Behind every (fill in the blank) great/glorious/funny/scary/sad story told on film is an equally great/glorious/funny/scary (yes, probably sometimes) sad story: the one about how the whole thing went from being an idea in a brain (probably many years ago) to a big screen premiere at a big-time Festival. In this Film/Maker Q/A blog series, our LA Film Fest programmers interview our LA Film Fest filmmakers to discover the stories behind the story.

Festival Associate Programer Christine Davila sat down with Director Renee Tajima-Peña and Producer Virginia Espino to discuss their documentary No Más Bebés, which tells the story of a group of mothers, lawyers, and activists who fought the injustice of an issue amongst Mexican immigrant women in the LA area during the ’60s and ’70s, in which they were coercively sterilized without their consent. 

We all know documentaries take a long time to come to fruition.  Clearly documentarians must be invested, passionate and tenacious about bringing to light stories that aren’t being told.  But I want to hear from you about the journey from the point of when you heard about this travesty and when you decided YOU needed to tell this story.
Virginia: When I learned about this horrible abuse, I also learned about the brave activists who put everything on the line to find justice for the plaintiffs in Madrigal v. Quilligan. It’s such a gripping story that brings on great anger, but also a powerful story of community love. A group of Angelinos came together to defend the rights of women to determine their own fertility. It’s a story you don’t hear very often and I tell it to anyone who will listen. And I will keep telling it until Madrigal v. Quilligan becomes as well-known as Roe v. Wade.

Renee: I grew up here, and I’ve been living just a few miles from the hospital for many years. You’d think I would know about the story, but I had absolutely no idea.

I found out about the case from Virginia. She and a handful of scholars have kept the story alive, mostly in academia. Otherwise it’s been virtually forgotten. Virginia and I are neighbors, and we have sons who are about the same age. When the kids were little, we had play dates. Virginia told me about her research into the coercive sterilizations at LA County hospital. It was devastating. Especially for me as a mother. I experienced every cliché in the book when I had a baby—absolute joy. I could not imagine having the right to have a child taken away from me. Right then and there we thought we should make a film about the story.

Aside from the challenge of finding funds, tell me roughly what was your biggest concern as you began to investigate and tackle the making of the film.  What one overarching theme/emotion/tone did you want to ensure the film to capture?
Virginia: My biggest concern was balancing my feeling that this story needed to be told with plaintiffs’ desire to tell the story. I wanted to ensure it was a comfortable and safe process for the mothers and that we respected their right to privacy. And while it’s a story of blatant abuse, I didn’t want to re-victimize the women in the narrative. I wanted the film to present the idea that Madrigal v. Quilligan was fought for all women.

Renee: I’m glad you said “aside from the challenge of finding funds,“ since I think that’s the most boring story that filmmakers ever tell.

A big challenge was figuring out how to get people to care. It’s a historical story, and this is not a culture that is very interested in history. On top of being a historical case, our main characters are Latinas, women, and now they’re older in age, so that’s three strikes in the conventional entertainment formula. When was the last time you saw a film, fiction or non-fiction, about older Latinas? And working class women? We saw them as heroes, but they are not out-there public figures in the Dolores Huerta mold. They are factory workers and homemakers from the housing projects and the neighborhoods around East LA. And they are women who decided to stand up for justice.

Secondly, this is a multiple character film in a storytelling universe that privileges the character-driven film. In telling the story of a collective movement, you sometimes need a chorus of voices. I want there to be multiple entry points to for the story: you might identify with the mothers, or the young lawyers and activists who took up their cause, or the whistleblowing doctor who was the very definition of a mensch. I came out of social movements, and to me the idea of the single hero, the maverick, is a bit of a lie. People make social change.

The other challenge was balancing journalistic integrity with telling the emotional story of the people in the film. While we were screening rough cuts, people always wanted a hero and a villain. But I had no interest in making a film about villainous doctors. For one thing, to villainize a character absolves all of us in our complicity in attitudes and policies that make something like the sterilizations possible. For another, the story is a lot more complex than that. There are a lot of shades of grey. That’s one thing I learned years ago making my first film, “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” which was about another civil rights case. I’ve relearned that lesson in almost every film since then. There’s nothing clear-cut about real life.

So all of the above amounts to an incredible amount of editing and reediting. It took a long, long time. We’d finish a cut, and everyone would say, great, that’s it, just finish the thing. But I was never happy. I always thought we were 85% there, and it could be better. So I kept on working and editing. It was never lost on me that no one heard from the women of Madrigal v. Quilligan for 40 years, and it was now or never. We just couldn’t f— this thing up, we had to do it right. You know, with all the money and contracts, and everything involved in the business of making documentaries—when you have a story like this; you have a really awesome responsibility for being true to the people who actually had to live through this nightmare.

What was the most unexpected discovery you uncovered during the course of researching/making the film?
Virginia: The fact that the mothers did not tell their children about the sterilization or the lawsuit was repeated over and over again. If it weren’t for the film, they might have never known.

Renee: I grew up with Roe v. Wade, and I had always thought reproductive rights was a question of abortion. Coming from a middle-class background, I never once considered being denied the right to have a baby. Making this film, I learned about the reproductive justice movement, which has been reframing the whole debate to represent the voices of women who have been shut out from reproductive equality because of race, class, immigration status.

