Stacy Cordova Diaz’s Visit to the Yale with the AECY
Tara*, a junior at Yale, recaps and reflects on the week spent with Ms. Stacy Cordova Diaz, who was hosted by the AECY in New Haven this November.
*Tara Bhat ‘25 (she/her) is a junior at Yale University, majoring in Political Science.
Image of Stacy Cordova Diaz
In November of 2023, the AECY hosted Ms. Stacy Cordova Diaz, a teacher, advocate, and soon-to-be author who has been personally impacted by the American Eugenics movement, for a week at Yale. While visiting New Haven, Ms. Cordova Diaz presented at classes, was a guest speaker for a community event, The Long Shadow of Eugenics, at La Casa Cultural, visited the Yale Archives, and offered her insights for upcoming HST eugenics exhibit at the Yale Peabody Museum.
At all of these events, Ms. Cordova Diaz shared and spoke about the way eugenics has personally affected her life and her advocacy going forward. When in college, Ms. Cordova Diaz learned that her great aunt Mary Franco, at the age of 14, had been forcibly sterilized while institutionalized at Pacific Colony, a state narcotics hospital in California. Later, Ms. Cordova Diaz realized that forcible sterilization was not something that happened just to her great aunt, but instead was a state-sponsored program propelled forward by California, where more than 20,000 women have been forcibly sterilized. Ms. Cordova Diaz has since spent years researching the history of California’s Eugenics Program and advocating for the living victims of sterilization — helping pass the Compensation Bill to Survivors of Forced and Coercive Sterilizations and helping possible recipients of these reparations to apply.
Ms. Cordova Diaz reflected openly on the story of her great-aunt and spoke about how her aunt was made to take an IQ test. After the IQ test concluded that she was “feeble-minded,” Pacific Colony used this test to legitimize her forced sterilization, linking to Yale’s own eugenicist, Robert Yerkes, and his work with intelligence testing. She also discussed how her career, as a special education teacher, and her educational path, both rely upon and in the case of her access to education, benefitted from IQ testing – showing the complexity of how historically eugenical tools have lived on.
Image of Diaz’s Talk at La Casa Cultural, from YDN contributor Emily Aikens
Ms. Cordova Diaz is also currently working on writing a book, where she will write about the story of her great aunt, paint a picture of the history of eugenics, and relate this all back to her own experiences growing up and being stigmatized as a teen mother. During her visit to the Eugenics and its Afterlives classroom, she and the students in the class read through parts of her manuscript and talked about how best to encapsulate all of these complex stories in one book.
Image of Ms. Stacy Cordova Diaz with the students in Eugenics and Its Afterlives
Throughout her visits to classes and at the speaking event at La Casa Cultural, Ms. Cordova Diaz very courageously shared her and her family's stories, providing both an example of the afterlives of eugenics and of anti-eugenic work based on visions of hope, collective freedom, and reparation.