Yolanda's Crossing

 The Pacific Ocean rose rabid and vengeful. Yolanda ran. Never fast enough. Waves swallowed the Mexican countryside, crashing into stick homes and palm trees and roadside stands. The girl, engulfed, watched her family in the distance.

Drowning.

Then she woke.

The dream came on those nights years ago when Yolanda slept beside Juan, in the trailer in North Carolina and budget motels in Georgia and Tennessee.

She has not seen the village, La Barra del Potrero, since she was a 12-year-old in the summer of 2000. Its power has been distilled in memory – the father she calls a devil, the mother she barely knew and the blue-gray ocean that meets the red-brown river where she was first raped.

At her mother's grave, the wood cross that once bore a name has vanished, leaving a crumbling concrete rectangle atop a cheap coffin. At the mud home where Yolanda lived as a child – where her mother and paternal grandmother died – children have seen ghosts. Women, dressed in white like brides, they say, with one wearing a crown.

And at homes across the village, Yolanda's story is recited like legend that whispers from afar. Men who work in el norte –in Ohio, Texas and Oklahoma – have relayed news of Juan's trial and her adoption.

But nobody fully understands. Juan's mother, Jacinta Aguilar Borques, herds goats to help make up for the money her son can no longer send. His father, Augustín, is near death. They and others can't grasp why Juan is locked up for life in the U.S., why he can't be in a Mexican prison, why he can't pay a fine and get out. They largely blame Yolanda for putting the family through this.

She has betrayed an unwritten code by turning Juan in. She went outside the family, turned to the law and went against a man. That is not done in a world still governed by machismo.

A man known as el caminante has spread word that if Yolanda ever returns, she will be captured and perhaps hurt.

The teenager knows none of this.

•

It's a Wednesday summer morning in Arlington. The 19-year-old is still asleep in gray pajamas. Susana, her new mother, thought she would rise at dawn. After all, this day has been marked on the wall calendar in Yolanda's bedroom for weeks:

July 19, 2006: Immigration Hearing.

Are you going to go? Susana asks rhetorically as Yolanda rolls out of bed.

Within minutes, the house hums. Yolanda's baby girl, Aidelin, chases Patrick the cat and yells shoos, shoos, shoos, referring to her shoes. The girls shower and dress. Yolanda puts on light blue jeans, a shimmering tan top, dangly earrings and a small cross necklace. Her makeup is perfect. Susana, in a formal black suit, straightens her hair in the bathroom.

Nobody thought this day would come. It's a little more than a week after Yolanda's 19th birthday – 15 months since Juan was sentenced to life in prison – but she has remained an illegal immigrant. She has been on humanitarian parole, a tenuous status that prevents her deportation but won't let her work or travel abroad.

Starting a few weeks ago, there was a flurry of progress – meetings with immigration lawyers, phone calls and official photos.

Yolanda's attorney, Michelle Sáenz-Rodríguez, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement reached an agreement. The government will revoke her parole, order her into deportation proceedings and then ask a judge to grant her residency.

It's all carefully scripted.

The family lunches at Chili's, drives to the federal courthouse and takes the elevator up to the immigration courts. Attorneys and friends fawn over Aidelin in the hallway. A woman remarks that she looks like Yolanda. Yolanda thinks it's better than the alternative. Martha Hollowell, the prosecutor who first met her days after she escaped, marvels at the teenager's transformation. Yolanda is no longer the shell of a girl who came to her office, timid and dirty.

Family and friends funnel into the small courtroom. U.S. Immigration Judge Anthony Rogers takes the bench, and proceedings begin. ICE attorney Saundra Arrington, the woman Martha first called to get Juan into custody, tells the judge a slice of Yolanda's life.

We do believe as a matter of humanitarian discretion, this young woman should be granted whatever relief she seeks from this court, Saundra says.

Sounds like a novel reduced to a short horror story, Judge Rogers remarks.

He turns his attention to Yolanda.

Well, young lady, you have had a heck of a challenging life thus far. It looks like ... you are about to have a new start. Do you have any sense of what you might want to do?

Yolanda pauses, as if making a mental tally. Learn English. Find a job. Take care of her child. Repay her new family. Learn how to forgive.

I want to be a stylist. ... I would like to start and have a normal life like I've never had before.

The judge knows the path to a normal life is never normal for many he sees inside the courtroom. And most green cards come with a lecture.

The status of permanent resident is very hard to get and easy to lose. You haven't been in a position to make choices in your life, and now you [are], he tells her.

He grants her residency.

Yolanda approaches the bench, thanks the judge and shakes his hand. She tries to teach the baby to say judge. She promised herself she wasn't going to cry, but cracks before she can leave the courtroom, burying her face in Susana's chest, mascara staining her cheek.

Downstairs, TV cameras and reporters await. Yolanda gives them the 10-minute story of her life. She talks about all the victims living in silence. An immigration official joins in, offering support for other abuse victims.

