FOUR
The one person that I thought really cared about me and was supposed to nurture me and make sure I was safe was my mom, and she wasn’t there. So why would some stranger care about me if my mom never did?
—EVELYN LOPEZ
As my eighty-nine-year-old mother deteriorates in the grip of age and dementia, I think a great deal about our relationship, a bond that has been both caring and troubled. As with all human connections that are uneasy, part of this is her responsibility and part of it mine. She sometimes drifts into my thoughts after I listen to formerly incarcerated women talk about their mothers. While describing the passage through youth to adulthood, nearly all of the women talk about their struggles trying to find some kind of meaningful connection with their mothers. And yet, they also recall how their mothers failed them—their experiences of betrayal and rejection often turning into expressions of anger and despair. But there is one common theme that weaves in and out of these accounts: their feelings of abandonment and their unvanquished longing for their mother’s love.
Interestingly, I hear very little about fathers in their stories. For most of these women, while they were growing up, their fathers were altogether absent—victims of the new Jim Crow, many incarcerated for decades, a handful for life. Some came to know their fathers in adulthood, while others never knew who their father was. Sonya, who had cycled in and out of prison for fifteen years, ruefully explained, “My mother was a whore, and I don’t know who my father was. She told me she was sure it was her pimp because I look like him. I don’t know if she said that to make me feel better.” For most of the women I spend time with, their fathers were offstage and did not loom as large in their lives as their mothers.
As they dealt with their feelings of abandonment and loss, some women decided to cut off all contact with their mothers. Others reported relief that their mothers had died, while a small number remained attached, even taking care of the mothers who had once abandoned them. But repeatedly, there was the unanswered need for love and approval in the mix. In turn, these deep-seated feelings affected their life trajectories. After listening to these stories of love and longing and the major role they’ve played in formerly incarcerated women’s lives, it’s surprising that there’s been very little research on the impact of the mother-daughter relationship on women’s pathways into the carceral system. The lack of knowledge surrounding women’s relationships with their mothers forms a significant part of the attention deficit surrounding the journeys and needs of women reentering life after incarceration. It also is yet another difference in understanding the lives of formerly incarcerated women and men.
In recent years, a great deal of attention has focused on what has been termed “the father wound” and how this often acts as a precursor to boys becoming involved with gangs and ultimately ending up in the criminal justice system. Researchers have studied the impact of father loss on individual development, especially for young males, with studies revealing a heightened risk of psychiatric disorders; problems with reasoning, processing, and memory; and overall long-lasting effects. These studies have also found that the younger the individuals, particularly boys, the more severe the impact of the father loss. But most significantly, research has shown that the impact of father absence is greater for young men than for young women. The National Institutes of Health have weighed in and reinforced the existence of this gender-based difference, observing that the effects of father loss have been shown to be stronger in boys than girls. Even I’d been swayed by this emphasis: my own research had examined how the lack of a father figure deeply affects young men, shaping their identity and activating their search for a substitute father in gang life.1
The absent father, the missing father, the father who wove in and out of a son’s life was a source of sorrow, rage, and ultimately often criminal activity. Aside from my research, I’d learned this lesson firsthand in Watts when I co-facilitated a men’s group through the Project Fatherhood program. My experiences with the formerly incarcerated men who formed that group eventually became a book that contributed to the growing literature on the impact of absent fathers. The men in the group, like the men I’d gotten to know at Homeboy Industries, idealized their mothers while at the same time working through their feelings of loss and anger at their fathers. Now I was discovering how most of the women I was talking with expressed similar feelings toward their mothers. They even used words that echoed the men’s feelings toward their fathers: they felt alone, they needed a role model, they needed someone to nurture them, to show them how to be women. Where was their mother? They also lamented how their mother was supposed to protect them and didn’t, particularly when it came to shielding them from physical and sexual abuse. But instead of openly expressing rage, as the men had felt comfortable doing toward their fathers, women repressed their anger, which was frequently eclipsed by feelings of responsibility. Conflicting life histories emerged: while boys ran in the streets, girls frequently became “little women,” taking the place of mothers in their families. There was a price for all this. Years later, the deep sadness of their lives floats in a reservoir of unexpressed rage.
