Yolanda's Crossing

Girl's Rape Begins Hidden, Too-common Form of Abuse

LA BARRA del POTRERO, Mexico – She should be getting back to the cornmeal left unattended in the kitchen. These muddy river banks, cloaked by banana trees and a half-hour walk from the house, are no place for a young girl after dark.

But the woman who brought her to bathe is insistent.

Stay.

More than an hour passes as night settles on the coastal village in southern Mexico. Earth-worn men walk through fields of peanut and corn to primitive homes where children orbit barefoot in the dirt around their mothers. Sea turtles nest in the nearby beach, and hawks make final surveys inland.

A man emerges by the river near where he fishes for shrimp. The girl knows him. She lives with him and his wife, a cousin on her mother's side, in a home up the hill. Tonight he has come to claim her, a virgin, as his other woman. He grabs the girl by the arm as the older woman scuttles away. He muffles her screams with his hand, strips her sleeveless blue dress, pushes her against a rock and rapes her.

His name is Juan García Aguilar. He is 38. The girl's name is Yolanda Méndez Torres. She is 11.

It is the summer of 1998. Over the next six years, he will take her over 5,000 miles, from the tropical scrub brush hills of Oaxaca into the Sonoran Desert and to the United States.

To North Carolina, where she will be a child laborer in blueberry fields. To Georgia and Tennessee, where she will live trapped in motel rooms as Juan pours concrete for Wal-Mart gas stations. And to Dallas, where she will sleep in a closet and decide whether to murder him or escape.

At each step, Yolanda will personify a dark migration: domestic abuse victims taken from a region beset with unreported violence against women and children to a country where they become phantoms, fearful of authorities and ignorant of legal protections.

In Mexico and the rest of Latin America, gripped by a centuries-old culture of machismo, rates of physical and sexual abuse against children are some of the highest in the world, according to a recent United Nations study of violence against children.

And the number of minors reported abducted in both directions across the U.S./Mexico border has more than doubled in recent years, from 168 in 2000 to 397 so far in 2006 – though experts warn that most abductions go unreported. Among the estimated 5 million children living in America as undocumented or with undocumented parents, the number of abuse victims cannot be known. They are largely invisible, unseen until they surface with their stories.

They call the town La Barra del Potrero, named for the ranchland where the river meets the Pacific Ocean. In all, there are fewer than 100 homes, most with walls stitched from tree branches and tin roofs held together with rusted bottle caps and pieces of found rubber. The land is raw and lush, its heavy tropical air spiked with smells of sweet flowers and burning trash.

At the west end of the village lives Yolanda's grandmother, Juana Alonzo Pedro. To the east, just before the river bridge, stays Juan's family, including his mother and father.

Nearby stands a small wood church on a hill, a community center, a health clinic, an iguana farm and a few small food stands along about a mile of asphalt highway.

Many elders cannot write their own names, and few children finish high school. Husbands and sons fish, tend to crops and migrate back and forth to work in America. Girls wed as young teenagers, families are knit tight and the local history is barbed with machismo and violence. Juan's cousin, Simona Aguilar Torres, runs a roadside store with her husband. She once watched as a man killed her father and Yolanda's uncle after a girl's quinceañera. Down the road, a man shot Juan's aunt in the back as she stood in the kitchen.

Yolanda knows little of the history.

She was born in a still smaller and poorer community called San José, a short walk up into the hills where villagers dipped rags in petrol and lit them for heat.

Her mother was Francisca Torres Alonzo, the oldest child of Juana Alonzo. Yolanda's father, Artemio Méndez Martínez, worked as a common laborer.

When Yolanda was small, her parents fought bitterly and split. Artemio took the children. Her mother moved to La Barra to live in a one-room adobe house with Juana Alonzo. Her mother was sick and bone thin. She ate dirt, ash and mineral lime.

Her body swelled from her toes to her head. She died Dec. 9, 1994, when she was 27 and Yolanda was 7. The medical examiner found she suffered from chronic malnutrition, intestinal parasites and an internal infection.

The family prayed over her body all night. Yolanda's grandmother Juana Alonzo had no money and borrowed 3,000 pesos, or less than $900, from a neighbor for a wood coffin and proper burial for her daughter. The next morning, Yolanda joined the funeral procession, six miles along a dirt road into the countryside, to a red-earth cemetery at San Francisco Cozoaltepec. Francisca was entombed under a raised rectangle of unadorned concrete, with a small wood cross at its head that bore her name. For one year, the family regularly brought flowers and candles.

Yolanda does not remember the funeral, only that her mother was gone.

She moved to La Barra after the services, living with her father and paternal grandmother in the adobe home where her mother died.

Some said the grandmother was bewitched by a curandero named Jesús. She began vomiting and died. Yolanda moved down the road with her father in a stick shack. She stopped going to school. She could barely read or write. Her older sister Gabriela ran away with a boyfriend. Her father was not equipped to raise a young girl alone.

In early 1998, Efigenia, Yolanda's cousin, found her walking through the village. She asked her to come live and work in the home with her, her husband, Juan, and their children.

At first, Yolanda liked life there. She slept in a room with one of the young girls. The boys slept next door. The oldest son, Bertín García López, had already left for America as a teenager. Juan was a construction worker in the U.S.

He was a largely unexceptional man, known as quiet, serious and friendly. Short with rounded indigenous features, he had a wide forehead and a groomed black mustache. His family owned much of the land in the village, hundreds of acres where they raised goats and mangos and corn.

He sent money to his mother while working in America. He drank, but no more than most, and had few enemies.

Then he came home from el Norte.

By the time Juan finishes with her by the river, Yolanda does not know if the feeling is pain or fear as she struggles in sweet, sticky darkness. She is a tiny girl with delicate features, inky black eyes and straight black hair that cascades down her back. Crying, she puts on her panties and dress, and the two walk up the rocky hill. Juan leaves her outside the house and goes down the road to visit family.

Inside, Efigenia notices Yolanda is wet and dirty, her knees all sandy. She touches her forehead and thinks she has a fever.

What's wrong, what's wrong? Why are you crying? Why are you all wet?

Because your husband forced himself on me, Yolanda says, explaining the night's events as best a child can.

Efigenia can't believe it. She confronts Juan when he returns.

Do you realize what you did? You took advantage of a little girl?

At first defiant, he denies it. Pressed, he becomes angry. He calls them to his room and closes the door. He grabs Efigenia by the hair and beats her bloody. He beckons Yolanda.

Look at her closely, because this is what's going to happen to your family if you say something more.

That threat will be her prison. She won't tell. Not directly anyway.

This has to be accepted. Speaking up won't do any good. There are stories of what happens to women who turn in their husbands. These stories generally end the same way.

Yolanda, this is the way things have to be, Efigenia tells her. Years later, Efigenia would say that even if her own daughter was raped, she would tell her to not report the crime.

They live like this for a few months in the village. Yolanda tends the home, helps cook tamales and tortillas and stays as a kept woman. Juan rapes her daily, sometimes in the afternoon while his children are at school, sometimes out in the countryside or by the river. She has few friends and rarely ventures outside, except to be with her confidant, a mutt she named Daisy.

Juan's son found the dog abandoned in the village as a puppy and gave her to Yolanda as a gift. Yolanda always liked the name Daisy. She fills up large plastic bottles with rocks and dirt and drags them for her to chase. She bathes her with shampoo, sometimes twice a day, causing the dog's fur to fall out. She tries keeping her inside so she won't get pregnant. On some days they sit under the banana trees, the dog at Yolanda's feet.

If you eat one of the rabbits, they're going to kill you or hit you , she tells the dog. I don't want them to hit you.

The dog complies.

Around town, rumors of the older man and young girl spread. Neighbors say they have heard Yolanda's cries coming from the countryside. Simona, the shopkeeper, notices changes in her body, her hips and the way she walks. More like a woman, less like a girl, she says.

A few family members say that Artemio has sold his daughter for 2,000 pesos, about $200, to Efigenia and Juan. Others say that he gave her to them to pay off a small debt. Artemio denies all of this. Yolanda has gone to live with them of her own free will, he says.

Yolanda won't acknowledge her relationship with Juan.

Gabi, who are you going to believe – other people or me, Yolanda tells her sister Gabriela one day when confronted with the rumors.

