For me, “La operacion” was a startling view into the lives of exploited women. This film was particularly disturbing to me because I am best friends with someone from Puerto Rico. I remember when we were both awkward middle schoolers that my Puerto Rican friend told me that her mother was getting her tubes tied. Of course at the time, neither of us really knew what that meant and certainly had not heard of the sterilization genocide described in the movie. However, after seeing this film, that comment so many years ago takes on new meaning to me. There was actual proof, tangible evidence that women in Puerto Rico suffer from the pressures and propaganda of sterilization. His really hits home for me because I know that my friend’s mom was poor growing up and that she has many siblings. The evidence is all too clear that she was exploited as a poor minority by the government of Puerto Rico in the attempts to balance economics and population; just like the other women from the film and the women suffering under Sims’ knife, she was silenced into operation.
Realizing the pain that my friend’s mom must have gone though gave me a deeper appreciation for the women’s sufferings in the article, “Women as Victims of Medical Experimentation.” These women also were exploited by someone in power, not the government but the white man. They too were subjected to surgery to benefit this power. Furthermore, all of these women were forced to suffer in silence. Being a minority and slaves, these women could not simply complain or refuse the operations because they ran the risk of being beaten or otherwise harmed. Similarly, the women in Puerto Rico would have a hard time refusing the “popular” operation. One scene in the movie depicts a worker from Planned Parenthood going door-to-door harassing women about coming to the clinic. These women virtually had no choice. This problem is not isolated to times when there were slave or just in Puerto Rico, but as Blackwood suggests in her article, "Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-Gender Females,” we must also be conscious to the possibility of this silence and exploitation.
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I agree that the Puertorican women were forced between a rock and a hard place. The amount and degree of aggressive methods used to "convince" (or is it coerce) these women to subject themselves to sterilization is horrendous. "La operacion" pointed things out that the articles failed: the propaganda experienced first-hand, the faces of the people made victim by the actions of the US government. The experience that these women had gone through should not have happened. Throughout all these articles, groups of people who do not have a voice in this country are being exploited by the government. I believe that our perspective of groups of people that encompass the US must change so that everyone is equal before we can prevent the exploitation of other groups of people in medical research, etc.
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