Little attention has been paid to the “mother wound” and how so many young women were forced to fulfill an adult role while longing for the mother who simply wasn’t there. There were even a handful of formerly incarcerated women who experienced the extreme: their mothers not only failed to fulfill the maternal role; they actually exploited their own daughters. Some looked the other way when boyfriends or family members molested their daughters. And there were other maternal failures, maybe not as excessive, that still had deep implications for their little girls once they grew up. As these mothers struggled and often failed to fulfill what was required, their daughters stepped into their mother’s role. They became the de facto parents, describing lives in which they never experienced a childhood. Their life histories were individually unique, but no matter who the woman was, no matter her color or her crime, there was one experience the majority of formerly incarcerated women shared: they functioned as adults early in life, most frequently taking on the roles and responsibilities of their mothers. I thought of Denise, of Joanna—both women I had come to know and love. Long before any of these women were adults, each had to fulfill parental roles and responsibilities in a destabilized family system, taking care of parents as well as children.
This dynamic is often referred to as “parentification.” Most people are aware of the process of parentification without knowing the exact terminology. I was no exception. Growing up, I never understood the division of labor at my friend Mandy Lewis’s house. While we played Barbies in her bedroom, it seemed like her mother spent a lot of time in bed. Her father was never around. And whatever the circumstances, Mandy invariably had to put her Barbie away right at five o’clock to cook dinner and make sure her younger sister and brother were doing their homework. Watching all of this, I was torn between admiration and discomfort. Mandy Lewis’s mother wasn’t majoring in incompetence, I now realize. She was probably chronically depressed as well as alcoholic. But this was the early 1960s, before therapy, before chemical imbalances, rehab, and recovery became part of reality TV and daily experience. Back in the day, when women retreated from the family, a child—usually a daughter—was left to pick up the slack.
My family moved to another neighborhood, yet I often wondered how Mandy was doing. I intuitively knew it was somehow wrong that as a little girl she was forced to take on adult responsibilities. Later, in graduate school, I learned the formal explanation for the process of parentification, how children literally pushed away their own needs to care for their parent and their siblings. The “psychopathology” texts we used—how I hated that word—said that parentification usually occurred in “disorganized family systems.” This made me uncomfortable. Intuitively I knew that blaming the family didn’t always make sense. As a young social worker in South Los Angeles, I saw that parentification took place in completely functional families that were economically and structurally pressured to the max. In these families, the parents were not dysfunctional or mentally ill; they were simply poor. The parent or parents were holding down two or three jobs, just trying to meet the rising costs of living, determined not to apply for welfare and live “on the county.” The single-parent families, usually headed by mothers, faced the biggest economic obstacles. One parent was the only source of economic and emotional support. Whatever the configuration, the parents were loving and responsible, yet they were strung out over the economic needs of the day. Still later in my personal life, I got an up-close and personal look at the wounds of parentification when I began to understand just what my husband had encountered growing up with an alcoholic mother. He was completely parentified and early in our marriage tried taking responsibility for the fate of everyone in our household. He was a deputy chief in the LAPD, and his professional life reinforced his need to control every situation. None of this boded well for our marriage or our daughter, but we were a middle-class couple who could go to therapy; the economic wolf was not at the door. Our family dynamics might have been difficult; still, we faced what our daughter called “first-world problems.”
This was not the case for the women getting out of jail or prison. Along with their trauma and their feelings of abandonment, many were parentified. While conducting a case study of women at A New Way of Life, I had found that the most universal experience for women who entered Susan Burton’s program was the parentification that occurred during their childhood. Literally every woman interviewed talked about fulfilling a parental role in relation to one or more family members, from young siblings to extended family. And in these women’s lives, parentification wasn’t a matter of taking on household duties while a parent or parents worked. They weren’t just babysitting or preparing meals. The women all felt they had to protect the sisters, brothers, and family members they cared about; some placed themselves in harm’s way, trying to intervene in partner violence and child abuse. Others worked to help support their families financially.
For someone like Denise, all of these demands colliding at once was not unusual. She was practically the walking, talking embodiment of the parentified child. As her mother drifted into relationships and breakups, Denise was invariably the one holding things together because “my mother just wasn’t there. I wanted her to take care of us, but she just didn’t or couldn’t. To this day, I don’t know why.” When her sister became pregnant, her mother didn’t respond to the situation, and Denise knew what she had to do. “I turned my first trick to get money for my sister’s abortion,” she told me matter-of-factly. There was a problem, and she found a solution.
