The Extraordinary Life and Tragic Death of Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo - Chapter Four: The Dictator and the Doctor

The Extraordinary Life and Tragic Death of Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo - Chapter Four: The Dictator and the Doctor

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Laura Gómez: It’s 1929 in San Pedro de Macorís. Despite facing criticism for her more radical ideas on family planning and treating sex workers, Evangelina continues to pursue her life’s work. She’s overseeing a maternity clinic that welcomes all women, regardless of income or class. She’s running a free milk distribution program for infants. And she’s caring for society's most marginalized members... poor people, orphaned children, tuberculosis patients. She’s still controversial, and an outlier in the world of healthcare, but she’s doing what she loves best. She’s following her passion and fulfilling her dream. 

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover): When she becomes a doctor, that's when she achieves happiness.

Milcíades Herrera (Voiceover): She is known as a woman dedicated to her service through medicine. That’s where she found a way to serve the country she loved so much.

Laura Gómez: But all this is about to change. Less than 50 miles away, in the capital, Santo Domingo, revolutionary forces are beginning to stir. And although Evangelina’s work feels far removed from these rumblings, they will soon upend not just her life, but that of all her fellow Dominicans.

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This is “Lost Women of Science.” I'm Laura Gómez. This week, we bring you the fourth episode of our series on the Dominican doctor, Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo. In the last three episodes, we followed Evangelina’s transformation from a poor, orphan girl to a brilliant and radical doctor. But now, at the peak of her career, dark forces are about to tear down everything she’s built. 

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This is episode 4: “The Dictator and the Doctor.”

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In February 1930, unrest hit the Dominican Republic yet again. The hope that had ushered in the latest president, Horacio Vásquez, had dissolved. Every day Dominicans struggled as the country suffered from the ripple effects of the financial crash of 1929 and the collapse in sugar prices. And Vásquez had flouted the country’s young constitution to stay in office past his term limit. So it wasn’t entirely surprising that by 1930, rebel forces sought to overthrow Vásquez's government. 

What was surprising was how easily they did it. The National Army didn’t lift a finger as the rebel leader, Rafael Estrella, marched on the capital. It turned out, Estrella had not been working alone. He’d cut a secret deal with the head of Vásquez's army… a man named Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.

Out in the Eastern Provinces, Evangelina was far removed from the scene. But she was all too familiar with the man who’d let it happen.

Evangelina first encountered Trujillo in the late nineteen-teens, when he was a young officer in the Dominican National Guard, trained by U.S. Marines. She'd witnessed his brutal displacement of farmers in the Eastern Provinces as U.S. sugar corporations took over. She knew well what kind of man he was.  

Trujillo had continued to rise through the ranks, until, in 1930, he was the head of the military.

And when rebel leader Rafael Estrella launched his coup, Trujillo secretly promised him that the army wouldn't interfere if Estrella helped him, Trujillo, run for president. 

That's how, in May 1930, Rafael Trujillo was elected president with an implausible 99% of the vote. 

The election was a sham, marked by violence against opposition candidates and widespread intimidation of voters. In the end, no one dared to stand against the head of the army. Trujillo assumed power. 

Robin Derby: Trujillo is part of a wave of dictators who take over in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua.

Laura Gómez: This is Robin Derby, a historian we heard from in Episode 2. Across Central America, strong men were seizing control, using violence to subdue resistance. She explains that one of Trujillo's first acts in office was to make it clear -- in the most brutal of ways -- that he would accept no dissent. He made an example of a caudillo, a sort of regional chieftain, who had once defied him.

Robin Derby: Desiderio Arias was one of the last caudillos to resist Trujillo… Trujillo had him murdered, to let it be known that the struggle was over and Trujillo had taken command. 

Laura Gómez: Trujillo soon took full control of the island and its economy. He placed family members and cronies in key positions and basically turned the state coffers into his own personal coffers. 

Robin Derby: Everything that he did was done in the name of the nation but actually for him. So he renames the capital city, Ciudad Trujillo, and many national monuments and parks, and many busts were created of him, of his likeness. You know—when he’s building a bridge, or when he’s building a hospital, all of these were cast as the beneficence of Trujillo. And yet actually, at that time he established a kleptocracy and was personally becoming one of the wealthiest men in Latin America.  

Laura Gómez: It didn’t take long. Within several years, the “Generalísimo,” as Trujillo liked to be called, was in complete control. And he established a cult of personality. All Dominicans were expected to express their absolute loyalty to him. 

Robin Derby: You had to have “God y Trujillo” in a little, you know, it was a little placard that you had to have in your home. People had to have images of Trujillo in their homes. 