After the lights go off, Yolanda walks away to a lobby couch where she sits with Aidelin and cries.

It's over.

I never imagined this.

•

That night, she dreams she is a little girl, playing with kids around a lake in a land she has never seen. A Mexican boy covers her face with mud. A fat white boy mashes chewing gum into her hair. Then she hears footsteps, turns and sees the bare feet of a man approaching.

Only the feet. Feet that are somehow foreboding. She warns her friends to go home. She stays.

She wakes before she can see a face.

•

Nearly 200 miles away, near Huntsville, Juan draws on white paper inside prison. Religious imagery. Mexican families. Images of pain and salvation.

There's a woman with blood-red tears dripping from her green shoulders. A detached arm holding a wooden cross. Three red roses bound at their stems. Flesh-colored angels, suspended in flight.

He sends them all to his son, Juan Carlos, along with letters of spiritual guidance. In one, he writes as if he is Jesus. Juan Carlos, who has returned to Dallas after being deported, suspects his father is searching for redemption.

From prison, Juan says he committed a crime of ignorance born from the customs of his land.

You grow up in a ranch there, in the field. Your parents don't educate you. You're enclosed and away from the town, and you don't think about how you're going to end up with the things you do.

Still, he is largely unrepentant. Despite pleading guilty, he says Yolanda wanted everything: to be his woman as a young girl, to flee to Oaxaca City, to go to the U.S. He says his wife Efigenia was fine with the arrangement. He dismisses the dozens of neighbors, strangers and family members who heard of his beatings and knew about Yolanda's captivity.

Well, they don't know the truth, he says. Only I, she and her dad know the truth.

Yolanda's dad, Artemio Méndez Martínez, has not spoken to his daughter since before she left for the U.S. In the village, some family members say he sold her for less than $1,000 to Juan and Efigenia. He denies it.

He now lives in Oaxaca City at the end of a dirt road with his new wife, his son and Efigenia, among others. He knows vaguely what has happened in the U.S. He believes Yolanda but wonders why she didn't speak up.

How could I know if she didn't tell me?

Inside the house, Efigenia won't talk about any abuse. Artemio believes she is also afraid of going to jail. If her own daughter was raped, she says, she would not report the crime. She knows what happens to some women who turn in men.

They don't kill. I don't know how they do it. I don't know if they pray to God or God grants their request. For example, if I'm driving in my car and the car crashes or goes off the road ...

Machismo.

More than a six-hour drive south in the village, a young woman makes small talk with a friend in the late afternoon. She says she's glad her husband is away for a spell so he can't hit her. Little has changed.

Here they rape. Here they rob. Here they murder, says shopkeeper Celso down the road.

Here there is no justice.

•

One day, Yolanda knows the baby will grow to a girl and then a woman and ask about her father. She plans to tell her he is dead. Later, when she is older, she may tell her the truth.

For now, in the summer of 2006, Yolanda waits for her green card to come in the mail and writes her grandmother a letter:

Thank God, grandmother, today I have a very special family that I will never leave. I will never stop thanking God. I have a pretty little girl, and God gave me a mother ... and also gave me a sister...

The only thing I want you to understand is that it was not my fault.

Not her fault. Yolanda visited a therapist once in Dallas, but thought he was telling her to get over the past. She never returned. Most of her talking is to Susana, the woman she calls Mom.

On some afternoons, the two will take chairs into the garage, open the door, look out at the street and drink beer, smoke cigarettes and talk.

Susana has left her job at the Mexican Consulate. She spoke out about the lack of victim protection, criticized a few diplomats in the local media and left to work at a Dallas attorneys' office.

Yolanda thinks about getting a job somewhere like Taco Bell while she learns English and studies for her citizenship exam. Susana wants her to work with other abused women, perhaps as a receptionist at a nonprofit organization.

Both know the pain faced by thousands of children. They are still recovering from years of abuse.

Susana's boyfriend, a Salvadoran immigrant whom she calls Amor, works at a restaurant in Oak Cliff. It is perhaps her healthiest relationship. He owns a house with a backyard apartment next to a small pen with roosters. In the late fall, Susana moves the family in with him. Yolanda moves into the backyard apartment with the baby, the first place of her own, as she looks for work.

She is lonely. Aidelin is enthralled by the roosters but misses Susana and her daughter Alexis.

Across the yard lives a young man named Napo, a relative of Susana's boyfriend, with gold-capped teeth and a kindly face. He meets Yolanda, hears of her history and is smitten. He buys presents for the baby, takes Yolanda to the movies and teaches her to drive.

Yolanda's green card comes in the mail. She once swore up and down she would be alone and had no need for a man if she could work. But she slowly melts. Melts as a teenage girl is supposed to.

Outside in the yard, Alexis calls Napo her boyfriend and teases Yolanda like a little sister.

Yolanda laughs.

Throws her head back and laughs.