Denise’s problem-solving was extreme and tragic, but in this she wasn’t an exception. So many of these women have been intuitively parental and protective of their siblings, as well as of their parents. This doesn’t end with the onset of actual adulthood. Once these children who have been functioning as parents grow up and make their way in the world, they feel guilty trying to save themselves; they continue to focus on and prioritize the needs of others. What results is a particularly potent form of survivor’s guilt. These women are never able to mourn the loss of their childhood. Instead, they remain literally trapped in a cycle of taking responsibility for others, with no time or space for themselves.
The results of emerging research in this area were disturbing: parentified children were at a high risk for developing mental health and substance abuse issues. Researchers also concluded that these children developed a strong internal locus of control—they continue to feel responsible up until adulthood for both their family and the conditions that created their parentification.2 On top of that, the women I was studying faced yet another conundrum: how did they react to the external control exerted over their lives both during and after incarceration? Their loss of autonomy was directly counter to the responsibility they had shouldered throughout their lives; they had gone from controlling literally everything to controlling nothing. There was so much to factor in to fully understand their struggles. It felt like everywhere formerly incarcerated women turned, they faced another stressor. Along with poverty, ACEs, and trauma, there was also the impact of parentification. How on earth did anyone survive?
As if this wasn’t complicated enough, formerly incarcerated women had to find a way to cope with their feelings of abandonment, most frequently alongside the wounds of parentification. After cycling in and out of jail for over a decade, Anika Johnson was in recovery and putting her life together. She was now in her early forties, had given birth to three children, and had functioned as a single parent from the time she was sixteen. Her only outlet was drugs, men, and criminal activity. And because, as she told me, “I gotta admit, I really never had a real childhood—I had trouble growin’ up, because there was no time to grow up.” Even now, she still longed for her mother to come and take care of her. “My mother just wasn’t there,” she explained. “I was raised by my grandmother and my auntie helped out. Now I know, it was really my grandmother who brought me up, and if she couldn’t always be around watchin’ me, I know she tried the best she could.” Her testimony to grandparental devotion left out one important fact. While raising Anika, her grandmother ran one of the biggest and most notorious dope houses in South LA. When I asked what drugs her grandmother trafficked in, she laughed and told me, “Everything.” It was the only life Anika knew, and she accepted it. But what Anika couldn’t accept was her missing-in-action mother. “I never really knew my mother—she’d come around for a few days, then she’d be off with a boyfriend, doing crack, gambling, going to clubs. I wonder how I would have turned out if she’d been around. Sometimes I still wish she was with me even now. She’s dead. Sometimes I still dream she comes home to me.”
The absence of a mother is the hole in their heart these women want to fill. Most significantly, many formerly incarcerated women feel emotionally abandoned by their mothers. So many still seek their mother’s love—setting them up for a cycle of more pain. Some women tried to rationalize their mother’s abandonment, often with little success. Anika told me, “I knew my mother loved me, but she had me too young. Sometimes I do think, if she had this baby, why didn’t she stay with me? She just dumped me with my grandmother.” Another woman, Estella, told me, “My mother was never there when I was growing up.” Yet, she insisted, “I’m trying to forgive her—even now I still want her in my life.” Many women understood that their mothers were trying to cope with their own issues—trauma, poverty, and substance abuse. The problem was, whatever had caused their abandonment by their mothers, that loss meant that there was no space for their daughters to develop a secure sense of self or a stable identity.
I knew that the earliest trauma both Ivy and Janeth had experienced occurred because their mothers had abandoned them. Ivy’s father and mother were both drug addicts raising two children in a chaotic household where Ivy had matured beyond her years by the time she was five years old. Her family wasn’t stable; she lived in a party house where substance abuse and drug dealing were the order of the day. By the time she turned thirteen, her father was long gone, signing off on a divorce and completely disappearing. Her mother was lost to the streets, addicted to cocaine and slipped back and forth between drug dealing and prostitution. While her mother was gone for days at a time, Ivy felt responsible for her brother, Guillermo, and developed a deep bond with him. Still, even this could not heal the trauma she’d experienced, and she began to self-medicate, developing an emotional and physical dependence on drugs. Still, even as Ivy struggled, she always held out hope that her mother would get clean, settle down, and take care of the family. But there was no mother to take care of her children and Ivy and Guillermo both became increasingly caught up with gangbanging, drugs, and partying. Ivy was a child of the hood, absent from school, high on cocaine, kicking it with her homies. By her sixteenth birthday, she was constantly using drugs and committing petty theft to support her habit. There was no one to take care of her and, like so many other women, she found her way into an abusive relationship where she stayed trapped for eight years, because she had nowhere else to go. The mother she hoped would someday return finally died, and Ivy felt she’d lost her hope forever.
