judge sided with Dr. Edward James Quilligan, and the women lost, but the case inspired legislation passed in 1979to abolish the practice in California.

The Los AngelesCounty Board of Supervisors issuedan apology in 2018 for the coerced sterilizations, but the women did not receive reparation money as victims did in other states, such as Virginia and North Carolina.

"As far as justice, they never received that," said Virginia Espino, who documentedthe women's stories as co-producer of a filmcalled "No Mas Bebs," ("No More Babies" in Spanish).

Consuelo Hermosillo says she was sterilized at a hospital without her knowledge.(Photo: Claudio Rocha)

Espino, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert in reproductive injustice, saidits unclear how many womenwere sterilized at the LAC-USC medical center. The lawyer for the women who brought the lawsuit estimated "hundreds.

Many didnt speak fluent English and didnt understand forms they signed, and in some cases, they werecoerced into signing.Many hadlabor complicationsand were told lies that they or their babies would die if they didn't sign.

Insidious sterilizations didnt occur inside that hospital only. Throughout the 20th century, about 20,000 women and men were sterilized in California alone under state eugenics policies, according to researchers, including University of Michigan professor Alexandra Minna Stern.The policies targeted patients ofstate-run asylums or group homes. A disproportionate number were Hispanic.

As COVID-19 vaccine rollout continues, hesitancy among vulnerable communities, including Hispanic people, is piqued and history is unearthed.

Experts and those within the communities say the skepticism partly stems from unethical medical practices that targeted people of color. Unwanted sterilizations didnt occur just in California among Mexican womenbut among Black women in the South, as well as Native American women.

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From the 1930s through the 1970s, for example, about a third of the female population in Puerto Rico was sterilized under population control policies that coerced women into postpartum sterilization after their second child's birth,according to theUniversity of Wisconsin's Office of the Gender and Women's Studies Librarian annotated bibliography on the topic.

The first large-scale clinical trial for contraceptives involved Puerto Rican women: In 1956, the pills were tested on poor women inRio Pidras, a housing projectin San Juan,according to a historical review published in the Canadian Family Physician journal. The women didn't know they were experimental.

"Women who stepped forward to describe side effects of nausea, dizziness, headaches, and blood clots were discounted as unreliable historians,wrote Dr. Pamela Verma Liao and Dr. Janet Dollin. Theclinical trials involved pills with much higher hormone levelsthan today's contraceptives.

"Despite the substantial positive effect of the pill, its history is marked by a lack of consent, a lack of full disclosure, a lack of true informed choice, and a lack of clinically relevant research regarding risk," the authors said. "These are the pills cautionary tales."

Angelina Zayas, a pastor at Grace and Peace Community Church that servesChicago's majority-Hispanic Belmont Cragin enclave, says many Puerto Rican women in her community are afraid to take COVID-19 vaccines, citing memories of the sterilizations and experiments.

The biggest one is fear, saidZayas, who is Puerto Rican. That's something that they remember, which affects their judgment in getting the vaccination. They're like, Well, how can I trust?

Consuelo Hermosillo listens to a recording of her voice from a trial three decades ago.(Photo: Claudio Rocha)

History'scautionary tales didn't stop the injustices from happening again.

Allegations of unwanted hysterectomies performed on mostly Hispanic women at Georgia's Irwin Detention Center surfaced last year. From 2006 to 2010, more than 100 incarcerated women in California prisons, mostly Black and Latina,underwent hysterectomies without their consent. The Center for Investigative Reporting broke the news in 2013.

Researchers weren't surprised.

"If certain conditions are in place, and these are conditions that often include marginalized populations incarceral spaces, with little oversight of the authorities,those types of conditions can be ripe for sterilization abuse,"said Stern, author of the book "Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America."

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We are still very much living with ... eugenic ideas of worth, she said. Who is worthy of having children, and who is worthy of raising children? Those are very much eugenic ideas that are alive and well, and they affect policy and harm certain people.

Under these policies, from 1907 through the 1970s,about 60,000 people underwent compulsory sterilizations nationwide.

Stern is studying a dataset of 30,000 sterilization records. She found thatLatina patients in California were 59% more likely to be sterilized than non-Latinas. Hispanic men were 20% more likely to be sterilized than non-Hispanic men.

The disproportionate operations,Stern said, were rooted in a racist ideology that certain attributes criminal behavior, homosexuality, poor health, welfare usage or education levels were hereditary and could be minimized through preventing procreation.

An institutional evaluation of Andrea Garcia, 19, circa 1940, recommends sterilization.(Photo: BACKSTAGE LIBRARY WORKS/California state archives)

Andrea Garcia, 19, from a Mexican family, was sterilized after being admitted into Pacific Colony, a psychiatric institution, for what evaluators called"truancy" and a low IQ test score.

"Mentally deficient. Sex delinquent girl. Unfit home," reads her evaluation, an archival copy of which is included in Stern's analyses. "Father was illiterate; mother subnormal ... one brother, four sisters thot to be subnormal."

At Pacific Colony, sterilization was a precondition for release another coercive factor, Stern noted. Sometimes people were released back to family members, sent to be helpers in households orperform menial labor jobs.

Garcia's mother took legal actionbut lost the case.

Often,white women at the facilitycould escapethe process, Stern said.

"What you have is a system in place that is stratified in such a way that is most likely to bring in certain people. A young white girl with truancy could get away with it. Unlike Andrea Garcia. She didnt have that luxury, a safety net, she didn't have anything," Stern said, calling the policies and practices "dehumanizing."

Espino, the historian who co-producedthe No Mas Bebs documentary,said the abuses put women in unique difficulties. Some spouses didn't trust that their wives were unwitting and thought they wanted the operations to be promiscuous. Factory worker Dolores Madrigal, the lead plaintiff in Madrigal v. Quilligan, said herhusband took his anger out on her.

The sterilizations sent negative messages to women of color "that their mothering is not valued in the same way," Espino said, "that theyre really only valued when theyre in the service of others: taking care of other peoples childrenor cooking for their masters. ... Women of colors bodies typically are valued when theyre used in the service of making other people wealthy."

The women, Espino said,were "robbed of their decision-making when it comes to the kind of family they want to have."

This man survived COVID-19: His treatment odyssey shows how complicated that can be.

On a recent morningin California, Hermosillo, 71, took a break from babysitting and running the kitchens in her son's four restaurants. Sitting on herporch in Venice, she reflected on the treatment of her and women like her.

"I think they were doing it to lower the value of us Mexicans," Hermosillo said. "That's what I think."

She isgrateful for her three childrenbut dreamed of having more. As one of her fellowplaintiffs said,"Se me acabo la cancion" "My song is finished."

Hermosillo's older sisters had more children. As the family grew, shed fall quiet when relatives asked when she would have more kids. She battled feelings of shame and embarrassment.

I hated baby showers, she said. Something happened to me.

As a girl in Mexico, she lived between her grandmothers house and foster homes. She learned to be a mom at a very young age. As a teenager, she immigrated to the USA with her motherand spent her days looking after her baby brother.

She didn't tell her sisters or friends what happened at the hospital, sharing her story for the first timeduring the trial. She translated her love of babies and motherhood to working at theWomen, Infants and Children (WIC) program for seven years, teaching breastfeeding classes to new moms.

She wears a diamond necklace around her neck that she and her husband bought from one of her clients to help her with rent money.

The struggle stayswith her.

So many years passed," she said, "but you dont forget.

Reach Nada Hassanein at nhassanein@usatoday.com or on Twitter @nhassanein_.

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Thousands of Latinos were sterilized in the 20th century. Amid COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, they remember - USA TODAY