Indigenous Oaxacan Woman Sues Missisippi Hospital For Taking Her Baby

by Sarah Menkedick · 2010-08-28 15:00:00 UTC
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Hey, here's a thought: why not start taking the babies of immigrant women and giving them to white lawyers? Why bother with, say, translating their statements at the hospital or worrying about their rights? Why not just snatch up the newborn, whisk it away, and shoo the mother out onto the streets?

Such was the philosophy of the Mississippi Department of Human Services (MDHS) which, incredibly, with virtually no hard evidence, took Cirila Baltazar Cruz' baby from her and gave it to Wendy and Douglas Tynes, a pair of white attorneys looking to adopt.

The story must send a chill of terror down the spine of any expecting mother, and it serves as a reminder of just how vulnerable women (and immigrant women in particular) are to the hospitals that are supposedly there to help and protect them.

After the birth of her baby, Cruz gave a statement to a hospital translator. The translator couldn't understand her, since Cruz only speaks Chatino, an indigenous language from the state of Oaxaca. So Cruz brought in a relative who speaks Chatino, but the hospital turned down his offer to translate.

The Puerto Rican translator concluded from a statement she could not understand that Chatino was a prostitute (aren't all immigrant mothers, y'know?) and was planning to give the baby up for adoption. Chatino, meanwhile, was trying to explain that she actually worked at a Chinese restaurant, lived in an apartment, and wanted to keep the baby. The translator's interpretation gave the MDHS what they needed to take the baby. Allegedly, they colluded with the Tynes and a judge to deny Cruz custody and give the child to the white couple.

It took Cruz a year to regain custody of her daughter, via a lawsuit filed with the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance. She and her daughter are now living in Mexico.

I'd like to see this as one horrific, isolated incident of the state's supposed "protection" of children gone madly awry, but instead I think the flagrant violation of immigrants' rights is more of the norm, or is at least a constant threat. TIME documents two more cases of children being taken from indigenous parents who could not speak English or Spanish and were therefore deemed "unfit" to care for their infants. Despairingly, it seems institutionalized racism and the suppression of women's rights are the default, and more and more immigrant women like Cruz are forced to wage battles like this one to change that.

Photo credit: LaserGuided

Sarah Menkedick is a freelance writer currently based in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has spent the last five years teaching, writing and traveling on five continents. She regularly writes about women's rights.
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