Unlike Ivy, Janeth never nurtured any dream of seeing her mother again. Growing up in Mexico, she’d never known her father, and even there, her mother was in and out of her life, focused mainly on using and dealing drugs. Instead, Janeth’s strongest support came from her aunt, her mother’s sister, who truly loved her and helped to take care of her as she grew up. However, she was forced to leave her aunt’s care when she was ten. Her mother had turned up and announced she’d decided to cross the border into California illegally. She insisted that Janeth and her two brothers come with her, promising them that life would be better in Los Angeles. Frightened to leave her aunt and the only family she’d ever really known, Janeth didn’t trust her mother’s words, and her misgivings soon proved true.
Life was hard, and expensive, in LA, and the family scraped by on money made from drug dealing, with much of the earnings used to feed her mother’s addiction. Janeth had trouble in school; she was hungry, she was frightened, and she could barely speak English. She began acting out, disrupting class and getting into fights. Ultimately, she wound up in Central Juvenile Hall, detained for a few nights until she was released to her mother’s care. Soon after that, she was assigned to a school-based probation officer who had little interest in her struggles or her attendance at school. The streets were calling and Janeth was rarely at home, cycling through Juvenile Hall on low-level charges such as being out past curfew.
Meanwhile, her mother’s drug dealing activities soon attracted the attention of law enforcement. Once her undocumented status was discovered, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) got involved, and days later Janeth’s mother was deported back to Mexico with the two boys—but not Janeth. She returned from spending a couple of nights with her new boyfriend, Luis, and the apartment was empty. In that moment she realized she was on her own. Her family was gone, without even leaving a note. She was sixteen years old and undocumented and had to avoid any authorities or she’d be deported. She managed to call her aunt, who urged her to come home to Mexico. But her aunt had children of her own and barely enough money to take care of them, and Janeth didn’t want to be a burden. For Janeth, there really was no choice. She turned to Luis and his gang, Rockwood, and they became her family; Luis’s mother, Myra, took her in, and she had a place to live. The situation was not ideal—Luis could be cruel. Still, he understood what frightened Janeth: he and his brother were undocumented as well. “I knew he’d take care of me,” she told Erika at the café. A few years later, she learned that her mother had been killed in Mexico; the homegirls whispered to me that “it had something to do with the cartel.” Both Ivy and Janeth were motherless; this loss had marked their lives.
Despite abandonment and the trauma caused by their mothers that so many of the women I knew had experienced, I still was finding that there was almost no research focusing on how mothers impact the development and identity of their daughters who either are or have been incarcerated. Instead, the studies that do exist examined one facet of this topic: the relationship between women and their mothers when they serve as surrogate parents for grandchildren while their daughter is incarcerated. One pilot investigation focused on how positive co-parenting relationships between incarcerated mothers and maternal grandmothers translated to children experiencing fewer “externalizing behavior problems.”3 Other research discussed how incarcerated women experience interrelated feelings of gratitude for and jealousy of the bond that developed between their mothers and their offspring.4 Aside from these studies, there appeared to be no other research exploring the emotional complexities that arise between formerly incarcerated women and their mothers. I kept reviewing what had been written, trying to uncover the hypotheses, the data, the empirical findings. And I kept coming up empty-handed.
But still, after whatever research I’d read and whatever stories of parentification and maternal abandonment I’d heard, nothing prepared me for Rosa Lucero. We connected at Loyola Law School’s annual conference about life in a gang, “Guilt by Association.” This event was the brainchild of Sean Kennedy, who, along with heading up Loyola’s Center for Juvenile Law and Policy, championed the need to understand the nexus between gangs, criminal activity, and trauma. Every year in Los Angeles, he created a space for professionals and formerly incarcerated individuals to examine how these forces all fit together and affected one another. This year, the conference included a focus on “Women, Female-Identifying People, Gangs and Trauma.” I was part of a panel along with a female gang interventionist, and the main speaker, who was a female former gang member. That was Rosa. Standing in front of a room filled with lawyers and law school students, she quietly detailed what had happened to her, something far beyond “lived experience.” The more accurate words to describe Rosa’s life can be found in the reports of Amnesty International: torture, imprisonment, and, at the very least, a profound violation of human rights. The room was silent when she finished. The gratitude and admiration of everyone present was boundless.
