The Intercultural Throughline Title

Category: Health

A black and white picture of Kiyoshi Kuromiya in a button-down shirt, smiling at the camera.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya

Kiyoshi Kuromiya was a leading activist and organizer around the issues of justice for people living with HIV/AIDS, who lived in Philadelphia, PA for most of his life. His work, while focused, was intersectional and cross-issue, as he worked to make survival easier for people with HIV/AIDS. It wasn’t until the late 2010s, almost 20 years after his death, that he began to recieve more mainstream recognition for his work. Below is a message, from the ACT UP NY archives, from the time of his passing. Even this brief memorialization from his comrades misses many of his contributions to the..Read More

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This is a presentation slide with the title "Puerto Rico: La Operacion." There is a black and white image of a woman smiling while looking at a young child that she is holding. There is also the following text: "Young women were key to labor force — Problem was pregnancy. Result: massive sterilization program. Women coerced into sterilization without being told it was irreversible. By 1968, 1/3 of women childbearing age were sterilized. Emigration and sterilization resulted in population drop with no increase in standard of living."

Sterilization of Puerto Rican Women

In 1937, Puerto Rico enacted Law 116, the last eugenics sterilization law passed under United States territorial jurisdiction. Soon after, a program endorsed by the U.S. government began sending health department officials to rural parts of the island advocating for sterilization. The Puerto Rican government fully supported this program, as it attributed overpopulation to the island’s high levels of poverty and unemployment. With the growth of American corporations on Puerto Rican soil and factory work, they also wanted to integrate women into the workforce more fully and child bearing was seen as an obstacle to that. In fact, sterilization efforts were..Read More

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California Proposition 187, November 8, 1994

California Proposition 187 (also known as the Save Our State (SOS) initiative) was a 1994 ballot initiative to establish a state-run citizenship screening system and prohibit illegal immigrants from using non-emergency health care, public education, and other services in the State of California. Voters passed the proposed law at a referendum on November 8, 1994. The law was challenged in a legal suit and found unconstitutional by a federal district court. In 1999, Governor Gray Davis halted state appeals of this ruling.

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