No, Yola, I believe you, but I don't know the truth. I have doubts about whether it's true.

No, Gabi, it's not true. People are just talking, but it's not true.

Yolanda cries and leaves. They never speak about it again.

Yolanda's grandmother, however, can't shake her suspicions.

In early June 2000, she walks down the highway, around a curve to Efigenia's house and finds Yolanda in the kitchen. She says she doesn't want people talking about her granddaughter the way they are around the village.

Did he grab you? Tell me, what did he do to you? You can confide in me. I'm going to press charges against him because this isn't right for him to be abusing you.

No, it's not true. It's just a rumor. It's not true.

She cannot tell, but her eyes again betray her.

Why are you crying?

It's that I don't want to hear you say that he is abusing me.

The grandmother leaves unconvinced. She finds Yolanda's father and convinces him to come with her to file a judicial complaint at the Agencia del Ministerio Público in Pochutla, A 30-minute bus ride away. If they file a complaint, authorities can open an investigation, get a doctor to examine Yolanda for signs of rape, and interview Juan. Yolanda will be safe and can move into Juana Alonzo's home down the road, the grandmother thinks.

On June 6, she and Artemio enter the agency housed in a spartan building with dirty white walls, naked light bulbs and shelves that bulge with crusty manila files of rapes and murders and robberies.

In a large book with lined pages, the accusation is handwritten.

Privacion ilegal de la Libertad.

Illegal privation of freedom, or being kept as a de facto slave.

Juan knows. He has caught wind of the grandmother's plans.

He tells his family that they are leaving. Within days, the family flees the village, taking only what they can carry – leaving furniture and Daisy behind. They travel by bus along the winding highway to Oaxaca City, more than six hours away. Yolanda's grandmother comes for her but finds only an empty house.

Yolanda has never been across those hills and has never seen a city. They arrive by day in the valley where the city of more than 250,000 people sits surrounded by the Sierra Madre del Sur mountains.

They show up at the metal door of Juan's brother, Eucebio García Aguilar, on a dusty street called Calle Monterrey in a Third-World neighborhood called Ejido Santa María.

Surprised by his visitors, Eucebio welcomes them in and offers the kitchen as a place to sleep. Juan tells him they plan to live and work in Oaxaca. He does not share that Yolanda is his woman.

Within weeks, however, Eucebio's wife, Epifanía, finds out about the girl and tells her husband.

It's true, Juan says when confronted by his brother.

But she's too young.

What's wrong with that?

Eucebio was a boy when he watched his dad hit his mom. When he married – he was 17 and she was 15 – he told his wife he would never treat her like that. He knows of a village over the hills where young girls are sold to older men. He wants better for his children.

Leave it alone, Juan tells him when pressed.

You're an adult. You're the oldest. You should be the one to set the example for all of us.

I can't set the example, so why don't you do it?

Most, however, don't share the suspicions of their new neighbors.

Down the street, a coyote's mother looks out her convenience store with the Coca-Cola sign out front. She sees Juan and Yolanda walking some days. She thinks they are father and daughter.

It is not until much later that she and her son, the immigrant smuggler, will find out otherwise.

In 1543, after the Spanish conquest of Oaxaca, locals found a box abandoned near a rock outcropping, legend tells. They opened it, and the image of a virgin appeared. The Virgin of Solitude. She would become Oaxaca's patron saint.

The ground became righteous space. By 1690, the Catholic Church finished building a temple on the land with an imposing array of domes and bells and rough hewn stone, with virgins and saints and skulls carved into the façade.

On some Sundays, Juan takes the family here. The meaning is not lost on Yolanda, surrounded by images of martyred suffering inside – faded oil paintings of Christ on the cross, angels in perpetual peace, and a bearded God in a blood red robe looking down at the Virgin from above. On the ceiling, a Latin inscription reads:

O all you who pass by this way, look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow. Yolanda prays. The sanctuary fills with the rhythmic chants of priests and the tolling of bells and the singing of the flock.

God, why won't you kill him? He's hurting me so much. Why don't you kill him if he's hurting a child?

She then asks for forgiveness. She believes in God and knows you cannot pray for him to murder. Still, she doesn't understand.

God, why do you let this animal inside your house?

Options are Limited for Abuse Victims

 María is still running. She changes Dallas-area apartments every few months. She shuttles her four kids between school districts. She hides in the shadows to escape the man who has tried to control her for the past decade.

Forced into prostitution as a 12-year-old by her own mother, María was hurt by strangers and people she loved in Mexico. The knife scars on her back and shoulder narrate years of abusive relationships. That abuse continued when María came to the U.S. illegally in the mid-1990s.

Like Yolanda Méndez Torres, María (not her real name), now 30, was forced to live a life of secrecy, fear and uncertainty. But for undocumented children and teenagers, that life can be especially challenging, with worries about deportation, language barriers and preconceived notions about justice.

"They don't know their rights. They don't speak English. So it may be more difficult for them to find help," said Yolanda Eisenstein, legal director of the Human Rights Initiative in Dallas, which aids abuse victims.

In Latin America, where there are more than 190 million children, the rate of violence against kids is among the highest in the world, according to the U.N. secretary general's recently published Study on Violence Against Children. The study reports that throughout Latin America, more than 6 million children annually suffer severe abuse, and more than 80,000 die as a result of domestic violence. Sexual abuse of children is the least reported form of abuse. Eight out of 10 cases involve a father, husband or other relative.

Julia Alanen, director of the international division of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said the international caseload of these young victims has grown from 1,000 open cases in January 2005 to 1,800 open cases this month. About 40 percent involve Mexico.

"Within the U.S., a lot of parents are undocumented, and they're fearful that if they contact any authority, they risk being deported," she said.

Sometimes these types of crimes go unpunished or are not penalized to the fullest extent in a child's native country. That, too, can deter a victim from seeking help. Depending on the state in Mexico, those convicted of rape could receive four to 20 years in prison, experts said. But that doesn't mean they will serve the entire sentence.

"The system is very corrupt," said Esther Chávez Cano, founder and director of Casa Amiga, a crisis center for women in Juárez, Mexico. "We try to convince victims to denounce the perpetrator, but we also tell them that there's a chance he won't be detained."

In Mexico, 21 minors were raped every day between 1997 and 2003, or nearly one per hour, according to a Child Rights Watch report published by UNICEF in Mexico. However, many rape cases are not reported. In Latin America, 2 million children are sexually exploited each year, most of them girls, according to the Inter-American Children's Institute, a children's rights group.

Juan José Salgado, former acting consul general of Mexico, who wrote a letter to the Dallas County district attorney's office regarding domestic abuse, said he's aware of the problem in Mexico, one he attributes to a lack of education.

Rural and poorer areas of the country, "where parents think daughters shouldn't go to school and where some mothers say they have to obey their husband," are especially susceptible, he said.

"We do see some change, but it's going slow," he said. "The change is happening in the middle class."

In more recent years, the country has launched radio and TV campaigns about the violence against women. In this country, a new Spanish-language radio campaign telling women here to seek help began airing in September on Spanish-language radio stations.

María's husband eventually was arrested, imprisoned and then deported. But he returned to the U.S. and, she believes, is looking for her. She's now living in North Texas, has her green card and is looking for work.

"I want to fly," she said. "I want to fly and never come back."

Paul S. Zoltan, a Dallas immigration lawyer, said these kinds of cases are getting more attention.

"Once upon a time, domestic violence lived and thrived in the shadow of social stigma," he said. "Nowadays, you have a people, regardless of any social stigma, who have a justifiable fear of authorities who would otherwise protect them.

"What is worse, the devil she knows – the abuse of an uncle – or face deportation and destiny?"

Girl in tow, abuser flees to U.S.

ALTAR, Mexico – The mayor watches the abuses arrive at his city in the Sonoran Desert, the illicit gateway to Arizona.

There was the man who forced his sister to sleep with their coyote . The mother who put her young girl to work selling roses down by the railroad tracks. The 6-month-old baby smuggled into a land that has reduced thousands of men to sun-scorched remains.

Francisco García Aten, a man of deep religious conviction, walks the streets of Altar. He sees older men with young girls. Sometimes he confronts them, but they just say the girl is a daughter or family, and there's no way to prove otherwise. There is no way for one man to stop any of this, but he tries as thousands pass through each week, drawn into the desert by the promise that pulls from the other side.

