The Extraordinary Life and Tragic Death of Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo - Chapter Five In Evangelina’s footsteps

The Extraordinary Life and Tragic Death of Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo - Chapter Five In Evangelina’s footsteps

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Laura Gómez: It’s December 2024, and I'm in a place I know well. A place I often came as a child. It’s the campus of the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, in the Dominican capital. My aunt was a student here, and she used to bring me to the movie club on campus when I was growing up. 

But it’s been many years since I stepped foot here, and now I'm standing in front of a bust I never knew existed, and perhaps many current students haven’t noticed, even though they probably walk past it many times. I study the face–by now familiar–of the woman gazing serenely back at me. 

Dr. Andrea Evangelina Rodriguez Perozo. 

This is Evangelina as she was immortalized in the one picture of her that still exists today. With a neat string of pearls, her curly hair parted into a stylish bob. Before she was persecuted by Trujillo's government. Before her repeated mental breakdowns, and her impoverished final days. 

It’s incredible to me that over 100 years ago, Evangelina may have stepped exactly where I am stepping now. She would have attended lectures at this very school… the only woman in a sea of men. And I find it fascinating that, even though she came so close to being erased from history, we’re here today remembering her. 

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo: Yo quisiera que la gente recordará de ella el tesón… 

Robin Derby: You know, somebody whose life is uniquely courageous and remarkable.

Milcíades Herrera: …una mujer emprendedora, una mujer que fue capaz de sacrificarse…

Claudia Scharf: Una persona que nunca pensó en sí misma, sino que pensó en los demás. 

Elizabeth Manley: …not just making that first for herself, but then, you know, sort of paying it back to society.

Laura Gómez: This is “Lost Women of Science”, I’m Laura Gómez. We’ve reached the final chapter of our special five-part series on the remarkable trajectory of Dr. Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo. 

She rose from the streets of San Pedro de Macorís to become the first Dominican woman to graduate from medical school, trained in Paris in Obstetrics and Gynecology and made it her mission to elevate women and children’s healthcare back in the Dominican Republic. In our final act of the series, we’ll examine how Evangelina’s memory was deliberately erased–then rescued–and the legacy she left behind. 

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This is Episode 5: In Evangelina’s Footsteps.

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Evangelina Rodríguez died in 1947, at the age of 68. 

During her final years, Evangelina was a broken woman. But before then, she had done enormous good for her country. She’d opened a maternity clinic in San Pedro de Macorís. She’d cared for tuberculosis and leprosy patients free of cost. She promoted life-saving nutrition and hygiene practices and delivered safe, pasteurized milk to poor families. And she’d championed the idea of contraception and sexual health.

But, following her death, she nearly disappeared without a trace. And that was no accident.

She was too radical for the authoritarian regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. It had been trying to erase her since at least a decade before her death. It banned her from a major medical conference, wiped her name from the national registry of doctors, and frightened patients away from her practice. 

Her capture and torture by Trujillo’s men was the final straw, robbing her of the last of her spirit. By the time she died, the Evangelina most people had known was already long gone.

Her death itself barely caused comment. Here’s Mercedes Fernández, who we've heard from in previous episodes.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): Nobody published that she had died. The only person who dared to publish a note was Francisco Comarazamy, correspondent of “La Opinión” in San Pedro de Macoris. And the article he published appeared in the newspaper a week after Evangelina's death. Why? Because it was forbidden to talk about Evangelina.

Laura Gómez: And so it came to be that the first Dominican woman to graduate from medical school, the doctor who had devoted herself to others and saved so many lives, died in near anonymity. 

Meanwhile, Trujillo, casting himself as the great benefactor of the nation, extended her free milk program and invested in better sanitation to avoid diseases and infection. But he never acknowledged her early role in promoting these public health ideas. Here’s Milcíades Herrera, the director of a cultural center in Higüey, the town where Evangelina was born.

Milcíades Herrera (Voiceover):  He appropriated many of her ideas for his personal political gain. But he didn’t give her the credit she deserved. So she was a victim of that.

Laura Gómez: This was part of a deliberate effort by the Trujillo regime to erase anyone in Dominican public life who hadn't bowed down to the dictator. To show that Trujillo — and only Trujillo — had the answer to his country’s problems. And for three decades, Trujillo’s narrative was all there was. 

He exercised complete control over Dominican political, social, and economic life.

But, as Evangelina repeatedly told her adopted daughter,Selisette, it couldn’t last forever.

Even as Trujillo paid off foreign debt and built roads, airports and modern cities, for many poor Dominicans, life remained precarious. Rural areas were neglected, and many former sharecroppers expelled from their communal lands migrated to shanty towns around Santo Domingo. 

In the midst of all this, public health suffered. According to UN data, the mortality rate for children under five actually rose during the final decade of Trujillo's term. 

And then there was the horrific brutality. Trujillo’s regime murdered around 50,000 people. In 1937, driven by his long standing hatred for Haitians, Trujillo ordered the execution of more than 15,000 Haitian men, women, and children living along the Dominican border in what came to be known as the “Parsley Massacre.” 

