"Dorm Rooms to
Boardrooms"
Victoria Pilate "Dorm
Rooms to
Boardrooms"
Victoria Pilate Dorm
Rooms to
Boardrooms "Dorm
Rooms to
Boardrooms"
Victoria Pilate Dorm
Rooms to
Boardrooms
Victoria Pilate
Boardrooms"
Victoria Pilate "Dorm
Rooms to
Boardrooms"
Victoria Pilate Dorm
Rooms to
Boardrooms "Dorm
Rooms to
Boardrooms"
Victoria Pilate Dorm
Rooms to
Boardrooms
Victoria Pilate
Victoria Pilate, Ph.D.
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Latino-American
History
History
Click here to download
the PDF of profiles.
(version 1)
Click here for profiles
(version 2).
Click here to download
bulletin board images.
the PDF of profiles.
(version 1)
Click here for profiles
(version 2).
Click here to download
bulletin board images.
Sterilizations of Puerto Rican Women
Between the 1930s and late 1960s, the U.S. government used coercion to
force tubal ligations on Puerto Rican women and other racial groups.
During this period, state Eugenics Boards were charged with handling
reproductive rights of certain individuals; these individuals were
ethnic/racial minorities, the mentally disabled and the physically disabled.
Some incarcerated individuals also were sterilized by order of Eugenics
Boards.
More than a third of the Puerto Rico’s women of childbearing age became
sterile under these programs. Even more tragically, more than one-third
of the women surveyed in 1968 didn’t know that tubal ligations were a
permanent form of contraception. The euphemism “tying the tubes” made
women think the procedure was easily reversible
In response to the public outcry, in 1974, the Department of Health,
Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services) published
guidelines for sterilization procedures. These guidelines established a
moratorium on sterilization of women under the age of 21 and on others
without the legal ability to provide consent. A 72-hour waiting period
between the signing of a consent form and the procedure was mandated.
However change was not immediate; the American Civil Liberties Union
and the Center for Disease Control in 1975 showed that noncompliance
with the guidelines was widespread.
Helen Rodriguez-Trias, M.D.
Born in New York in 1929, Helen Rodriguez spent her early years in
Puerto Rico, returning with her family to New York when she was 10.
Growing up as a Puerto Rican in New York City, she had experienced
racism and discrimination first-hand. Rodriguez-Trias graduated from the
University of Puerto Rico in 1957 where she became a student activist on
issues such as freedom of speech and Puerto Rican independence. Later
she re-enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico to study medicine.
She obtained her medical degree with highest honors in 1960, and gave
birth to her fourth child. During her residency, she established the first
center for the care of newborn babies in Puerto Rico. Under her direction,
the hospital's death rate for newborns decreased 50 percent within three
years.
When she returned to New York in 1970, Dr. Rodriguez-Trias decided to
work in community medicine. At Lincoln Hospital, which serves a largely
Puerto Rican section of the South Bronx, she headed the department of
pediatrics. Her patients, among the lowest-income populations in the
United States at that time, were struggling for greater political power and
better health care. At that time, she was also an associate professor of
medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, and
later taught at Columbia and Fordham universities.
Throughout the 1970s, Dr. Rodriguez-Trias was an active member of the
women's health movement. Rodriguez-Trias joined the effort to stop
sterilization abuse. Poor women, women of color, and women with physical
disabilities were far more likely to be sterilized than Caucasian, middle-
class women.
Rodriguez-Trias was a founding member of both the Committee to End
Sterilization Abuse. She testified before the Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare for passage of federal sterilization guidelines in
1979. The guidelines, which she helped draft, require a woman's written
consent to sterilization, offered in a language they can understand, and
set a waiting period between the consent and the sterilization procedure.
In the 1980s, Rodriguez-Trias served as medical director of the New York
State Department of Health AIDS Institute, where she worked on behalf of
women with HIV. In the 1990s, she focused on reproductive health as co-
director of the Pacific Institute for Women's Health, a nonprofit research
and advocacy group dedicated to improving women's well-being
worldwide. Rodriguez-Trias was a founding member of both the Women's
Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus of the American Public Health
Association and the first Latina to serve as president. She lobbied for
health and reproductive issues in International Women's Conferences in
Cairo and Beijing.