This year, 2002, the number of deaths is rising again. It is a journey, the mayor knows, that no child wants to undertake.

More than 1,200 miles to the south, in the city of Oaxaca, Juan has moved Yolanda and the family out of his brother's kitchen into a shack on a rocky street that runs into the hills. Juan's young children go to school. Yolanda stays inside with his wife, Efigenia, cooking and cleaning. They do not speak much of the past.

It is spring, but the neighborhood stands in contrast to the electric greens and blues of the village from where they fled – from the banana trees, the iguana farm and the Pacific Ocean. Here, men build homes from flattened metal cans. Dogs dance with flies, and children kick frayed balls in the dirt.

Next door to the family's new home, Margarita runs a yellow-painted store, selling beer and sodas and cigarettes and food. Yolanda, she thinks at first, is a simple, quiet girl. But she never sees her leave home to play or go to school.

Now 14, Yolanda is no longer a girl. Not since that summer night almost four years ago when Juan raped her by the river and claimed her as his other woman.

There were never those frivolous, fantastic dreams of imaginary lands. Or invented games, nascent crushes, role-playing, adolescent first kisses and birthday parties. She is a woman in a tiny body, standing less than 4 feet, 9 inches, maybe 80 pounds, with hips and shoulder blades that stretch her skin. She is a girl filled with anger, pain and resignation.

Margarita begins to learn more. She hears that Yolanda has been sold to Juan and Efigenia. One day, Juan's son comes to her store to buy Chiclets gum and tells her that Yolanda is sleeping with his father.

She hears arguments coming from inside the house, but she never intervenes.

Outside, a young girl named Jessica plays with her friends. She is about Yolanda's age and sometimes asks her to play, only to be told that Juan would get angry. And occasionally when she goes over to the house to play with Juan's children, she can hear Yolanda crying. On one such day, while Juan is at work, the teenager tells her about the rapes and threats and captivity.

Nothing is done. Violence against women and children often goes unreported in parts of Mexico.

Juan's mother, Jacinta, meanwhile, has developed a heart condition, and he decides to take his family back to the village for a couple of days. Jacinta knows of Yolanda and has chastised her son. Juan, however, told her that his wife, Efigenia, is fine with the arrangement. Efigenia has said little to others about the relationship.

But in town, Yolanda runs into her uncle Quile. He is her mother's brother and has heard of Juan's abuses.

Your mother died, and you know you can count on me, he tells her.

He asks her questions about her relationship with Juan. She cries tears of acknowledgment, but says little. Quile erupts.

Let me kill him.

Later, he is drunk when he finds Juan. They argue angrily. But if Quile had tried to fight him then, Yolanda is confident he would have lost on account of the mescal. Quile returns to his mother's home without incident.

Yolanda and Efigenia return to Oaxaca the next day, joined by Juan about a day later.

Who told Quile? he demands to know.

They both deny it.

Who the devil told him? Tell me, which one of you two told him. If it was one of you and you don't tell me, your uncle is going to die.

Nobody tells. Soon, Juan begins making plans to take Yolanda to America. She suspects he is afraid of being turned in if they stay in Mexico. She knows she has no choice in any of this. She does not think about escaping. There is nowhere to go, and Juan has threatened to kill her family if she tries.

A couple of miles away, on the street where they first stayed with Juan's brother, lives a coyote named Abel and his family.

Abel is 19 or 20, stocky and tattooed with a buzz cut. He started working the border only recently. His mom runs a store from the front of the home under a white, green and black awning with a Coca-Cola sign on the wall.

She once watched Yolanda and Juan in the neighborhood and thought they were father and daughter.

Juan approaches Abel and asks him if he can organize a trip to Arizona. He plans to take Yolanda to Dallas, where he has relatives and where his son Bertín can help him get an apartment. He already has job contacts, and a former boss lives in Oak Cliff.He will leave Efigenia and his family behind.

Within days, the trip is arranged. In addition to Yolanda and Juan, the traveling group includes a man named Emerson, a young teenager named Amber and his older brother Manuel. They are going to America to work, send money home, maybe help their mother build a new house. Nobody knows about Juan's relationship with Yolanda. He tells Abel she is his niece. Juan promises to pay the coyote the cost for both of them when they reach the United States and he can get help from relatives.

It is late spring 2002 when they begin their trip on the ADO bus line in Oaxaca. Yolanda wears faded blue jeans and a shirt with purple straps. She carries only water, a change of clothes and a birth certificate.

The only thing I can tell you is to take very good care of yourself and think very carefully about what you do over there, Efigenia tells her.

They head north.

Juan is quiet. Maybe he is thinking about what will happen if they don't make it across the desert. Or about immigration agents, the military or the dangers of bringing an underage girl with him. He has made this journey before, and Yolanda knows he has been turned back. She secretly hopes agents will stop them. At least in Oaxaca she has family. America means nothing to her. She sits by the window and fantasizes about being a bird or a tree.

North.

They transfer at a Mexico City station, a glassy modern building where they can stock up on water and have one last chance to play the lottery before boarding their futures. From here, the names of bus companies are advertisements for a better life: Futura, Transportes Frontera, Transportes del Norte. ...

They get on the Estrella Blanca, the White Star, for the 40-plus-hour ride to Altar, the bus brimming with a mottled mix of coyotes and migrants, of rusty, reliable men and fresh-faced youths ready for adventure.

North.

They trace the Pacific Coast, watching bad American movies on mounted televisions.

At a stop in Tepic, authorities have posted photos of missing women and children behind glass. At Mazatlán, they would later post signs with death statistics from the Arizona desert along with stories of murder and migrants who bake to death in the back of tractor trailers.

As the bus crawls to the border, men in military fatigues board. They start searching bags and asking questions.

How old are you?

Yolanda answers.

Who are you with?

What is he to you?

She's my niece, Juan says. He says they are going to visit family. After almost four years of intimidation, Yolanda has learned to stay silent.

The officer examines their documents and lets them continue.

By day, they arrive in Altar, Francisco García Aten's town where the local population swells with the tides of immigrants and commodities.

There used to be 200 daily crossings, the mayor recalls. By 2001, that had increased to 1,200. The town itself has little reason to exist apart from the traffic. There is the main drag with the Pollo Feliz restaurant, the town square and dozens of hotels and small lodges where migrants can rest. At the square, Ford Econoline vans line up from morning until sundown, packing people 20 deep for the hour-plus trip to Sasabe, where most of the desert crossings begin. Nearby, a church offers one last chance for prayer.

Jesus' heart, full of love and mercy, I want to pray to you for my fellow migrants, a message inside reads. Have pity on them and protect them, because they suffer from mistreatment and humiliation on their journey, and they are known by many as dangerous and marginalized because they are foreigners.

At the back is a space to post photos of missing men and women.

Abel takes his group to a small inn, where they sleep on mattresses on the floor in a large room. The next afternoon, they leave for the desert. Yolanda carries chips, a few small bottles of water and a ragged birth certificate. It is her only form of identification.

They pack into a van at the square, drive out of town and turn onto a dirt road toward Sasabe where white crosses rise from the sand and drivers make the sign of the cross on their chests. Saguaro cacti point prickly fingers out into the emptiness.

Just southwest of Sasabe, many immigrants jump off in a junkyard of rusted trucks, hypodermic needles and a few homes, where trash and used toilet paper hang from cactus spikes. These are the last residues of life in Mexico. From there, they transfer to trucks that carry them off road along dry creek beds. They arrive at a barbed wire fence, hop across and begin walking into the Sonoran.

Simple, unless you get lost.

In 2001, 78 people died in the Tucson sector, which includes the Sasabe crossing. The number will reach 134 in 2002.

It is a terrifying experience for a child. Apart from the heat that can push 110 degrees, there are the rattlesnakes and desert tarantulas and giant hairy scorpions and cacti with funny-sounding names like prickly pear and hedgehog and fishhook.

Abel's group transfers from the van to a truck that takes them off road in the desert, where they cross a fence and walk half an hour to a creek bed. There, they wait for night to fall and listen to passing helicopters.

What's Don Juan to you? Amber, the young teenage boy, asks Yolanda.