I’d first met Rosa during my research at Homeboy Industries. She was being mentored by one of the senior staff and working as her administrative assistant, helping in the front office. She never worked at the Homegirl Café, and her stint in the office didn’t last long. After a few weeks, Rosa flunked her drug test and faced Homeboy’s zero tolerance policy. There were immediate consequences for using. Instead of firing people, trainees who “tested dirty” were told they could return to Homeboy once they completed rehab. Some refused, but most enrolled in treatment. After she relapsed, Rosa went to Royal Palms, the rehab facility that had a contract with Homeboy and treated trainees for free. I lost track of her once she left.
This had all occurred a decade ago, before anyone understood that Rosa’s substance abuse at Homeboy was part of a bigger problem. This was neither Homeboy’s flaw nor its responsibility. In its early years, Father Greg Boyle led an agency that worked to replace the despair that led to gang membership with hope and pro-social activities. Homeboy’s priority had been employment training and job placement, reflecting its mantra, “Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job.” That was the whole idea that gave birth to the “Industries” in its name—a logical focus for what rapidly became the largest program for individuals seeking to leave gang life in the country. The need for jobs was reinforced in many sectors. I climbed on to the bandwagon as well. Whenever I talked about my community-based research designed to understand how men (and later, women) navigate the process of reentering mainstream society after incarceration, most people assumed that the answer could be found in employment. Repeatedly, I’d be told, “Those people need jobs.” While there was a partial truth to this reentry prescription, “those people” also needed to address the trauma that landed them in jail or prison in the first place. And the unaddressed trauma continued to affect formerly incarcerated women—even if they successfully confronted some of the obstacles facing them when they reentered their lives. They may have jobs, they may have housing, they may be trying to raise their children and create a home with a spouse or a partner, but always, lurking in the background, lies the trauma.
Ironically, Father Greg Boyle was among the first to realize the critical need to deal with the trauma these men and women had experienced; a job alone could neither facilitate nor guarantee their recovery. This was the reason so many homies and homegirls relapsed: their underlying trauma had never been addressed and treated. There were never any resources available to them. No one was even talking about trauma. This was particularly true for formerly incarcerated women, who were often labeled “unstable” or “emotional” or—stupidly—“hormonal.” Their behavior wasn’t “hormonal.” It was the result of trauma, trauma with its roots in the places where women should have found sanctuary: their homes and families. What G discovered at Homeboy was also being confirmed in other criminal justice sectors. Right around this time, the groundbreaking research on the impact of childhood trauma was emerging, shining a light on the impact of adverse childhood experiences.
Alongside these developments, lawyers were lasering in on trauma and its meaning for the entire criminal justice industrial complex. The focus on trauma at the Loyola conference was not a one-off; similar convenings were occurring across the US. A few weeks earlier, I’d been at a conference in Miami, presenting on the significance of trauma in capital cases and sentencing mitigation. But much of that discussion was theoretical; Rosa’s narrative offered something completely different: it cut through concepts, with a story that was deeply personal and, for most of us, unimaginable.
Rosa and I connected a few weeks after the conference. We agreed to talk at a coffee house after she texted me, “If you come over to my house my kids will literally scare you and we won’t be able to focus on anything. LOL.”
We meet up at Terra Mia, a coffee house in Lynwood a few blocks east of the Los Angeles County women’s jail. Rosa is beautiful. Small and thin, she wears a sundress and walks with a purposeful stride. Ordering coffee, we make small talk, discussing her interest in learning to be a computer programmer. As we stand in line, my mind wanders. Rosa was once somebody’s daughter, somebody’s little girl—what happened to her? I don’t have to wait long for an answer. In a few minutes, we’re sitting on the patio, and as Rosa sips her latte, her softly rounded face grows serious. She takes a breath and starts talking.
“I was born in Honduras—I don’t really remember anything about my life there other than short visions of my past.” Her mother left shortly after she was born, then her grandmother raised her until she was seven, when she traveled with a coyote to Los Angeles to join her mother and stepfather. “I just wanted to be with my mother,” she tells me. “This was all I thought about—and when I got to America, I felt like my dreams had come true.” That didn’t last long; soon after she arrived, her stepfather “forced himself on me—he molested me. It went on for some time. I don’t know what happened. . . . I guess I thought it was normal.”