In 2000, Rodriguez-Trias was the first Latina to be elected president of the
American Public Health Association. In 2001, Rodriguez-Trias received the
Presidential Citizen's Medal for her work on behalf of women, children,
people with HIV and AIDS, and the poor. She died in 2001. (Excerpted
from the National Library of Medicine, NIH website)
Milka Duno
Milka Duno is the first woman in U.S. history to win a major sports car race
in North America. She is active with promoting literacy among Latino
children. She is a qualified naval engineer and holds four master’s
degrees in organizational development, naval architecture, maritime
business and marine biology.
John O. Gonzales
Gonzales was born Colorado in 1915 but grew up in Phoenix when he
went to school and married. He started his career as a clerk in the county
recorder's office but also started a newspaper with a friend dealing with
political issues in the Latino community. It was though the newspaper that
Gonzales began his involvement with the League of United Latin American
Citizens (LULAC).
He moved to Los Angeles in 1939 and worked as a shipyard welder and
studied at UCLA . He would later earn a law degree from Western State
College of Law in Los Angeles in 1950. Before graduating law school,
Gonzales experienced a life altering experience. In 1946, Gonzales,
having founded the Los Angeles branch of LULAC helped organize the
class action lawsuit and wrote a defining article for LULAC News that
helped bring national attention to a landmark court case, Mendez et al vs.
Westminster School District of Orange County et al. This was the state of
California’s school segregation case. Gonzales helped raise money for the
case. In 1947, nearly seven years before the U.S. Supreme Courts Brown
versus the Board of Education decision, The Mendez case led to
desegregation in California schools.
He continued to work for social rights for Latinos in California for the
remainder of his life. He later worked in the Los Angeles district attorney's
office on child support cases. In a newspaper interview, a former
colleague described him as "a fearless stalwart in the defense of Southern
California Latinos in the early to mid-'40s when few dared raise their head
above the crowd for fear of violent retribution." Gonzales died at age 91.
Hector J. Santa Anna
Hector J. Santa Anna, a descendant of the brother of Antonio Lopez de
Santa Anna -- the Mexican general who led the bloody siege against the
Alamo in 1836, Santa Anna was a famed WWII pilot.
Santa Anna was born in Arizona in 1923 but moved to California after high
school graduation. Expected to work to earn money for college, he
instead enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1942. He was the only Latino in
his graduation class from flight school and was one of the few Latino pilots
in the Army Air Force. An estimated 250,000 to 750,000 Latinos served in
the military during WWII. Santa Anna was posted to Sudbury, England
and flew 35 combat missions over occupied territory.
After the war, Santa Anna flew 127 missions during the Berlin Air Lift. In
the 1950s, he was chief of the U.S. Joint Military Group's Protocol Office in
Madrid, Spain and later was stationed at the Pentagon as a special
assistant secretary of defense for public affairs before retiring as a Lt.
Colonel in 1964.
Not being able to stay away from aviation, Santa Anna became chief of
NASA's exhibit design and operations. During the Nixon administration, he
represented the Office of Economic Opportunity to the White House,
served on the President's Committee on Aging, and on the President's
Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish-Speaking People.
Based on a Washington Post article
Esther Renteria
Esther Renteria was born May 1, 1939, in East Los Angeles. After
graduating from Montebello High School she earned a bachelor's degree
from California State University, Los Angeles. Renteria began her career
in newspapers in 1959, as a reporter for the Alhambra Post-Advocate.
Later she joined the staff of the East Los Angeles Tribune and Gazette,
where she worked as a reporter and editor until 1968. In 1971, she
married Martin Renteria.
The defining moment of her life was, when watching TV, she realized the
lack of Latinos on TV, particularly on staff at TV station news broadcasts.
Realizing the link between visibility of other Latinos and self esteem of
Latinos, Renteria took action.
In 1969, she became the first Latino to appear in a nightly news broadcast
on her TV show, Ahora!" Her advocacy continued with her work in forming
advocacy groups and raising scholarship funds for Latino journalism
students. She founded Hispanic Americans for Fairness in Media, which
also awards scholarships.
Perhaps most pivotal was her role several years later in 1986 in federal
regulation. Renteria filed petitions with the Federal Communications
Commission on equal opportunity/civil rights compliance. . Under an FCC
rule, the percentage of any ethnic group working at a station should be at
least half of that group's percentage in the local workforce. Renteria and
the organization she co-founded, the National Hispanic Media Coalition,
targeted stations that failed to meet that requirement. Looking to force
compliance, the coalition filed petitions with the FCC seeking to revoke the
broadcast licenses of stations that had not hired sufficient numbers of
Latinos. By 1992, her organization had filed 36 challenges to license
renewals.