Nothing. It's that her father doesn't want her to be in Mexico, Juan says. He wants her to be with her aunts and uncles in the United States.

Yolanda is silent. Night comes. Abel begins leading the way to a place he knows as the Indian's house. Once they reach that house, they will be safe. The Indian will drive them into Arizona.

They walk for several hours in silence, dodging the spotlights of the border patrol. Abel puts branches on the ground where border patrol vehicles have left tire tracks in the sand, walking atop them to prevent leaving footprints that can be tracked. Yolanda thinks she sees human bodies and snakes. Strange things brush up against her, and thorns lodge in her clothes.

Suddenly, Abel calls out from ahead. Don't come any farther.

He has fallen down a steep embankment. One by one, the men carefully climb down. Yolanda is left alone on the top. There is the fleeting thought.

If only I could run away now.

She knows it would mean sure death. She climbs down in the arms of her devil.

A Shadow in America

He expected only his father to cross the desert and says by phone he doesn't have the extra cash for Yolanda. Or maybe that's just an excuse. He blames the 14-year-old girl for getting between his mother and father. He blames his father for bringing her to America.

Either way, there's no money. They can't pay the coyote. And Juan is out of options.

They're near Phoenix, living in a halfway house for recent immigrants. Juan has a smuggling debt of at least a couple thousand dollars. He promised to pay their smuggler once they arrived, before heading to Dallas to live and find construction work. But his son won't budge.

So they will go to North Carolina to work off their debt, indentured in the fields.

Within days, Juan and Yolanda get in a minivan with tinted windows and about a dozen other immigrants heading east.

It has been four years since he started abusing her, four years of flight from the small village in southern Mexico to the city of Oaxaca, across the Sonoran Desert and now along an American interstate.

They pass the truck stops selling dream catchers and breakfast burritos. Indian casinos, rust red plateaus and auto dealerships with American flags. The van breaks down, and everybody hides under a bridge until it's fixed.

More than a day later, they arrive just outside of Seven Springs, N.C., in a mobile home park on Cabin Creek Drive.

114 Cabin Creek is a singlewide, two-bedroom trailer with dirty white synthetic siding, backed against a clothesline and tobacco field. There are sheets on the windows, foam board ceilings, stained mattresses. And thin walls.

Yolanda and as many as 10 men live inside. Everybody knows she is Juan's woman. The two sleep together in a single bed in a room not much bigger than a walk-in closet. Juan's wife and family remain in Mexico.

For the old cat, a tender rat, Yolanda hears the men say.

Anyone could put an end to this with an anonymous phone call to police. But fear keeps people from speaking up. It's the fear that police will come. Then Immigration. Men will be deported. Money will dry up. Families will rupture.

Juan tells Yolanda that if she called police, they would send her back to Mexico. He would follow. She knows what could happen next.

If she was in school, there would be a network of counselors and teachers and friends and parents of friends. If she was a resident or spoke English, she might know about shelters or laws. As it is, she can barely read or write in Spanish.

Here, there is only silence.

•

Seven Springs, population 86, is a historic town in eastern North Carolina on the banks of the Neuse River. Its main strip boasts the Seven Springs Restaurant – run by Ola Mae Adams – an antique store, post office and the volunteer fire department. Just to the north, 59 steps up a hill, stands the white wood Methodist church, its dented copper steeple the highest point around. Bobby Mozingo does Civil War re-enactments in these parts, and Jewel Kilpatrick is the silver-haired mayor.

Then there is the migrant town just outside the city limits, fed by the fields of corn, wheat, beans and tobacco. By the Southern Produce plant, Carolina Turkey and a hog plant not far from that.

Limbo King, his belly bulging over his pants with a rat's nest of chest hair and untamed beard, has been property manager at Cabin Creek for more than a decade. He talks, often while chain smoking, in piecemeal Spanish with a North Carolina drawl. He likes the job, he says, because it lets him sleep with Hispanic men.

On the highway and dirt roads, he knows of the brothels and bars that dot the land. Women, he says, come in from New York, among other places. Sex costs about $30, but the rate is negotiable.

As far as labor in the fields is concerned, Ismael Pacheco, known simply as Pacheco, is the man. He owns many of the mobile homes around Cabin Creek. Each morning, trucks and vans show up to take men to farms and packing plants that have made deals with Pacheco's contract labor company. The supply of workers is rarely an issue.

Some come from Florida after orange season. Others come straight from the border.

Logs record names and hours worked, handwritten on notebook paper. $5.15 an hour for work at Lewis Nursery and Farms picking pickles, with other farms paying per container for sweet potatoes and peppers picked.

When Juan and Yolanda arrive, it's blueberry season.

In the mornings, they wake before sunup for the hourlong ride to the field.

The field is her escape. The heat, she thinks, is unbearable, but there are cows and horses and birds' nests and ants with wings to look at. The bosses give her small containers to put the fruit in. Not too green or too ripe. Remember the gloves. They get coffee and bread and beans at lunch. She tries not to think about the trailer, about what's awaiting her when she returns.

At sundown, on the trip home, she sometimes falls asleep in the van. She rushes to beat the men to the bathroom to shower and wash off the pesticides.

Then it's almost always the same, the dull dread when darkness comes. He comes for her after dinner or when everyone else has gone to sleep. Sometimes she struggles. More often than not, she is resigned to the futility of struggling. Sometimes she goes to the bathroom and cries and vomits. Then back to the mattress for sleep. He tries to press his body against hers. She pushes him away and faces the other way, a small act of rebellion.

•

Two blocks away, Laura Hernández sells perfumes door to door. She meets Yolanda one day out on her rounds. There is a mixture of empathy and sadness, seeing the teenage girl in the company of such men. She was about Yolanda's age when she came to America.

Is he your husband?

No, he's my father.

Her intuition tells her it isn't true. Over the next few months, she sees Yolanda a handful of times. Her daughters – Daisy, Diana, Dilayla and Dalia – give her clothes. Laura thinks fleetingly about adopting the girl.

But Juan is already planning to leave. He isn't paying down the debt fast enough. In addition to the smuggling debt, there are the rent and electricity and daily expenses. He decides to run from Seven Springs in the winter of 2002. He calls his friend César Santana and asks if he can line up some work. César is heading a crew of laborers working on Wal-Mart gas stations. He agrees to pick up Juan by night at a McDonald's parking lot in nearby Mount Olive. The Hernándezes drive Juan and Yolanda into town.

César sees the little girl step out of the SUV and thinks it is Juan's daughter. Juan has not told him otherwise.

They drive all night to Bremen, Ga., 50 miles outside of Atlanta. Yolanda notices César examining her through the rearview mirror.

They arrive at the Days Inn near the interstate in the morning and move into their hotel rooms. Juan gets to work with César pouring concrete for a Wal-Mart gas station down the road.

In the mornings, Juan takes the key card with him, leaving Yolanda alone. She has nothing to eat except a bag of chips on some days, until Juan brings her dinner. Hour on hour, she watches television. Terminator. RoboCop. Stuart Little.

Why don't you take her some food, César asks Juan at a Mexican restaurant.

No, she's already eaten.

César knows it isn't true. His workers soon tell him that Yolanda is Juan's woman.

César understands the kind of trouble he could be in. About three days after they arrive, he goes to Yolanda's room while Juan works.

Yolanda struggles with the door and looks scared when she gets it open. César tells her something strange is going on inside the hotel and he wants answers.

First of all, how old are you?

18.

César laughs. Please, little girl, you're lying to me. My daughter's about the same age as you, how can I not know how old you are? I can tell by your face that you're too young to be 18 years old. How old are you?

Yolanda won't tell.

This man García has a wife. He has five kids. He's three times your age. He's older than me!

Yolanda starts crying and shaking. César tells her to calm down.

You have to promise me that you're not going to tell García anything, she says.

It's not what you think it is. I don't want to be with this man. I know this man is old enough to be my grandfather. But this man has threatened me. That's why I can't say anything. He told me if I said anything to anyone, he would kill my family.

Yolanda tells her real age. César knows he is in a bind. Having this girl here with his crew is dangerous, especially if the police come. He is legal, but his wife and many of his workers are not. He promises not to tell Juan and says they'll find a solution. He calls his wife, Cristina, in Dallas and tells her of the girl.

