"I feel like the best way to express how immigration and reproductive justice connect and intercept is by the incredible power of storytelling," said Jessica González-Rojas, the executive director at the National Institute of Latina Institute of Reproductive Health, "an organization that cultivates Latina leaders" and "builds Latina power."

"We are seeking to change the narrative of who we are, how we feel, act and respond to reproductive issues," she said.

On Friday, Dec. 6, the Bronx Museum of the Arts in collaboration the National Institute of Latina Institute of Reproductive Health and Planned Parenthood of New York City Training Institute, featured a screening of "Harvest Empire: A History of Latinos in America," a documentary based on New York Daily News journalist Juan González's book of the same name.

The film "takes an unflinching look at how U.S. economic and military interests helped trigger an unprecedented wave of migration." Originally released in 2000 and then updated in 2011, the book explores the stories of Latinos from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua El Salvador, among other countries around the region.

The screening was followed by a panel discussion based on the question, "Latino Immigration, U.S. Policy, and Reproductive Health: What's the Connection?"

On the panel, González-Rojas highlighted "Nuestro Texas, a human rights campaign calling for reproductive health access for all women, without distinction as to geographic location, ethnicity, race, economic class, or citizen status."

"It is a response to policies passed by the Texas legislature in 2011 that devastated the reproductive health safety net of Texas-a decades-old system enabling millions of low-income Texas women to exercise their rights to health services and information," according to Nuestro Texas' official website. "These polices, including severe funding cuts to family planning services and regulations limiting certain reproductive health providers from operating, have jeopardized women's rights to health, life, autonomy, equality and freedom from ill treatment."

According to González-Rojas, who called Texas' response, a "straight-up legislative assault," pointed out that one of the areas most deeply impacted is the Lower Rio Grande Valley, "an under-resourced area where family planning clinics are frontline providers for uninsured and low-income women who would otherwise have nowhere to turn for essential services like contraception and cancer screenings."

She explains that for Latinas who don't speak English don't understand their rights and therefore, "accessing the legal right doesn't exist," due to the language barriers.

"The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH) and the Center for Reproductive Rights formed a partnership in 2012 to document the human rights impact of Texas' policies on the women in the Valley. The investigation exposed the profound barriers women in the Valley have faced for years in trying to access basic reproductive health care and shows, through women's own voices, how recent policies have eliminated what little access they once had.

"With long delays at clinics and the elimination of many free and low-cost services, reproductive health care has become unavailable and unaffordable for hundreds of thousands of women. Health outcomes reflect this, with reported increases in unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, as well as reproductive system cancers that, if caught early, are preventable or treatable."