By the end of her life, Renteria had begun to see change in the media--
both in Latino representation and in how Latinos were portrayed. She
died an early death in January 2007 of cancer. She was 67. (Based on an
article by Jocelyn Y. Stewart)
Between the 1930s and late 1960s, the U.S. government used coercion to
force tubal ligations on Puerto Rican women and other racial groups.
During this period, state Eugenics Boards were charged with handling
reproductive rights of certain individuals; these individuals were
ethnic/racial minorities, the mentally disabled and the physically disabled.
Some incarcerated individuals also were sterilized by order of Eugenics
Boards.
More than a third of the Puerto Rico’s women of childbearing age became
sterile under these programs. Even more tragically, more than one-third
of the women surveyed in 1968 didn’t know that tubal ligations were a
permanent form of contraception. The euphemism “tying the tubes” made
women think the procedure was easily reversible
In response to the public outcry, in 1974, the Department of Health,
Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services) published
guidelines for sterilization procedures. These guidelines established a
moratorium on sterilization of women under the age of 21 and on others
without the legal ability to provide consent. A 72-hour waiting period
between the signing of a consent form and the procedure was mandated.
However change was not immediate; the American Civil Liberties Union
and the Center for Disease Control in 1975 showed that noncompliance
with the guidelines was widespread.
Helen Rodriguez-Trias, M.D.
Born in New York in 1929, Helen Rodriguez spent her early years in
Puerto Rico, returning with her family to New York when she was 10.
Growing up as a Puerto Rican in New York City, she had experienced
racism and discrimination first-hand. Rodriguez-Trias graduated from the
University of Puerto Rico in 1957 where she became a student activist on
issues such as freedom of speech and Puerto Rican independence. Later
she re-enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico to study medicine.
She obtained her medical degree with highest honors in 1960, and gave
birth to her fourth child. During her residency, she established the first
center for the care of newborn babies in Puerto Rico. Under her direction,
the hospital's death rate for newborns decreased 50 percent within three
years.
When she returned to New York in 1970, Dr. Rodriguez-Trias decided to
work in community medicine. At Lincoln Hospital, which serves a largely
Puerto Rican section of the South Bronx, she headed the department of
pediatrics. Her patients, among the lowest-income populations in the
United States at that time, were struggling for greater political power and
better health care. At that time, she was also an associate professor of
medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, and
later taught at Columbia and Fordham universities.
Throughout the 1970s, Dr. Rodriguez-Trias was an active member of the
women's health movement. Rodriguez-Trias joined the effort to stop
sterilization abuse. Poor women, women of color, and women with physical
disabilities were far more likely to be sterilized than Caucasian, middle-
class women.
Rodriguez-Trias was a founding member of both the Committee to End
Sterilization Abuse. She testified before the Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare for passage of federal sterilization guidelines in
1979. The guidelines, which she helped draft, require a woman's written
consent to sterilization, offered in a language they can understand, and
set a waiting period between the consent and the sterilization procedure.
In the 1980s, Rodriguez-Trias served as medical director of the New York
State Department of Health AIDS Institute, where she worked on behalf of
women with HIV. In the 1990s, she focused on reproductive health as co-
director of the Pacific Institute for Women's Health, a nonprofit research
and advocacy group dedicated to improving women's well-being
worldwide. Rodriguez-Trias was a founding member of both the Women's
Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus of the American Public Health
Association and the first Latina to serve as president. She lobbied for
health and reproductive issues in International Women's Conferences in
Cairo and Beijing.
In 2000, Rodriguez-Trias was the first Latina to be elected president of the
American Public Health Association. In 2001, Rodriguez-Trias received the
Presidential Citizen's Medal for her work on behalf of women, children,
people with HIV and AIDS, and the poor. She died in 2001. (Excerpted
from the National Library of Medicine, NIH website)
Milka Duno
Milka Duno is the first woman in U.S. history to win a major sports car race
in North America. She is active with promoting literacy among Latino
children. She is a qualified naval engineer and holds four master’s
degrees in organizational development, naval architecture, maritime
business and marine biology.
