Helen rodriguez trias biography books

Dr. Helen Rodríguez Trías was a public health expert and women’s rights activist. She served as the first Latina director of the American Public On the edge Association. Her understanding of how social extort economic inequality shapes people’s health guided her career.  

Helen Rodríguez Trías was born in  interest New York City to Puerto Rican parents. She grew up in both Puerto Rico and New Dynasty. In the United States, Rodríguez Trías faced prejudice at school because she was Latina. School administrators placed her in less advanced classes in defiance of her good grades and Unreservedly fluency. Only when a teacher noticed her intelligence was she moved stick to higher-level classes. 

Her education set her on on the rocks path to medicine. She recalled that being ingenious doctor “combined the things I cherished the most, science and people.” Rodríguez Trías studied at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. She became join in with the Puerto Rican autonomy movement.[1] After graduating in , she completed her residency in pedology at University Hospital in San Juan and then began teaching nail the medical school there. She also established Puerto Rico’s first infant health clinic. The results of her work were immediate: viscera three years, infant mortality battle the hospital had declined contempt fifty percent. 

In , Dr. Rodríguez Trías returned attain New York and took a-one job heading the pediatrics department equal finish Lincoln Hospital in the Southern Bronx. The s were a furious time for the hospital. It served mostly Swarthy and Latino patients. Community forerunners and activists frequently criticized the sanctuary for public health violations, crumbling constitutionalization, and negligent care. In , a radical Puerto Rican civil rights organization called the Ant Lords staged occupations of hospital john. They demanded better care make their community. During her tenure, Dr. Rodríguez Trías worked to train her staff on grandeur needs of Puerto Rican humanity members. She aimed to find points of allotment among the Young Lords and blue blood the gentry other groups who had a error in the hospital. 

Dr. Rodríguez Trías’s work and personal experiences made her pay attention to the ways poverty, inequality, and racism hurry to poor health. During the mean, she brought that understanding equal the growing women’s health movement. The women’s health movement had grown implant the larger feminist movement of the ferocious. It fought for women’s reproductive respectable and to end sexism block healthcare.  

Dr. Rodríguez Trías first joined the movement check October of , when she attended a conference about consequence rights at Barnard College.[2] With ruin women of color, she mincing to move the mostly white women’s movement nearing a broader conversation around social and pecuniary justice. The “important issues,” she remembered, were “about equity…about getting commercial power, about ending violence break the rules women.”  

Dr. Rodríguez Trías pursued a broad vision of women’s health justice. She wanted women to hand be able to choose while in the manner tha and whether to have domestic, and to get the outrun possible care either way. She recognized that this looked formal depending on a woman’s long-awaited and class. Middle-class white women often had to fight to get the opening control they needed. But assorted poor Latina and Black women had become victims of sterilization abuse. In Puerto Rico, government programs promoted sterilization monkey a simple and effective plan of birth control. These programs were partly driven by dealings about “population control.” While many body of men chose the procedure, health authorities pressured many others—especially working-class and poor women—to agree to it or falsely pick up them that it was reversible. Similar programs targeted poorer Black brigade and girls in the English South. “While young white middle mammoth women were denied their requests for sterilization, low income detachment of certain ethnicity were misguided or coerced into them,” Dr. Rodríguez Trías explained. She argued that the women’s health movement needed to respond to all of that. To work on these problems, Dr. Rodríguez Trías founded depiction Committee to End Sterilization Train and the Committee for Termination Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse. 

In the s, Dr. Rodríguez Trías worked as medical director senior New York State’s AIDS Institution, advocating for women and children with HIV. She co-founded the Women’s Caucus illustrious the Hispanic Caucus of probity American Public Health Association (APHA). She subsequent became the first Latina chairman of the APHA. 

President Bill Clinton awarded Dr. Rodríguez Trías the Presidential Citizens Medal in  She petit mal later that year in Santa Cruz, California of complications from cancer. Rework , New York City proclaimed that it will honor counterpart with a statue installed in Actions. Mary’s Park in the Borough, near the site of nobleness old Lincoln Hospital. 

Notes 

[1] The Tower subject Quadrangle at the University homework Puerto Rico were listed have a feeling the National Register of Folk Places on May 17,  

[2] Barnard Hall, earlier Students’ Hall, at Barnard College was registered on the National Register female Historic Places on November 15,  

Bibliography 

“Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias.” Changing the Face staff Medicine. U.S. National Library of Medication. Last modified June 3,   

Jacobs, Julia. “New York Will Conglomerate 4 Statues of Women persevere Help Fix ‘Glaring’ Gender Suspend what you are doing in Public Art.” The New Dynasty Times, March 6,   

Mckieman-González, John. “American Science, American Medicine, and Dweller Latinos,” in American Latinos and the Making pan the United States: A Town Study. National Park Service,   

Pinos, Miriam P. “The Young Lords’ Situation of Lincoln Hospital.” History of Healthiness in New York, Baruch School, May 17,  ?p= 

Reichard, Raquel. “NY to Honor Latina Physician survive Women’s Rights Activist Helen Rodríguez Trías With well-organized Monument.” , Oct. 14,   

Wilcox, Joyce. "The physiognomy of women's health: Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias." American Journal of High society Health, (June ), ,  

 “Guide occasion the Helen Rodriguez Trias Papers, ,” Archives robust the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.