And reproductive justice is something that’s more urgent today than at any other time. And unwilling sterilizations keep happening. There was a recent case where incarcerated women were being sterilized in California prisons. I met some of the women and their stories were, in a very chilling way, almost identical to the women we talked to. Eefforts to control women’s bodies, that’s something that’s never gone away.

How did you go about choosing the visual aesthetic of the documentary? What inspirations did you glean from?
Renee: I was really influenced by artists and scholars who have been looking at the social meaning of sites of trauma, and the presence of absence embodied in those places. The old LA County hospital site where the sterilizations happened has been abandoned, and they’ve built a brand new hospital next door. The old hospital still stands. Apparently it would cost more to tear it down than keep it standing. So they have to keep the AC on so that it doesn’t rot, and there are still hospital beds, surgery gurneys, birthing rooms still intact. Talk about a haunting. We filmed there. It was empty, cold, but you could imagine what it was like in the 1970s when the women went there to give birth to their babies, and came home sterilized.

In No Más Bebés, I tried to find a visual language and deeper comprehension for making legible these “presence of absences.” How can a film express the true dimensions of loss and violation, and its aftermath, whether inconsolable or transformational, given the extent to which these are internal processes and not necessarily visible to the camera? I was really influenced by several artists. Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, for one. A mother who has escaped slavery, kills her baby rather than return to the plantation. That baby becomes the narrator of the story. When we interviewed the women of Madrigal v. Quilligan, they had memories and grief for children that were never born. For me, those memories of dreams were a constant visual reminder of the trauma, and I wanted to find a way to evoke that. Another source of inspiration were the photographers Carrie Mae Weems and Kara Walker. The layered quality of history and experience in Weems’s work, and Kara Walker’s photograph, “The Water Bearer” really spoke to me. I thought of those references a lot while were shooting.

The film opens up an entire other dimension to the Chicano rights movement, and the reproductive rights history. It really is ripe for unpacking…tell me about your academic studies as well as the personal framework you leaned on to guide the focus.
Virginia: I wrote a short paper on this issue in graduate school and I tried to combine the emergence of Chicana activism with protection of traditional women and their desire or role in a traditional marriage. Gloria Molina and Antonia Hernandez were on a different path than the Madrigal plaintiffs and yet they were just a generation removed from those kinds of life choices. I was inspired by learning the history of a group of young Chicanas who supported abortion rights and practiced fertility control and yet could see the importance of women determining the number of children they want to have. The focus of the film needed to be on a reproductive justice framework that moves beyond abortion rights to include the right to have as many children as you want and to raise them in healthy and nurturing communities.

Renee: Trauma studies, the idea of praesentia that Rosalinda Fregoso describes as a cultural act that “brings to the surface the unseen but felt presence, the memories of the subject no longer living, the socially haunting forces. So in No Más Bebés, the visual subtext is the idea of a haunting by children that would never be, and the violations of women that happened in the now-empty rooms of the hospital.

Working with Virginia, who is a historian and understands theory–which is sometimes indecipherable to a layperson–has been really amazing. She’a an oral historian, which means she’s interested in how history can be translated to non-academic audiences and made relevant to their daily lives. Not just theoretical jargon confined behind the walls of academia.

The idea of reproductive justice–a person’s right to not have a child, or have a child and raise that child in dignity, and the factors of race, class, and legal status that impacts those rights – that’s a message that has been very slow in gaining teeth. It took me a while to understand, and making the film really helped me grasp it. We pay a lot of lip service to the idea that a woman should control her own fertility, but at the same time, I can’t tell you how many people have asked, “Well how many children did these women have?” implying that their sterilization may have had an upside. I don’t blame them, I’ve had those attitudes myself—that, well, maybe people who can’t afford so many children shouldn’t have more.

But that goes to the very fundamental question of whose choice is it. What does it really mean for a woman to control her own body? Whose decision is it? And I think of my own grandparents. They were immigrants from Japan. They didn’t speak English, and they couldn’t become citizens for over 50 years because of immigration laws. They were poor, my grandfather worked two and three jobs as a janitor and barely made a living. They lived in Skid Row, just across the bridge from East L.A. But they had five children, during the Depression no less (and making moonshine in the bathtub, but that’s another story)! I’m sure people might have thought, well, why are they having so many children they could barely care for? But that was their choice, no one else’s. And thank God for me they had them, because my mom was number four.

No Más Bebés is in the Festival’s LA Muse Competition and screening on Sunday, June 14 at 2:15 pm and Tuesday, June 16 at 6:10 pm. Get your tickets here.

Christine Davila / Associate Feature Film Programmer

Christine Davila is the Director of Ambulante California, a 501c3 nonprofit and traveling documentary film festival founded by actors and filmmakers Diego Luna, Gael García Bernal, Pablo Cruz and Elena Fortes. She has been a Programming Associate at the Sundance Film Festival since 2008 and is the Programmer at the Curaçao International Film Festival Rotterdam which is dedicated to promoting up and coming Caribbean filmmakers. She is also an Associate Programmer at the Los Angeles Film Festival. A champion of emerging U.S. Latino talent, Davila tracks filmmakers and the festival scene on her blog chicanafromchicago.com.