John O. Gonzales
Gonzales was born Colorado in 1915 but grew up in Phoenix when he
went to school and married. He started his career as a clerk in the county
recorder's office but also started a newspaper with a friend dealing with
political issues in the Latino community. It was though the newspaper that
Gonzales began his involvement with the League of United Latin American
Citizens (LULAC).
He moved to Los Angeles in 1939 and worked as a shipyard welder and
studied at UCLA . He would later earn a law degree from Western State
College of Law in Los Angeles in 1950. Before graduating law school,
Gonzales experienced a life altering experience. In 1946, Gonzales,
having founded the Los Angeles branch of LULAC helped organize the
class action lawsuit and wrote a defining article for LULAC News that
helped bring national attention to a landmark court case, Mendez et al vs.
Westminster School District of Orange County et al. This was the state of
California’s school segregation case. Gonzales helped raise money for the
case. In 1947, nearly seven years before the U.S. Supreme Courts Brown
versus the Board of Education decision, The Mendez case led to
desegregation in California schools.
He continued to work for social rights for Latinos in California for the
remainder of his life. He later worked in the Los Angeles district attorney's
office on child support cases. In a newspaper interview, a former
colleague described him as "a fearless stalwart in the defense of Southern
California Latinos in the early to mid-'40s when few dared raise their head
above the crowd for fear of violent retribution." Gonzales died at age 91.
Hector J. Santa Anna
Hector J. Santa Anna, a descendant of the brother of Antonio Lopez de
Santa Anna -- the Mexican general who led the bloody siege against the
Alamo in 1836, Santa Anna was a famed WWII pilot.
Santa Anna was born in Arizona in 1923 but moved to California after high
school graduation. Expected to work to earn money for college, he
instead enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1942. He was the only Latino in
his graduation class from flight school and was one of the few Latino pilots
in the Army Air Force. An estimated 250,000 to 750,000 Latinos served in
the military during WWII. Santa Anna was posted to Sudbury, England
and flew 35 combat missions over occupied territory.
After the war, Santa Anna flew 127 missions during the Berlin Air Lift. In
the 1950s, he was chief of the U.S. Joint Military Group's Protocol Office in
Madrid, Spain and later was stationed at the Pentagon as a special
assistant secretary of defense for public affairs before retiring as a Lt.
Colonel in 1964.
Not being able to stay away from aviation, Santa Anna became chief of
NASA's exhibit design and operations. During the Nixon administration, he
represented the Office of Economic Opportunity to the White House,
served on the President's Committee on Aging, and on the President's
Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish-Speaking People.
Based on a Washington Post article
Esther Renteria
Esther Renteria was born May 1, 1939, in East Los Angeles. After
graduating from Montebello High School she earned a bachelor's degree
from California State University, Los Angeles. Renteria began her career
in newspapers in 1959, as a reporter for the Alhambra Post-Advocate.
Later she joined the staff of the East Los Angeles Tribune and Gazette,
where she worked as a reporter and editor until 1968. In 1971, she
married Martin Renteria.
The defining moment of her life was, when watching TV, she realized the
lack of Latinos on TV, particularly on staff at TV station news broadcasts.
Realizing the link between visibility of other Latinos and self esteem of
Latinos, Renteria took action.
In 1969, she became the first Latino to appear in a nightly news broadcast
on her TV show, Ahora!" Her advocacy continued with her work in forming
advocacy groups and raising scholarship funds for Latino journalism
students. She founded Hispanic Americans for Fairness in Media, which
also awards scholarships.
Perhaps most pivotal was her role several years later in 1986 in federal
regulation. Renteria filed petitions with the Federal Communications
Commission on equal opportunity/civil rights compliance. . Under an FCC
rule, the percentage of any ethnic group working at a station should be at
least half of that group's percentage in the local workforce. Renteria and
the organization she co-founded, the National Hispanic Media Coalition,
targeted stations that failed to meet that requirement. Looking to force
compliance, the coalition filed petitions with the FCC seeking to revoke the
broadcast licenses of stations that had not hired sufficient numbers of
Latinos. By 1992, her organization had filed 36 challenges to license
renewals.
By the end of her life, Renteria had begun to see change in the media--
both in Latino representation and in how Latinos were portrayed. She
died an early death in January 2007 of cancer. She was 67. (Based on an
article by Jocelyn Y. Stewart)