Rosa’s voice trails off for a moment, then she adds, “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to go back to Honduras. I just wanted to stay with my mother. I loved her so much.” Rosa was not her mother’s only child; she had two older sisters she’d never met. “Right about the time I was eleven or twelve, my mom told me both of my sisters were coming over. I was so excited to be with the two of them—I thought they were older and so smart.” Rosa remembers how thrilled she felt when her two sisters offered to help her dress in grown-up clothes. “They were giving me so much attention. I was feeling so good and so excited, but it was the day of, like, a horror movie. It all begins so happy. Then things started to change.” After helping her dress up, her sisters offered Rosa “this special drink.” She didn’t want it. Still, her sisters insisted, telling her it would help her relax. “Relax for what, I wondered.”
She goes on, “Then they took me to a bar and a man was waiting there. He said I was pretty. Then he took me to a house attached to the bar. It was a brothel. He had sex with me. It took me a while to figure out what was going on. I knew, but I didn’t want to know. My parents were trafficking me for sex.”
These are Rosa’s words. This is the terminology she uses, the way her life should be honored. Beyond that, how can anyone adequately label Rosa’s experience? There are formal definitions that are essential to our understanding. In Ending Human Trafficking and Modern-Day Slavery, the groundbreaking book edited by Dr. Annalisa Enrile, she defines trafficking as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person for the purpose of exploitation.”5 The statistics are staggering. At any given time, in a global industry that generates $32 billion in profits, there are 2.5 million human trafficking victims, with women making up 76 percent of this total. Enrile goes on to say that—at a minimum—the exploitation includes prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation. It’s clear that Rosa experienced sexual exploitation, becoming one of the ten million girls and boys that the United Nations estimates are involved in child prostitution globally, in both developed and underdeveloped countries. However, what’s not included in the definition or in these statistics is the impact of having your mother being your trafficker, the person who has consented and in this case facilitated her daughter’s being sexually exploited.
In acknowledging her exploitation, I found the enormity of Rosa’s betrayal to be unlike anything I’d heard before. Rosa’s mother persisted in selling her daughter and pocketing all the money she earned. As Rosa grew older, she continued to regularly “take the special drink,” and it made her feel better, “especially when I was with men, because it was mainly like a dream—like I was in a Nintendo game. It felt like it wasn’t real—I was hoping it wasn’t real.”
Rosa describes a life where she was simply an object to be used and discarded, with no one caring for her. “I didn’t even have a designated place at the brothel, like my sisters did because they were older. There was always a guy waiting for me at the bar, and we’d find an empty room. My mother or my stepfather would hand me off.” In between these assignations, her mother kept all three girls barricaded at home. “We were all prisoners,” Rosa recalls. One day, her two sisters escaped through the window, but she didn’t make it out—her parents caught her.
“I was this little girl that was just literally hurting inside. And I couldn’t defend myself. And the person who was supposed to protect me wasn’t there.” To this day she has difficulty in her relationships with women, saying, “Sometimes it’s really hard for me to trust women. In my mind, I think—what do they want from me?” When Rosa muses about whether this is an aftereffect of being trafficked throughout her childhood, I can’t tell her what I’m thinking: I wouldn’t have trouble trusting women—I would hate them.
She gave birth to her first child—a son, Arturo—when she was thirteen years old. “Now I think, where was social services? Where was child welfare? Didn’t anyone notice that a thirteen-year-old was pregnant?” I have so many questions of my own as I listen to her talk. I can’t ask; I don’t want to disrespect her story by inserting myself into it. There’s another reason I can’t ask any questions: I just can’t take it.
“When I finally had my little boy, DCFS took him away,” Rosa says. It’s unclear how the LA County Department of Children and Family Services finally arrived on the scene. Rosa thinks her parents may have called them. Once Arturo was taken from her, Rosa felt she had nothing to lose; she was willing to risk her life to get away. A plan began forming in her mind. Her mother and stepfather had taken to simply dropping her off at the bar to fend for herself; this ultimately provided her with the means of escape. There was a park next door to the bar where she’d hang around between clients. “A guy that was part of a gang took me in.” Here her story is echoed in the accounts of other women. “People make it seem like gangs are bad. Gangs weren’t my nightmare—they helped me to escape, and they helped build my identity so I could react and respond.”
Rosa joined MCS, the Mid-City Stoners 13, a group that started out as a Mexican American stoner barrio and evolved into a violent Sureños street gang. As a gang member, Rosa was fearless. She was unafraid to go into other hoods, including those claimed by rivals. Still, she’s quick to point out that this was not because she was courageous.