But the more Trujillo tightened his grip on his country, the more it began to crack under the weight of all the atrocities.

And then, in 1961, the tables finally turned. 

Archival News Clip: A 31-year reign of terror and bloodshed comes to an end in the Dominican Republic, as Dictator Rafael Trujillo is shot down by seven assassins. His victims were numbered in the tens of thousands during his iron-fisted rule, a rule that created fabulous wealth for a few, and the grimmest of poverty for the majority. He ruled by the gun, and died by the gun. And now a scramble for power begins.

Laura Gómez: The U.S., which had supported Trujillo for years despite his brutality, began to fear that the growing resistance to his regime could lead to a communist takeover, as had happened in Cuba with Fidel Castro. And so… when the plot started taking shape to assassinate Trujillo, the CIA provided its support.

Years of turmoil followed. In 1963, the island elected Juan Bosch, a president who supported the working class, in a democratic election. Seven months later, his government was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup by military figures who accused him of being a communist. In 1966, supported by the U.S., Joaquín Balaguer was elected president.

Evangelina’s legacy remained buried, but as the Trujillo family’s iron grip somewhat loosened, those who hadn’t forgotten her weren’t about to let their beloved doctor slip into oblivion so easily. 

April Mayes: I think Petro Macorisanos did their work to keep her legacy alive more than anything, actually.

That’s historian April Mayes. She says the people most intent on making sure the story of Evangelina wasn’t forgotten were the residents of the town where she had grown up, lived, and worked for most of her life,San Pedro de Macorís. 

April Mayes: She's mentioned in a kind of local histories that are written by Petro Macorisanos, and her story never dies. It continues to be shared generation after generation.

This had started with that single obituary that was written a week after Evangelina died. 

Francisco Comarazamy (Voice Actor): After painful days of suffering, Dr. Evangelina  Rodriguez Recientemente, a noblewoman who practiced medicine and literature with love and humanistic understanding recently passed away in the city. 

Laura Gómez: The journalist Francisco Comarazamy had been Evangelina's neighbor in San Pedro. He knew her personally. And he felt strongly that her death shouldn't go unreported. Mercedes Fernández again. 

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): He says no, this woman is very important. People have to know that she has died. And that's why he publishes the note describing the death.

Laura Gómez: And that's how—barely, just barely–despite all odds, Evangelina's memory survived over time. April Mayes again. 

April Mayes: I think that that's an incredible testament. It's like a big F-you from San Pedro as well. Like, we are our own people and you know, we will elevate our own. We don't actually really care what they do in Santo Domingo and who's in charge over there. And I think that that's just incredible.

Laura Gómez: Then slowly but surely, after Trujillo’s death, recognition of Evangelina began to spread beyond the small, word-of-mouth circles of San Pedro.

It didn’t hurt that this moment in the 1960s also coincided with a global change in attitudes towards what had once been considered one of Evangelina’s more controversial efforts: family planning. In the United States, the birth control pill was legalized in 1960, and a number of countries followed suit. 

In the Dominican Republic, the family planning nonprofit Profamilia was founded in 1966, spawning a network of free clinics across the country. And in fact... 

Elizabeth Manley: … one of their two first clinics that they founded in 1968 around family planning is called the Clínica Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo. So they named their first clinic after her.

Laura Gómez: That’s historian Elizabeth Manley, who we heard from in previous episodes. She explains that in the 1960s, Dominican feminist groups, freed from the censorship of Trujillo’s government, began reclaiming the names of women like Evangelina who had been early champions of women’s empowerment. 

Elizabeth Manley: I think in large part, women within, in the ’60s, in the post-Trujillo period, they were really interested in looking to women that provided another model…and hers was a great one, right? Because not only did she represent that kind of resistance, but also she was a pioneer in reproductive health.

Laura Gómez: Here's Claudia Scharf, a Dominican pediatrician and medical professor. 

Claudia Scharf (Voiceover): After Trujillo's death, there started to be some recognition of her value and of everything she left as a legacy, which were all these innovative practices, all these health strategies that today we could say are public health strategies. And so from 1960s onwards, perhaps, all her work began to be recognized.

Laura Gómez: Then in 1980, 33 years after Evangelina's death, a San Pedro de Macorís doctor named Antonio Zaglul published a first biography of Evangelina. She had been his family doctor when he was growing up, and as an adult, he spent years digging up everything he could find about her. Mercedes Fernandez again. 

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): The publication of Evangelina's biography, in my opinion, has helped make her known to the general public.

Laura Gómez: After Zaglul’s biography was published, a trickle of commemorative monuments honoring Evangelina began slowly popping up across the country. 

In 1985, the government issued a commemorative postal stamp bearing Evangelina’s image. In 2014, a street in the capital was named after her, and even more recently, the city’s public maternity hospital was renamed Hospital Materno Evangelina Rodriguez. It took decades, but Evangelina’s story was beginning to get some recognition. 