Laura Gómez: And Trujillo made it clear from early on that he expected full allegiance. People who did not join his party and vocally express their support were blacklisted. They could lose their jobs, their livelihoods, or even be arrested. In later years, Trujillo founded a lethal secret service, called the SIM, which stood for the Military Intelligence Service in Spanish. It cracked down on any sign of dissent. 

Robin Derby: The SIM, the international intelligence, had these Volkswagen bugs. And they were moving around the city quite publicly, and doing abductions in broad daylight. So that was another one of his numbers. Sent a message of fear that, if you don’t get with the program, this is what’s happening to you. 

April Mayes: Historians will talk about the absolute culture of fear. 

Laura Gómez: This is April Mayes, a historian we heard from in previous episodes. 

April Mayes: People would whisper his name. You never really talked about him in public or even in your house for fear that someone was listening and would turn you in.

Laura Gómez: Dominicans had every reason to fear Trujillo. His network of informers spanned the island. The campaign of fear he waged targeted anyone opposed to his policies… even by association. But somehow, Evangelina remained uncowed. 

She refused to show allegiance to a man she knew was a murderer. She could see that even though Trujillo cast himself as the nation’s benefactor and promised to invest in the well-being of all Dominicans, he focused his attention mostly on developing infrastructure in urban areas. The places where Evangelina practiced medicine remained underfunded and neglected. Despite the risks, she refused to stay quiet. In a 1936 letter to the Secretary of State for Justice and Public Instruction, she complained that resources she’d intended to put toward a school for tuberculosis prevention in a rural area never appeared.

April Mayes: She begins calling out different social problems and social issues, and the problem is that the solution isn’t just, “And our Generalísimo Trujillo de Tal is going to resolve all of this for us.” She’s really trying to call the people to say, “What are we going to do about this? You know, our General Trujillo doesn’t have just the solution and he’s not paying attention to this.” It is this kind of, you know, denunciation. 

Laura Gómez: And Evangelina would take her denunciation of Trujillo even further. Here's what her adopted daughter, Selisette, told historian Perdita Houston in an interview published in the 1990s. Her words are read by a voice actress. 

Selisette (Voice Actor): When we went to visit patients, she always talked about how bad Trujillo was, a dictator, a murderer, and a killer. It was a very repressive time, and people became afraid.

Laura Gómez: According to Robin Derby, in the early years of Trujillo’s rule, Evangelina was truly an outlier in her open opposition to the dictator.

Robin Derby: I think she’s pretty outstanding, as a case. It would be interesting to think about who else is able to just speak out as she did. And to stand up to a regime as ferocious as Trujillo.  

Laura Gómez: Perhaps Evangelina felt that she had nothing to lose under Trujillo’s regime. Here’s Mercedes Fernández, who wrote her Ph.D. on Evangelina.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover):  During the Trujillo regime, the issue of race becomes very important again. And the regime does not want people of color as representatives of what it means to be Dominican. 

Milcíades Herrera (Voiceover):  Remember that Evangelina was Black. Her race was not white.

Laura Gómez: This is Milcíades Herrera. He runs a cultural center in Higüey, the town where Evangelina Rodríguez was born.

Milcíades Herrera (Voiceover):  Trujillo was a racist person. He had a delirium for the maximum, the best of society. 

Laura Gómez: And to Trujillo, the “best in society” meant those of European descent. According to the only census from that time, conducted in 1920 while the island was under U.S. rule, that description might only have fit about a quarter of the population. The vast majority were either mixed race or Black. But Trujillo promoted a policy of “blanqueamiento,” or whitening, of Dominican society. He encouraged the immigration of white Europeans to the island and offered refuge to Jews fleeing Nazism during World War II because they were considered white. Meanwhile, Black immigrants from neighboring countries like Haiti were brutally persecuted. And so were dark-skinned Dominicans. 

Milcíades Herrera (Voiceover):  And so, what he did to important people of color, was persecute them.

Laura Gómez: It also didn’t matter who you were or how accomplished you were. During Trujillo’s three decades in power, he killed or forced out anyone who stood in his path, from farm workers resisting exploitation to Dominican elites who posed threats to his authority. 

So perhaps, even if she'd said or done nothing else, Evangelina's crime in the eyes of Trujillo was simply being an accomplished, prominent woman who happened to have been born Black. 

Here’s Mercedes Fernández.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover):  So, it's a combination of elements that work against her. And that leads to the fact that in the end, she is stripped of all the advantages that she had before because she studied abroad. So she is no longer recognized as an important person.

Laura Gómez: April Mayes.

April Mayes: She finds herself afraid of being pursued by police, that she’s under surveillance by the regime. And, I mean, just a lot of things begin to fall apart at the end. 

