How do you express an apology through art?
That was the question Los Angeles-based artist Phung Huynh had to consider when she embarked on a journey to create “Sobrevivir,” an installation at L.A. County-USC Medical Center.
Commissioned by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in 2018, “Sobrevivir” (To Remain Alive), aims to publicly apologize and pay homage to more than 240 largely Mexican immigrant women who were sterilized without their consent at the medical center between 1968-1974. The procedures were part of federal population control programs that were underway across the nation.
“This is going to be the most important work I’m ever going to do,” said Huynh, speaking from her studio in Northeast L.A. “This work is going to live for years and decades, even after I’m not here anymore.”
The installation, which was unveiled this summer in an elevated courtyard near the hospital’s main administrative building, is composed of complementary elements that reflect the women’s Mexican heritage. It features a steel disk sculpture that measures 21 feet in diameter formed with 300-pound corten-steel panels positioned flush against the ground. Corten-steel, known for its ability to withstand weatherization, captivated Huynh because to her the material symbolized the women’s strength, beauty and resilience in the face of immense pain, shame and silence.
The disk is embellished with imagery of Mexico’s matriarch saint, the Virgen de Guadalupe, etched in the hand-tooled style often found on traditional Mexican purses, belts and shoes. Surrounding the Virgen are etchings of flowers, which symbolize women’s fertility. They’re carved to resemble Mexican huipiles, hand-stitched tunics that have become a symbol of indigenous resistance against colonialism over the centuries.
“[The huipil] has lasted, and women today still wear it,” said Huynh, who is herself a mother and educator. “I feel it’s a Mexican cultural identifier for the matriarch, for the mom, for women and for girls.”
At night, lights illuminate these designs to resemble candlelight. The sculpture is also surrounded by curved walls that feature quotes from the women taken from “No Más Bebes” (No More Babies), the 2016 documentary directed by oral historian Virginia Espino and filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña.
“The mothers were never heard when this was happening to them,” Huynh said. “And I want their words to be permanent and forever for people to know directly what the moms felt.”
The film brought this dark chapter back into public memory and served as a fundamental source of research and connection to the mothers for Huynh’s installation.
According to the artist, when read together, direct quotes from the film function as a contemplative poem:
“Yo por dentro siento mucha tristeza.” (I feel a lot of sadness inside.)
“Se me acabó la canción.” (My song is finished.)
“If you speak English, they treat you one way. If you don’t speak English, they treat you another way.”
To create “Sobrevivir,” Huynh adopted a community-informed artistic approach that allowed local residents and activists to provide feedback during the design process. To facilitate this involvement, Huynh held virtual sewing gatherings with Mujeres de Maíz, the East Los Angeles Women’s Center, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, Comisión Femenil and the East Los Angeles Stitchers, among other organizations, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It felt like a sewing circle, where women got together to share very deep personal [reproductive justice] stories,” said Huynh.
Collectively, participants designed 60 hand-stitched squares that showcase a variety of reproductive justice-inspired messages. Huynh then stitched the blocks together to form four community quilts that will complement the hospital’s main art installation.
Before the quilts are permanently displayed at the hospital, they are being exhibited at the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles Community College through Feb. 18, 2023. In coordination with reproductive justice activists, the exhibition will also feature programming “to examine this traumatic history and its repercussions in communities of color today.”
While “Sobrevivir” and the history it represents is now publicly accessible, its creation can largely be traced back to the positive public reception of “No Más Bebés,” which prompted Los Angeles County officials to issue a public apology.
According to Espino, who also served on the committee that selected Huynh’s project, the forced sterilizations became the subject of multiple front-page features in the ‘70s. Yet, as time transpired, even in seminal books focused on documenting the Chicana and Chicano experience, “this history took up maybe a sentence,” Espino said.
“No Más Bebés” changed this by centering interviews with the mothers, doctors, historians and the civil rights leaders behind the 1975 class-action lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan, which finally challenged the coercive practices.
“I really wanted to make this history something that people would recognize in the same way that they recognize other civil rights struggles like Brown v. Board of Education, or Mendez v. Westminster,” Espino said.
The film outlines how the federal government began incentivizing public health facilities to advance population control programs guised as family planning initiatives that disproportionately targeted brown and Black women across the nation. At the same time, eugenics laws aimed at reducing “undesirable” populations were also underway in 31 states across the country.
Using the logic similar to that applied to Roe v. Wade, the attorneys representing the 10 plaintiffs in Madrigal v. Quilligan argued that the women were entitled to the right to procreate, just like they also had the right to abort. Ultimately, a federal judge ruled against the women and held that the sterilizations were the result of miscommunication.
Despite this, the women’s efforts did not go in vain. The landmark case led to widespread public support of the mothers, an end to statewide sterilization laws, changes in sterilization practices and bilingual information surrounding the procedure and its consequences.
Huynh acknowledges that “Sobrevivir” will never rectify the harmful practices, but she commends the hospital for being the first public institution in the nation to express remorse.
“I think [apologizing] is really important in a country that has really bad karma, that has had centuries of harm from settler colonialism, genocide [and] racism,” she said.
Espino also hopes that the public installation draws attention to the activist spirit of the mothers. She believes the women were agents of change and, in many ways, advanced the way we understand reproductive justice today, a theme that played a central theme in her film.
“[The mothers] were saying, I don’t want this to happen to anybody else,” she said. “Their actions articulated this reproductive justice ideology, before we had that framework to make sense of it.”
Both Huynh and Espino share the feeling that “Sobrevivir” will serve not only as an apology, but that the sculpture’s permanence represents a sense of reproductive security for future generations of women.
“For me, the monument is this acknowledgment that this is the true history,” Espino said. “This is saying we acknowledge something horrible that happened here. And we’re going to do what we can to ensure that it never happens again.”
—
Learn more about “Sobrevivir” at the Vincent Price Museum exhibit here.
Learn more about “No Más Bebés” here.