What should I do? he asks her.

You can't do anything.

Why?

Because she's underage. And if you call the police, everyone could go to jail.

Within days, they finish the job in Bremen and head to another Wal-Mart in Waverly, Tenn.

César gives Yolanda a phone card to call Cristina. The first time they talk, Cristina tells Yolanda she knows about her history and will try to help.

Yolanda hides the card under the TV, pulling it out with a safety pin when Juan leaves. César sneaks her food so she won't starve.

It takes about two weeks to finish the Waverly job. There's no more work. César, Juan and Yolanda head for Texas.

•

It has been raining in Dallas, the water still standing on the streets of Oak Cliff.

Cristina looks outside and sees Yolanda jumping in puddles.

And that little girl? she asks of her husband.

That's Juan's woman.

Love or Something

Yolanda walks into the kitchen, opens a drawer and pulls out a knife. She hides it behind her back, elbow bent.

It's spring 2004 in Dallas. She stands inside the one-bedroom apartment where she sleeps with Juan inside a closet: roughly 6 feet wide and 10 feet deep, with a twin mattress below the clothes rack. Just hours before, she was furious and crying in the bathroom. She felt an evil rise inside her.

Yolanda grips the knife, sneaks up to the closet and opens the door. She has thought of killing him at least once before, down by the river in Mexico where he first raped her almost six years ago. She later prayed for God to kill him in Oaxaca.

Now 16, she still believes in the Catholic God of sacred life. She knows killing is a sin. But she believes in human justice and knows this is somehow righteous.

The knife would be enough. With a quick stab to his chest, it could all be over. But if he wakes and sees her, she won't be able to handle him. She'll be beaten bloody or worse.

Then there's the unborn baby to consider.

She remembers a doctor near her village in southern Mexico saying that her ovaries were damaged and she would not be able to have children. She always suspected it was because she had been abused so young.

But in December 2003, a few months after coming to Dallas, she was in the bathroom, vomiting. Her head hurt. Nothing felt right.

Her last period was more than a month ago.

The older women in the apartment knew and bought her a pregnancy test. She closed the bathroom door.

Please, God, don't let it be.

Pink. Unmistakably pink.

I'm not going to have a baby, it's not true. It's not true.

She thought about her dead mother and how she could never raise a child, not one imprinted with the memory of this man and his sins. Not with the memory of a man who had raped her at 11 and taken her across two countries.

That afternoon, after Juan came home from work, she told him that the test was positive, but that she didn't believe it was accurate. He appeared indifferent.

Within a week, Juan's cousin took her to Parkland Memorial Hospital for a definitive exam. As Yolanda waited for the results, she already knew it was true. She was more than a month pregnant.

But she does not love this thing growing inside her. Over the next few months, she does not care to know its gender, or listen to its heartbeat or think of a name. She is indifferent to its kicks.

She spoke with a relative about getting an abortion, but she doesn't know how to find a clinic, doesn't know whether it is legal and doesn't have any money anyway.

She jumped up and down in the apartment, hoping it might shake the fetus free. Juan says it doesn't matter to him if she has the baby or not.

After a few months, she resigns herself to having the baby and giving it up for adoption.

Yolanda walks back to the kitchen and puts the knife away, unnoticed. It's not worth it, she tells herself. Juan is still sleeping. So are his relatives, who share the apartment. They live in the Brandywine Apartments, a mostly Hispanic complex near Maple and Wycliff avenues, where caged birds live on first-floor patios and the sounds of Tejano, Cumbia and Norteño music float through breezeways.

Yolanda never talks with anyone about her past. Those in the apartment know she is Juan's woman but don't pry much. Cristina and César Santana, the couple that knows her history and helped her in Georgia and Tennessee, visit occasionally but never very long. César gives her some money and asks one time over the phone if she is ready to leave Juan. She tells him that Juan would kill her if she left. They leave it at that.

While the men work during the day, Yolanda and a woman named Felícitas stay home, cook and watch telenovelas with their storylines of romance, murder and betrayal.

At a few months pregnant, Yolanda shows only the faintest bulge from her still infantile figure. She looks gaunt and frail, as if she hasn't been eating much.

Then on Aug. 16, about 3 a.m., she starts to bleed. An hour later, there is pain and then contractions. Contractions every 20 minutes. Pain every 5 minutes. Then 3 minutes. She tells Juan she needs to go to the hospital.

Don't you dare to tell them that I am the father... say that I am your uncle.

Shut that [expletive] mouth, she curses him as she leaves.

At Parkland Memorial Hospital, they say she's not ready yet and send her home. She returns three hours later.

Doctors and nurses make two notes of interest in her file:

1) Teenage mother

2) Anemia

Yolanda says nothing of the baby's father or how she became pregnant. She is used to keeping quiet.

Shortly after 9 a.m., the doctor tells her to push once, then again. The baby comes out with the second push. It is a girl, 6 pounds, 4 ounces, born with bruises on her face from the natural delivery.

The nurse gives her to Yolanda swaddled in a blanket. She feels warm. Yolanda does not know what the emotion is, but it fills her.

Later, she describes the feeling:

Love or something.

Something she has not felt before. Something that is primal and pure. The baby, she thinks while holding her, is not to blame. The baby does not know the crime she is the product of.

From the hospital bed, Yolanda realizes she cannot give this newborn away. She does not want the baby's life cursed like that of her mother.

Over the next two days in the hospital, she flips through books of names: Maria, Margarita, Mexican names and other English names she doesn't understand.

Juan suggests Ayleen. Yolanda bristles and comes up with Aidelin.

Aidelin Adair Méndez .

As they make the birth certificate, they ask for the father's name.

She says to leave it blank.

The first night back, the three of them sleep inside the closet on the twin mattress. The second night, he forces her to have sex with him with the baby present.

He is getting more violent. She is losing control.

The baby cries all day, and Yolanda has no idea why. She thinks Aidelin may be sick, but Juan says he won't take her for a checkup.

His son, Juan Carlos, has come into Dallas and has been staying around the apartment. Yolanda believes he has seen his dad hitting her. A few weeks after she returns from Parkland, he approaches her with a surprise offer: About $30 to help her leave. Enough for a cab ride.

This will be the first and the last time I help you, he says.

She can think only about the baby and knows this is her chance. She sends word to Cristina that she is leaving Juan and needs to live with her. César warned his wife not to get into trouble, but she brushed him off in her abruptly independent way. She needs to help this girl.

On Monday, Sept. 13, 2004, Yolanda wakes at 5 a.m. as normal. She prepares lunch for Juan, and the men leave for work. She is left alone with Felícitas, who watches her morning soap opera and falls back to sleep.

Yolanda moves to the closet and starts putting clothes in bags. She searches for any money that Juan may have stashed, but finds none.

Outside, it's cloudy and hot. Near the laundry room, she finds a woman who helps her call a cab. It comes around 1:30 p.m. She gets inside with the baby, hands the driver a piece of paper with Cristina's address and breathes deeply.

A half-hour later, Yolanda is on Texas Drive in Oak Cliff, standing outside a one-story white wood home.

She has come with one bag for herself and two small bags for the baby. Inside the house, she tells Cristina everything, much of which Cristina already knows from her husband. She talks about the first time she was raped in La Barra del Potrero, about the threats to her family, about being kept prisoner in motel rooms and about her life in a closet in Dallas.

Cristina vows to keep her safe. She takes her to Wal-Mart to buy diapers, milk and other supplies for the baby.

When they return, Juan is waiting in a car outside.

Cristina sees Yolanda trembling in the back seat, terrorized, her eyes wide with fear.

Stay here. Don't get out.

But he's going to take me back,

Señora. Senito, Senito, he's going to hit me. He's going to take me away.

He's not going to take you. Remember that, he's not going to take you away.

Cristina leaves the car. Her daughter Jessica, young son and Yolanda stay inside.

How are you doing? Juan says.

How did you know she was here?

Because I had people watching her.

Juan asks for Yolanda. Cristina, a woman not given to demure politeness, boils in anger. She curses him, calls him a disgraceful old man and says she will be keeping the girl.

If you try to hit me, if you threaten her ... if you try to lay a hand on her, you're going to pay.

Juan argues, relents and then drives away. Nobody can guess his next move.