Laura Gómez: For 56-year-old Evangelina, it was the beginning of a tragic downward spiral. That's after the break — stay with us. 

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[Mid-roll]

Laura Gómez: In 1933, Evangelina and Rafael Trujillo crossed paths at a congress of medical professionals in Santo Domingo. Trujillo opened the proceedings by proclaiming the advances his policies had made in healthcare. But the rest of the congress didn’t proceed as he would have liked. He was immediately contradicted by the organizer, who said that more resources were needed and that the medical situation in the country was dire.

And it likely didn’t help that there was a delegation of Haitians presenting papers, along with non-white Dominicans like Evangelina. To make matters worse, when Evangelina’s paper about social medicine was given an honorable mention, she pointedly failed to thank Trujillo in her acceptance speech.

Something had clearly gotten under Trujillo’s skin because he declared that from then on, all submissions for congresses would have to be vetted.

For a time, Evangelina carried on with her work in San Pedro. Then, two years later, she made another trip to Santo Domingo for a medical conference. But this time, things went very differently. Mercedes Fernández.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover):  She was banned from participating in the 1935 congress, and from there all her problems began.

Laura Gómez: They don’t let her in. There she is, after a long journey, a highly regarded doctor, ready to participate in a conference about the health of her nation. And she’s barred from entry. 

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover):  It’s a kind of punishment, right? For not adhering to this dialectic of the Trujillato of saying, “Oh, President Trujillo, you have modernized, you made it possible for so-and-so to have a new house, to build this thing, to build that other thing.” She just doesn't say anything like that. And then Trujillo punishes her.

Laura Gómez: It’s possible that Evangelina got on the regime’s radar when she failed to thank Trujillo in her 1933 speech. It’s also possible that her very presence there—as an educated Afro-Dominican woman—was enough to anger the powers that be. 

That night, Evangelina returned to the home of the friends she was staying with in Santo Domingo. Her hair was disheveled, her eyes wild, her face twisted in fear. One of her hosts would later describe her to her biographer, Antonio Zaglul, as rambling incoherently, muttering about thugs chasing after her. She seemed to be hallucinating. 

Evangelina’s adopted daughter, Selisette, was six at the time. She told the biographer, Perdita Houston, that this was the first visible sign of Evangelina's mental health troubles... troubles that would plague her for the rest of her life… Mercedes Fernández.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover):  She had a mental illness that was simply not treated, right? And this rejection by the regime, what it did was exacerbate her illness and it got worse.

Laura Gómez: Evangelina began losing many of the things she held dear. The Trujillo government stripped her name from the National Registry of Doctors. One by one, Evangelina's patients started abandoning her practice. According to her biographer, Antonio Zaglul, she was left with only her poorest patients, those with no one else to turn to. To those people, Evangelina would always be their trusted doctor. But to most others, she became a social risk, a pariah, someone to avoid. And the final blow. La Casa Amarilla, her beloved maternity clinic in San Pedro, shut down.  

All of these losses deeply impacted Evangelina’s mental health. She began neglecting her appearance even more—some days she appeared unkempt, even dirty. Reports of Evangelina's mental state got back to Selisette’s father, and he decided to take the little girl back home with him. Years later, Selisette would remember how other adults tried to shield her from Evangelina's views—views they were convinced would put her in danger. 

Selisette (Voice Actor): I was taken to my father's house and kept away from other children so I couldn't say anything about where my mother was or what she had been saying or doing. The adults in the house tried to change my ideas about Trujillo; they told me he was a good man.

Laura Gómez: With Selisette gone, so was Evangelina's last remaining tie with a person she truly loved. Mercedes Fernández.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover):  All her friends, the Deligne brothers, Anacaona, José Ramón López, had passed away, as well as her closest relatives, her aunts and paternal grandmother. By this time she is completely alone. She has no one to take care of her.

Laura Gómez: It was around this time that Evangelina appears to have left San Pedro de Macorís and moved to a village called Pedro Sánchez, where she lived with a distant half-brother she barely knew. By then, her isolation was complete. Her dreams were shattered. Fear had taken over her world. 

The record on this next part of Evangelina's story is murky. For roughly a decade, there’s very little trace of what she’s doing. In the 1970s, Evangelina's biographer Antonio Zaglul traveled to Pedro Sánchez to interview people there. Residents who remembered Evangelina said she alternated between periods of lucidity and bouts of madness. When she was lucid enough, she saw patients, in particular, mothers and children–free of charge, of course. Some of these patients described how Evangelina's mind seemed to slip in the middle of a consultation. One minute she would be talking, and the next, she'd stare fixedly at the ceiling, lost in thought. 