“I should have been afraid,” she tells me. “I just didn’t have remorse; I didn’t have empathy. I had already cried so much as a kid, I didn’t have any tears.”
Rosa was still a prisoner. Gang life had replaced being sexually trafficked, but the outcomes of this trade-off weren’t positive. She became deeply involved in drugs, gangbanging, and criminal activity in exchange for her freedom. “That guy from the park, he was broken just like I was. I went to work in a strip club to feed our addiction. I didn’t feel bad; I got through it. My image now was at least I was somebody’s somebody.” The hood mentality was attractive to Rosa; she needed to be protected. And working in the strip club was still a far cry from being sexually trafficked. “No one was touching me—it wasn’t like my mother pimping me out. I was doing this with my man—he wasn’t forcing me into it. He didn’t betray me—my mother did that.”
When formerly incarcerated women describe their lives, there is often an explosion of emotion and pain. Still, with Rosa there is something beyond the emotion; her narrative is laced with deep understanding. She knows she has to titrate her experience for certain audiences. “You know they tell me on panels sometimes—your drugging, your gang involvement, keep it limited. I don’t always listen when they say this. Sometimes I just can’t limit it or not talk about what happened to me because gangs helped me survive. They gave me this identity. They gave me so much power. And I also understand why people can only listen to so much. So, I try to tell about what happened to me slowly. They have to get used to my story.” The terrible trauma Rosa endured has not robbed her of her empathy today, even for the anonymous audiences listening to her story.
And yet. As Rosa sits in front of me sipping her coffee, she doesn’t only talk about the brutality and loss that had long characterized her life. She also talks about her love for her children. She worries about the job interview she has the next day at Watts Labor Community Action Committee. She promises she’ll tell me what happened to her when she was repeatedly incarcerated, as well as the hope she discovered. But that is for another day. For now, she has to pick up her son from school.
I keep thinking of Greg Boyle. I keep thinking of how he has struck a chord in me and so many others when he says he stands in awe of these individuals. I keep thinking, how are they doing it? And I keep thinking about Ivy on the run, and of Janeth, locked up and alone in the women’s “detention facility” just a few blocks from this coffee house.
INTERLUDE
Law enforcement, frustrated for months in their search for Ivy and Pedro, finally catches a break. Someone—no one knows who—has tipped off the cops that they are in Tijuana. All the media reports is that an anonymous source is set to receive $20,000 as a reward for the information and that an arrest warrant has been issued. In February, almost four months after the shooting, Ivy and Pedro are found in Mexico and extradited back to Los Angeles.
At Homegirl, the women wonder why Ivy got involved with Pedro. She’d always been so strong. Ivy hadn’t known Pedro for very long before the deacon was murdered. Pedro was a few years younger than she, and most of her friends considered him immature, beneath her. And he was abusive—Ivy had confided in some of the women in the café that the beatings were getting worse. They saw the bruises. They couldn’t understand why Ivy stayed. Still, one of the women at the café, Adela Juarez, understood. “Ivy never faced her trauma. She always got involved with men who were abusive. They were cruel. That’s all she thought she deserved—these were men who beat her over and over again. She couldn’t escape.” Ivy had turned her back on gangbanging, but Pedro was still active—he’d just gotten out of prison and rejected the idea of accessing any services at Homeboy when the two of them hooked up. Ivy always insisted their relationship was casual. But Adela knew more than anyone about the vectors of the relationship. “Ivy just couldn’t escape. She was still scared no one would want her, no one would take care of her. She knew Pedro was bad, but her fear was worse.”
Now, when Adela visits her at jail, Ivy explains how she told Pedro, “We gotta turn ourselves in because I can’t deal with this.” Adela knows that “they had nobody in TJ; they were running out of money.” She says, “I’m sure Pedro was abusing her and Ivy couldn’t take it anymore. So, they were coming back, and when they came across the border, that’s when they got arrested.”
It doesn’t matter now why Ivy got together with Pedro or how he abused her, or if she started using drugs again, with her trauma increasing. Law enforcement wasn’t thinking about her trauma when they brought the couple back to Los Angeles and locked them up in different facilities. In Lynwood, in the women’s county jail, Janeth and Ivy are finally reunited, facing multiple charges and unaffordable bail; all they have are the services of two court-appointed attorneys.