An Unlikely Angel

2003

Susana Loera works in a world of law laced with machismo.

From the second floor of the Mexican Consulate, she has seen thousands of immigrants come for help navigating the justice system. Help with child custody cases. Deportation orders. Criminal arrests.

But beaten and raped women, she is convinced, have been ignored by the consulate to keep Mexican men out of U.S. prisons.

It is the morning of Sept. 20, 2004, when Mexican Vice Consul Luis Lara provides a chance she has waited on for months.

I have a victim ... he says, sticking his head into her office. She's claiming an uncle had raped her ... and I need you to help her. Susana puts her hand on the phone.

If I help her, Luis, I'm going to help her the whole way.

Susana calls Dallas police, reports that she has a domestic abuse victim in the office, hangs up and walks next door.

She sees a tiny 17-year-old girl with a glazed look of fear and something tiny wrapped in her arms. It is Yolanda and her baby, Aidelin, just days after they escaped from Juan and went to live with Cristina Santana. They have come to the consulate with Yolanda's tattered birth certificate to get emergency picture identification. After consular officials heard her story, they sent her upstairs to meet with the protection department.

Susana shakes her hand, and Yolanda lets off a slight, nervous smile.

I'm here to give you what you need, Susana says. The police are on their way. I just want to tell you that you are very brave for doing what you did.

There is a bond, but neither knows its depths. Susana, her broad face and wide shoulders at once empathetic and imposing, tells Yolanda little about herself. She sits atop the office desk and listens. Yolanda begins with the first time she was raped on the riverbank in La Barra del Potrero in rural Oaxaca. Of her journey along the winding highway to Oaxaca City and by foot across the Sonoran Desert and into American fields and motel rooms.

The 33-year-old woman's instinct tells her this is all true. Too real not to be true.

Two police officers take a report. Before they can arrest Juan, they need to know his birthday and need DNA tests to confirm he is the father. Yolanda doesn't know the birthday, and a DNA test will take days.

But they have to arrest him, she pleads with Susana. He's going to come after me.

Susana leaves a message with the Dallas County district attorney's office, saying she needs help for a victim. She needs a protective order and needs somebody to shepherd Yolanda's case through the system. Within an hour, she gets a call from Martha Hollowell, co-chief of the office's family violence division.

Martha is suspicious.

In all her years in the office, she cannot remember hearing the consulate's office ask for help with a victim or prosecution of an abuser.

Usually, such calls come on behalf of defendants to get cases dismissed or downgraded. In December 2003, the acting consul general had gone so far as to send a letter asking for dismissals or deferred adjudication in some cases of domestic violence, citing cultural differences and the destruction of families caused by jail and deportation. Juan José Salgado would later say he signed the letter to help U.S. authorities understand the culture of rural Mexico but not to trivialize domestic violence. The consulate's office added that they believed Yolanda's story but have an obligation to help any Mexican citizen who requests it.

If Susana is being honest, Martha knows Yolanda is in danger. Of women who are slain by abusers, about 75 percent die during or shortly after their escape. And if Juan catches wind of an impending arrest, he could run south as many do, crossing back into the safety of Mexico.

She says to bring Yolanda into the office the next morning.

That night, Susana can't shake the day.

If anybody ever does anything to you, you can tell me. I don't care who it is. Your uncle, your dad. It could be anyone, she tells her 10-year-old daughter, Alexis.

Why are you telling me this?

For now, Susana mentions nothing of Yolanda. But Alexis knows the darkness in her mother's past.

•

They were in a green station wagon in Grand Prairie. Susana was 9, motherless and from a family of 12. Her relative was in his mid-40s, an upholsterer.

He spilled spools of string and thread on her lap, reached across and began touching her, fondling her. He had been touching her since she was 7, since the time he gave her a five-dollar bill as hush money and threatened to kill her father if the incentive was not enough to ensure silence.

On this day, they drove to his apartment building. She knew she could not go inside. Unspeakable things would happen inside that building.

She got out of the car, broke his grasp and ran into an empty field. For hours, she hid behind a big tree, the man screaming as he searched. Night came and the girl, scared of the dark, emerged. He took her home.

The molestation would continue until she was 14. She kept it a secret, from her family and priests and friends, until she turned 28.

By that time, Susana was a divorced single mother, battling a string of abusive relationships.

On April 1, 2002, she hit bottom. She and her live-in boyfriend had been fighting again, this time about the dog sleeping on the bed. Again, it had become physical. When Grand Prairie police showed up, she told them how he spat on her face, shoulder-butted her, smashed her television and threw a can of white paint in her car. Alexis, then 8, saw and heard everything.

The boyfriend moved out for good. Susana nursed her wounds. She moved into her sister's house and returned to school in September. She began work at the Mexican Consulate in January 2004 while she finished classes. Months later, she became the first child on her mother's side of the family to graduate from college. She worked inside the consulate for a private attorney helping Mexican citizens.

Everything had been building toward this moment.

•

The morning of Sept. 21, 2004, Susana picks up Yolanda in Oak Cliff and drives her to the district attorney's family violence division at the Frank Crowley Courts Building. Martha meets them and sees what Susana first saw: a shell of a teenage girl, emaciated and dirty with her long, black hair tumbling down toward the small of her back. Cristina has been trying to feed the girl four times a day. Liver. Fritos. Chicken soup and spinach. All to no avail. She still weighs less than 90 pounds, malnourished from one-meal days in America.

Martha knows the distrust she has to overcome. She has seen it dozens of times.

Women failed by their government, by their families. She says defense attorneys have told illegal-immigrant victims they'll get deported if they testify against their abusers. Then there's Susana, whom she still doesn't know whether to trust.

Martha speaks to Yolanda in Spanish. Her mother is from Chihuahua, her father from Victoria. She explains that the way they do things in Dallas isn't like Mexico. She explains the system, the options, things that the girl never knew about.

The first step will be a protective order.

The next day, Susana takes Yolanda across town to meet with Dallas police Detective Glen Slade at the Children's Advocacy Center. Detective Slade is a veteran of cases like this, working nearly 1,000 since 2001. He remembers the Mexican father who abused his daughter and took her across the border to live above a bar before the girl escaped. The mom who had two daughters abused by a baby sitter but never knew she could do anything about it.

Many women in Mexico, his experience narrates, remain second-class citizens who don't know much about legal protections when they come north.

He talks to Yolanda, takes a DNA test but still needs Juan's date of birth. Yolanda has Juan's phone number and gives it to Susana. She calls in the lobby from her cellphone.

Who's this? Juan answers.

Susana lies: I'm calling from the state of Texas.

She tells him she is working on Yolanda's Medicaid application and needs to know when he was born. He tells her.

She thanks him and goes back upstairs and gives the detective the date.

Back at the courthouse, meanwhile, Martha has called Saundra Arrington, an attorney with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to see if agents can immediately arrest Juan.

They can raid the apartment, but everyone else inside will be deported. The message is relayed to Susana. She knows the Mexican Consulate might have a problem with the prospect of deporting an apartment full of illegal immigrants.

Get 'em all. I don't care, she says. The consulate's office has nothing to do with it at this point.

In the early morning, less than a week after Yolanda first entered the consulate, there is a knock on the door at Apartment 303.

Juan answers. He and the other men inside are taken away.

Susana calls Yolanda to let her know she is safe. Yolanda screams, then calls Martha and cries.

A Slight Voice Rises

 What do you want to eat?

I don't know.

Yolanda stares at the menu, lost. She can scarcely read or write in Spanish with the education of a second-grader. She has never chosen for herself. And now the 17-year-old sits at a suburban Chili's restaurant with Susana and her 10-year-old daughter, Alexis, puzzled by words like Awesome Blossom and Baby Back Ribs.

Susana, who met Yolanda about a week ago at the Mexican Consulate, orders for her. Alexis, rapt by Yolanda's baby and knowing little of her mother, peppers the table with awkward questions.

Where's her daddy? Does the baby look more like her daddy or her?

Delicately, Susana tells a small portion of Yolanda's history, of her six years of sexual abuse and her abduction from the village in southern Mexico into the United States and Dallas.

Alexis shrinks silent. The food comes, and Yolanda eats as if there will never be another meal.