Isolated and unmoored, Evangelina lost touch with reality. She began wandering the countryside of the Eastern Provinces wearing men’s shoes and carrying a basket of flowers on her head. She walked for hours on end. Sometimes days. 

April Mayes: People talk about, that she’s just found wandering in the streets. 

Laura Gómez: Here's April Mayes. 

 April Mayes: There’s just this something about her walking around, the description—muttering to herself, she was very unkempt, and those shoes that she was wearing just kind of—you could identify it was Evangelina.

Milcíades Herrera (Voiceover): She walked, walked, and walked.

Laura Gómez: And Milcíades Herrera again. 

Milcíades Herrera (Voiceover): And that was perhaps a way of evading this treatment of the same society she had devoted herself to, which did not return her devotion.

Laura Gómez: But as Evangelina wandered through towns and villages, some people took pity on her. 

Milcíades Herrera (Voiceover): So in those walks, people always give her food. Because that was a typical thing to do back then. But what does she do? She passed it on to the first hungry person she found. She gave it to them instead of eating it. She cared more about others.

Laura Gómez: It’s heartbreaking to imagine this woman who had come so far and done so much good in her life wandering around the countryside, with her basket of flowers and men’s shoes, muttering incoherently. 

This part of Evangelina's life isn't in any official record. It was passed down by Dominicans’ collective memory... generation after generation of people sharing the tale of this strange woman, who had once been a doctor. 

In 1946, around a decade after she moved to Pedro Sánchez, Evangelina re-emerged in the official record. That year, Dominican sugar workers, tired of their meager pay and oppressive work conditions, finally dared to go on strike. Trujillo had been in power for 16 years by then, and he and his family controlled most of the island's sugar production. 

Trujillo responded with classic brutality. He sent his secret police to identify and arrest strike leaders. Several of them were captured, detained, and ultimately hanged in public, their bodies left dangling for days as a warning to others. 

The strike also kicked off a massive witch hunt for any enemies of the regime in the sugar-producing regions... and someone, somewhere, pointed a finger at Evangelina. Here's historian Elizabeth Manley. 

Elizabeth Manley: It seems likely that this was kind of a convenient way to wrap her into this, not necessarily fully believing that she was involved in this strike organizing, but just kind of a convenient coincidence.

Laura Gómez: It wasn't long before Trujillo's men came for Evangelina. She was arrested during one of her walks between Pedro Sánchez and a neighboring town. Her captors brought her to a prison in San Pedro de Macorís, the town where she had spent most of her life. She was beaten and tortured for several days, and then released on a deserted road out in the countryside.

The trauma of her arrest, imprisonment, and torture was something she could not survive. She fell silent and eventually stopped eating almost completely. Milcíades Herrera again. 

Milcíades Herrera (Voiceover):  Little by little, her system became more and more deprived, until she died of starvation.

Laura Gómez: On January 11, 1947, Evangelina was found dead on a street that bore the name of the man who had been her first mentor and friend, the poet Rafael Deligne. She was 68 years old. The cause of death listed on her death certificate was starvation. 

Milcíades Herrera (Voiceover):  Her giving attitude was so complete, so strong that she no longer valued her own life. 

Laura Gómez: Mercedes Fernández.

Mercedes Fernández Asenjo (Voiceover):  To me, it seems that life was very cruel to her. And when she finally got what she really wanted, the difficulties returned again. When I was doing my thesis, it really moved me. I felt a lot of rage, and I said, but why, I mean why, why are there people to whom destiny is so ruthless? I can't understand it, you know?

Laura Gómez: It’s hard not to feel that same rage. I feel it, too. That a woman of such extraordinary intelligence, who went so far and did so much for others in her lifetime, would end up dying of starvation. It’s almost too much to bear. 

And it also hurts that many of Evangelina's accomplishments were erased from history. 

The Trujillo regime established its own initiatives aimed at helping mothers and children, including a milk distribution program, with no nod to Evangelina. And her dissertation was never saved in the national archives. Mercedes Fernández suspects it may have been intentionally removed during the Trujillo years. 

But in our final episode of this season, we'll look at how some Dominicans, against all odds, have worked to keep Evangelina's memory alive. Testaments to her work and modest tributes to her are scattered around the country. We'll visit some of them. 

Most of all, I take some comfort in knowing that Evangelina was right about one thing. She told her adopted daughter, Selisette, again and again, that Trujillo's reign of terror would eventually end. 

Selisette (Voice Actor): She told me that the day that he died I would hear all the church bells ringing. She said that she herself probably wouldn't see it, but you will, for sure. And then, you will remember me.

Laura Gómez: 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. 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, and until next week!