Week 7 Isabel Castro

I decided to do my presentation on Isabel Castro. She is a well-known Chicana photographer who focused on issues related to women’s rights. She was born in Mexico City but raised in the United States. She received her bachelor’s degree of Fine Arts at USC Roski School of Fine Arts. She completed a master's degree in arts journalism at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. One of her most famous works is Women under Fire (1980). This was produced after Isabel Castro discovered that Chicana women were being sterilized at USC’s medical center without their consent. Most of these women would come in for emergency C-sections. Then they would be given these English-language consent forms while in labor. Most of them did not speak English and the forms would not be translated to them, so they would just sign it. Some of them did not receive the consent forms at all. These women would discover what happened to them years later after trying to get pregnant again and failing. The doctors who performed sterilizations claimed that these women changed their minds after post-surgery. 

Isabel Castro photographed women who had friends or family members that were sterilized. The photographs are not developed completely. Pigment was utilized to scratch the subjects’ faces and bellies which are known as the most vulnerable areas of their bodies and the ones under fire. There are gun targets on the images to signify how these women’s bodies are targets. 

I have chosen this image because in Chicana 10B, we watched a documentary about the lives of the women who were sterilized without consent. These women were victims and did not realize what had happened until years later. As someone who wants to pursue medicine, I am outraged at the doctors who performed this inhumane treatment. The doctor I shadowed during the summer would have one of the nurses translate everything to his Hispanic patients because he ensured that his patients could understand the remedies he prescribed. Communication between a doctor and patient is key. I hope the doctors who performed these sterilizations have lost their license to practice medicine.