It is late September 2004, less than a month after she escaped Juan to live with Cristina Santana and her children in Oak Cliff. Juan waits in jail, his fate undetermined.

Yolanda remains an illegal immigrant, an exile in a land she never chose.

She knows she cannot return to the village where both of their families live. She hopes to stay with Cristina until she turns 18 in July, then find an apartment, work and support the baby.

Susana has been helping move her case through the system. The day after dinner at Chili's, her phone rings.

There is a way for Yolanda to stay in America legally, a voice says.

On the line is Michelle Sáenz-Rodríguez, a prominent Dallas immigration attorney. Michelle has heard about the case from the district attorney's office and thinks she may be able to help. Since Yolanda is still a minor, she can get a green card if she is declared a ward of the state and a U.S. citizen takes custody of her. But they must move fast. Much of it has to happen before she turns 18.

Otherwise, they could try to get her a special visa created by Congress for victims of crime in 2000 under the Violence Against Women Act. The visas were intended to move vulnerable immigrants out of the shadows and help authorities investigate and prosecute crimes, including rape and torture. But none has been handed out, and rules on how to administer them have never been published. At best, Yolanda could get temporary help.

It's not until that night that Susana thinks of taking custody of her. She is a single mother, once divorced, living with her sister and pulling down $36,000 a year. She doesn't have a car payment. Her days of living with abusive and drugged-out men are over. Her relationship with Alexis is strong.

Yet she knows everyone would criticize taking in a girl she barely knows, a girl with the tangled psyche of a rape victim. It could cost her job at the Mexican Consulate, a job that's already strained. It would mean getting her own place and putting off law school.

Susana lets nobody into her head that night: not her daughter or mother or best friend whom she has known since junior high school.

She thinks about the dozens of people who failed to stand up for Yolanda in Mexico and the United States. Dozens of strangers and family members who knew but stayed silent.

She prays and she sleeps. She says she talks with God. When she wakes, her mind is resolute and she picks up the phone.

What would you think about coming to live with me? she asks Yolanda.

Are you serious? Are you playing?

You would have to leave Cristina and come to Arlington.

Yolanda needs to think about it.

She has no idea where her father is. Drunk somewhere, she believes. She still has a sister and brother in Oaxaca, but she knows little of their fate. Cristina remains illegal and unable to provide Yolanda the opportunities a citizen can.

Susana finds an apartment in Arlington, and Yolanda moves in before Thanksgiving. For Christmas, Susana goes to the dollar store and buys as many gifts as she can afford, wrapping them and putting them under a tree. Yolanda has never opened presents.

And she has never had a room of her own. She looks outside at the apartment swimming pool, the first snow, the Hispanic construction workers.

She watches Mexican soap operas and cooks. Slowly, all the pain begins to rise. She says she feels like a squeezed tomato. Yolanda writes pages of memories in chicken-scratch Spanish. Then rips them apart, crumples them up and throws them in a trash can. Pain and anger.

This [expletive] man did so much harm to me, I'll never forgive him , she told a consulate employee shortly after her escape. He's a dog, a damned dog.

On some nights, Susana wakes to Yolanda's sobs in the adjacent room. She asks her what's wrong, but Yolanda just says her stomach hurts.

Other times Susana wakes to find all the cabinets in the apartment open. Bathroom drawers, kitchen cabinets, closets. Everything is open while Yolanda's door is locked.

Then there is the baby. Susana is concerned with Yolanda's mothering skills – not enough to alert Child Protective Services, but she is concerned nonetheless. When Yolanda is frustrated, she shakes Aidelin. When Alexis sees it, she yells at Yolanda and takes the baby away. Alexis' mothering skills can seem more evolved.

Susana begins to think she may have been naïve. Nothing is easy.

At the district attorney's office, Lara Peirce has been assigned to try Juan's case in front of state District Judge Manny Álvarez.

In the winter, when the 32-year-old prosecutor first reads the police report – with its one-paragraph narrative of Yolanda's story – she calls his public defender and offers his client 20 years. Juan turns it down.

She brings Susana and Yolanda into the office. They talk for hours.

I need to know where he touched. What he did. How it felt. What did you feel? What were you thinking?

By the end, Lara would say this is the worst case she has seen, worse than the kid who was tortured by his dad and the dozens of child abuse stories that have come through her hands.

She scribbles on her legal pad:

Twenty years definitely not enough.

But she worries whether a jury will think it's too grotesque to be true. Most witnesses are in Mexico. Those who shared the apartment with Yolanda and Juan in Dallas have been deported.

She offers 50 years. Rejected.

A trial appears inevitable. They will try Juan on sexual assault and aggravated sexual assault for threats he made to harm or kill Yolanda to ensure her silence.

To prepare, Yolanda and Susana visit a mock court where prosecutors prepare child victims for the rigors of the courtroom. Yolanda wears a judge's robe and holds a gavel. She meets a woman from Oaxaca whose daughter was abused. Slowly, she becomes more confident.

Then in the spring of 2005, Lara gets a surprise.

Juan will plead guilty, his attorney says. He will let a judge decide his sentence.

On April 5, 2005 – about two weeks before Juan's sentencing – Susana appears in a Tarrant County court to gain custody of Yolanda.

In an eight-page ruling, the court determines that Yolanda's father abandoned her as a child and failed to protect her from abuse and neglect by family members.

The judge makes Susana sole conservator, opening the door for Yolanda to gain residency in the coming months.

One hurdle crossed.

At home in Arlington, the family prepares for criminal court.

Susana wants Yolanda to look childlike and innocent at Juan's sentencing. Nothing sleeveless. Minimal makeup. Juvenile. They go shopping at Old Navy and pick out a white dress, simple and girly.

On the morning of April 22, she wears it to the courthouse.

Juan, 45, is led into the courtroom in his jail jumpsuit. Susana has never seen him. Short, old, disgusting, she thinks as the stories Yolanda has told her run through her head. Yolanda follows the advice of prosecutors and avoids eye contact.

She takes the witness stand, and Lara begins.

They start at the beginning, with the rape by the river, the threats and her cousin's bloody face. Yolanda is nervous, her voice quiet and unsteady.

I was sitting down, and I told him that I didn't want him to continue doing that anymore. ... That's when he pulled me by my hair, and he told me to get on the bed. And then he started taking my clothes off...

Judge Álvarez cuts it off, and asks Lara to approach the bench. Move on, is the message she hears.

Lara doesn't know what it means, but thinks Judge Álvarez has already made up his mind. Yolanda tells the court about coming to the U.S., about the baby and about her fears.

The prosecutor rests. Yolanda endures a brief and gentle cross-examination. Juan takes the stand.

OK. What were you thinking? asks his attorney Russ Henrichs. Were you hoping that she would stay with you and marry you?

No. I think I was mistaken. I thought she loved me, Juan says.

You thought she loved you?

Yes.

Susana thinks she hears the courtroom gasp. Lara waives her cross-examination and begins closing arguments. She explains the loss of childhood, the captivity, the kidnapping.

When you look at the kind of cases we see down here, this is the most egregious of the cases that we see. It's not a murder, but, in some ways, it's worse ...

There is no mercy that should be given to him.

Lara sits and Judge Álvarez tells Juan to stand up.

Maximum sentences. Life in prison plus 20 years.

Yolanda does not understand. She sees Susana crying and thinks he has gotten off light. Then she learns of the judgment.

Le dieron una vida. He got life, Susana tells her.

It is an emotion for which there is no single word. Part relief, part vindication, part joy. Tinged with thoughts of God and destiny.

For Susana, it is closure. For Yolanda, it is empowerment.

Yolanda Seeks "A Normal Life Like I've Never Had Before"

 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.

Editorial: The Power of One: Each of Us Can Help Save a Yolanda

If you've been following The Dallas Morning News' riveting series about Yolanda Méndez Torres, you would probably never think to label the young woman lucky.

She was only 11 the first time her 38-year-old uncle, Juan García Aguilar, raped her. Soon after, he took her as his other woman alongside his wife, Efigenia. Juan beat both into silence and submission.

Reporters Stella Chávez and Paul Meyer and photographer Lara Solt retraced Yolanda's journey from her dirt-poor village in Mexico to the blueberry fields and motel rooms in the South and finally to Dallas, where she lived in a closet and, at age 17, gave birth to a girl.