And yet, I’d never heard of her before I started working on this podcast–and I know many other Dominicans haven’t, either. I never heard of her in school. That upsets me. 

Encountering her in this way has meant so much to me. I feel incredibly connected to this woman who fought so hard for our people. Who cared so much about Dominican women’s health. 

So I decided it was time for me to pay her a proper tribute, to follow her footsteps. That’s after the break.

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[Mid-roll]

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Laura Gómez: On a sunny December morning, I drove over to the campus of the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, right in the town where I grew up.

I wanted to see the bust of Evangelina that’s been erected outside the very medical school where she once studied. 

As part of this trip to pay homage to Evangelina, I met up with a fellow actor from Santo Domingo named Alejandra Alemany. She portrayed Evangelina in a theater production 13 years ago.

I felt like Alejandra might understand what I’ve been feeling. Both of us spent months inhabiting Evangelina’s world, retracing her struggles and her triumphs.

And standing next to her statue, as modern Dominican women who have both been deeply immersed in Evangelina’s story, some mixed feelings washed over us. Here’s Alejandra.

Alejandra Alemany: Me da un poco de tristeza saber que no se le da el reconocimiento que ella merece. ¿Por qué no se hacen más libros? ¿Por qué no se hacen películas? 

Laura Gómez: Alejandra feels sadness that Evangelina isn’t more widely recognized. She thinks that her story should be much more widely told, through textbooks, movies, TV series… Here in the Dominican Republic, there are three sisters named Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal, who famously resisted Trujillo in the final years of his term. Their names are everywhere. Everyone on the island knows who they are. 

Evangelina’s courage was on par with the Mirabal sisters, and her story should be just as widely known.  

But at the same time… as women, we also feel a strong sense of kinship with Evangelina, and a responsibility to continue her fight. 

Laura Gómez: Yo lo siento como una conexión visceral a su fortaleza. 

 Alejandra Alemany: Sí.

Laura Gómez: We’ve come a long way since Evangelina’s time, and many of the ideas she fought for have now entered the mainstream. But looking at the Dominican Republic today, I can't help but think about how that struggle that she dedicated her life to is still ongoing. Women’s health in my country still lags behind that of many other Latin American countries.  Maternal mortality rates are nearly one-third higher in the DR than the regional average. And numbers have actually worsened in the past 20 years. The teenage pregnancy rate is also very high. And there’s no access to legal abortion, even in cases where the fetus isn’t viable, or the woman’s life is in danger. 

It feels crazy to me that even though Evangelina and I were born generations apart, so much of what she was fighting for – women’s access to healthcare, our basic right to bodily autonomy, still feels so relevant and urgent today. 

…que estamos tan conectadas a pesar de la lejanía en cuanto al tiempo en que existimos, históricamente, es muy loco. 

Alejandra Alemany: Eso, exactamente…

Laura Gómez: I tried to imagine what Evangelina would think of our country today, of the situation we’re in–not just in the Dominican Republic but in many other places too, still fighting for women’s health and reproductive rights. 

Perhaps she would still be fired up, fighting alongside us. 

But I hope she would also feel some sense of pride. Just imagine if she could see all the new doctors in training retracing her footsteps right here on this campus… with the women outnumbering the men. Claudia Scharf, who teaches in a medical school in Santo Domingo, offers this perspective. 

Claudia Scharf (Voiceover): The truth is that if Dr. Evangelina Rodriguez were born again today, she would not be able to believe what is happening. Because at the moment, I’d say that about 70, 75% of the students enrolled in medical school are women. So, I think that in a way she can feel satisfied because someone needed to take a first step. Back in her day, she was the one who took it.

Laura Gómez: As a Dominican woman, I’m so grateful for all that Evangelina did for us, not just delivering babies and caring for infants back in her day, but fighting to make this a better country with a better future for all of us.

As Alejandra and I were leaving the campus, we passed by one more small tribute to Evangelina: a mural, outside the medical school building. It shows a number of illustrious Dominican doctors, some in portrait mode, some in action... performing a surgery, looking at an X-ray, listening to a patient’s heart… 

Smack in the middle of the mural, nearly crowded out by the male figures that surround her, sits a now familiar face. 

Evangelina. 

She’s up there alone–the only female doctor - now standing watch over the many young women following in her footsteps. 

This episode of “Lost Women of Science” was produced by Lorena Galliot, with help from associate producer Natalia Sánchez Loayza. Samia Bouzid is our senior producer, and our senior managing producer is Deborah Unger. 

David DeLuca was our sound designer and engineer. Field recordings by Homer Mora Acosta. Lizzie Younan composed all of our music. We had fact-checking help from Desirée Yépez.

Our co-executive producers are Amy Scharf and Katie Hafner. Thanks to Eowyn Burtner, our program manager, and Jeff DelViscio at our publishing partner, “Scientific American.” Our intern is Kimberly Mendez.

“Lost Women of Science” is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX.

For show notes and an episode transcript, head to lostwomenofscience.org, where you can also support our work by hitting the donate button.

I’m your host, Laura Gómez. Thanks for listening! 

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