LEAVE YOUR MARK: Cancer Crusader

ByABC News
November 11, 2008, 6:42 PM

— -- Early one Saturday morning in October, 44-year-old Mercedes Vázquez stands near the front of a long line of women that snakes out the lobby doors of the massive Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. She and the others are not there for a service, but for free medical screenings for such diseases as breast cancer, diabetes and HIV. The event is run by Dia de la Mujer Latina, a non-profit organization aimed at increasing awareness of how to prevent such diseases. Vazquez, who works in the kitchen of a Houston middle school, says she has never had a breast exam, let alone a mammogram. "I don't have enough money to visit a doctor," she says.

María Guadalupe Ramírez, a 54-year-old house cleaner, also receives a breast exam from a volunteer doctor at the event, as well as having her blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol checked. She admits that she and other Latinas benefit from such events because it helps them become better educated about disease prevention. "Our community is not really knowledgeable about the importance of health," she says. "This helps people learn."

Dashing all about the event talking to the women and coordinating volunteers is Dia de la Mujer Latina's 57-year-old founder and breast cancer survivor Venus Gines, who wears a bright pink shirt with the words, "La lucha continua pero no seremos vencidos." ("The fight continues but we will not be defeated.")

"Don't trust the doctors in this country because they use us Puerto Rican women as guinea pigs," Gines' mother, Rosa, repeatedly told her as she grew up between the Harlem area of New York City, Cayey, Puerto Rico, and in Miami, Florida. Rosa had been sterile since the age of 28 and she blamed U.S. doctors. "My mother was a victim of the sterilization abuse that took place in the 1940s and 1950s," says Gines. "She was very bitter about the medical system in this country and I grew up in that atmosphere."

Rosa's words had a strong impact on her daughter. Even after graduating college and landing a job as a flight attendant for Trans World Airlines (TWA), with full health insurance, Gines never went to a doctor for regular checkups, and if she got sick she just tried to get better on her own.