Somehow under these unimaginable hardships,Yolanda, now 19, endured. She and her daughter are safe, and her rapist sits in jail.

Yolanda's life was probably saved by one simple act of kindness: César Santana didn't look the other way. He went to the motel room where Yolanda's uncle kept her locked up and starving, and handed her a calling card to reach his wife, Cristina.

Because of the Santanas, Yolanda had a place to go that afternoon when she finally found the courage to leave her abuser. She found another angel in Susana Loera, a Mexican Consulate employee, who not only helped Yolanda fight for justice but also took her and her baby in as her own.

Yolanda's story makes a point that too often we forget in our day-to-day hustle and bustle: What can one person do? A lot. Laws and studies alone won't stop the violence against women. It will take all of us reaching out to perfect strangers – like César, Cristina and Susana did – to help set the Yolandas of this world free.

Mixed Reviews for Yolanda's Tale

Bad timing, placement

Re: "Yolanda's Crossing," news series published Dec. 17 through today.

Why was such a series chosen for the front page during the week before Christmas? During Ramadan, you had very complimentary stories about the observance of Ramadan. Can't you show the same respect to Christians?

The choice and place to run "Yolanda's Crossing" at this time was inappropriate and of extremely poor taste. Are you just trying to condone illegal entry to this country? Why not encourage the illegal immigrants to go back to their countries, protest and get rid of corruption there, instead of expecting the U.S. to take care of them?

Kathy Smith, Dallas

Amazing reporting job

This series is riveting. What an amazing piece of investigative reporting. My grandfather, the late Dick West, editorial director of The Dallas Morning News, would be proud.

Elizabeth West, Westbury, N.Y.

We can't let this continue

What have we become as a society? How can we, as one of the so-called world powers, allow these things to go on? These are human beings, for God's sake! Most of our pets are treated and taken care of better than many of these immigrants.

I blame all of us: The Wal-Mart executive who cares only to make a profit on the backs of its poorly paid workers. Our public officials who look the other way, too busy to investigate and pursue obviously illegal and unhealthy situations. Those of us who sit around and watch the news and read the paper. We shake our heads and say, "What a shame. Something really must be done about all these illegal immigrants."

Tell me something, Farmers Branch: If you refuse to rent to people like Juan García Aguilar and Yolanda Méndez Torres, will that make you a better city? Can your citizens rest better at night knowing that those nasty immigrants have gone somewhere else? If you build a wall around your fair city, or if we build a wall around our country – the finest country in the world – will that keep all the Juans and Yolandas out?

Will we all sleep better at night not having to look at these ugly things – poverty, ignorance, cruelty and abuse?

Tina Sanchez, Dallas

Tired of Mexicans' story

Why in the world am I reading, almost daily, about Mexico? Has Dallas been overrun by Mexicans? Do Mexicans now control the press? Quit giving illegal immigration press time. The illegal immigrants are destroying our country, and your paper appears to support them.

Don Wendt, DeSoto

Dismal tale not warranted

How could such a dismal feature be so prominent on an Advent Sunday and at the beginning of Hanukkah? Why not a large picture and story of the second-grader who cared for abandoned children instead of burying that on an inside page?

Franne Jackson, Dallas

Again, you go to extreme

There is so much happening in our world that is totally overlooked, and you go to the extreme to cover this unsavory custom that has been a way of life in every country south of the U.S. border for centuries.

Should we open our borders and doors to this breed of uneducated degenerates? This story is not going to engender a feeling of sympathy with readers. This story will certainly add to the list of reasons these people should never be allowed to enter or live in the U.S.

Rounding up and deporting every man, woman and child should be the highest priority of every law officer.

Bill Henderson, Dallas

You did the same thing ...

I could not believe the irony of a major series you started on Sunday. The subject was "exploitation of woman," and what do you do but put a huge, full-color, front-page nude picture of a woman. Talk about exploitation!

Robert Paelke, Plano

... by exploiting woman

I am horrified and outraged by Sunday's front-page, color photo of a naked woman. The article told of awful conditions that women are being forced to endure, but what these women got from The Dallas Morning News was more exploitation, lack of respect and humiliation.

As usual, it's just another naked woman. A large, front-page apology is in order.

Donna Callaway, Plano

Resources for Abuse Victims

Some agencies that aid abuse victims:

Human Rights Initiative of North Texas

214-855-0520

www.hrionline.org

Mosaic Family Services

214-821-5393

[email protected]

www.mosaicservices.org

Child Abuse Prevention Center

214-370-9810

www.excap.org

Catholic Charities

Immigration and Legal Services

214-634-7182

www.catholiccharitiesdallas.org

Dallas County domestic violence resources

www.dallasdvresources.org

The National Domestic Violence Hotline

1-800-799-SAFE (7233)

www.ndvh.org

The National Center for Missing

and Exploited Children

www.missingkids.com

1-800-THE-LOST (1-800-843-5678)

2007 Dart Award Final Judges

Jimmie Briggs, formerly a reporter with LIFE magazine, has been a freelance writer and producer for the last thirteen years. The author of a book on child soldiers and war-affected children, "Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go To War," Briggs has written for a number of publications including Essence, VIBE, The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, El Pais, among others. A National Magazine Award finalist, he is a recipient of the OSI Individual Project Fellowship, the Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship, Congressional Black Caucus Media Award, Carter Center Mental Health Journalism Fellowship, Dart Society Fellowship and the NABJ Magazine Award. A past instructor at the New School of Social Research, Briggs has taught photography and writing through the Seeds of Peace program in New York City and Kabul, Afghanistan, as well as in the International Center of Photography's community outreach program. Presently, he is co-producing a feature film based on "Innocents Lost" and working as a freelance producer for ABC News.

Mark Kramer has written for The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside and many other publications. His books include Three Farms: Making Milk, Meat and Money from the American Soil, Invasive Procedures: A Year in the World of Two Surgeons, and Travels with a Hungry Bear: A Journey to the Russian Heartland. He co-edited the anthologies Literary Journalism, and Telling True Stories: A Writer's Guide to Narrative Nonfiction from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, which Plume/Penguin published in February 2007.  From 2001 until a few months ago when he retired to write books again, Mark was the writer-in-residence and director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism at Harvard University. He was writer-in-residence and professor of journalism at Boston University from 1991-2001, where he started this conference in '97, and was writer-in-residence at Smith College for a decade before that.  In addition, he has  started narrative journalism conferences in S. Africa, Denmark, and Germany and consults at newspapers in many nations.  He is married to Susan Eaton, director of research at Harvard Law School's Houston Foundation for Racial Justice and author of the newly published book The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial.  They have two sons.

Kate Lowenstein is Program Director for Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights.  She has spent her career working as an advocate for homicide victims' family members, as well as victims of domestic violence and child abuse and neglect.  She has a JD/MSW and is a member of the Maryland and United States Supreme Court Bar. 

Fred Ritchin is the director of Pixel Press, the former picture editor of The New York Times Magazine, the executive editor of Camera Arts magazine and the founding director of the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography educational program at the International Center of Photography. His book, In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography, was the first to deal with the digital revolution's impact on photography. A Website that he created with photographer Gilles Peress, Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace, was nominated by the New York Times for a Pulitzer Prize in public service. American Photo magazine recently named him one of the 100 Most Important People in Photography. His new book, After Photography, will be published next year by WW Norton. Ritchin is also associate chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University.

Dr. Stuart Turner  is a pioneer in the field of trauma research, helping to develop evidence based services for survivors of adversity in the UK and internationally. He was recently elected as President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), the leading society in this field, for 2008.  Turner is one of the four clinicians who established the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS), having been Chair of the European Trauma Foundation from 1991 to 1993, the precursor organization. In 1995, he became second President of ESTSS. In 1996, he established the UK Trauma Group, a managed clinical network of practitioners and researchers in the UK, which he chaired  for 8 years. He is Chair of Trustees of the Refugee Therapy Centre, a London-based service specializing in offering same language counseling for young refugees and asylum seekers. Currently, he is a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Capio Nightingale Hospital. He is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the  Royal Free and University College Medical School in London. He is Emeritus Consultant to the Camden and Islington Mental Health and Social Care NHS Trust. He has been a Member of the Dart Centre for Europe Advisory Group since 2005.