A long way to go on crime so close to home

The girls Ellen Parsons wants to help don’t tell.

They don’t trust adults. They don’t use words like pimp or prostitute. And they don’t view themselves as victims of an ugly, multimillion-dollar sex business that exploits hundreds of thousands of adolescents every day. Instead, Ellen says, they see the trade as a way to survive and remain independent in a system that has often misunderstood their struggles — and in the worst cases treated them as criminals.

Ellen and I sat in her office at Lifeworks, a youth advocacy center in South Austin where she works as a counselor. I shifted in my seat as I tried to grasp her words.

The term sex trafficking tends to conjure images of girls and young women brought into the country from faraway places, lured by opportunity, forced by abductors. But over the past decade, we have come to realize that some of the most vulnerable victims of the vicious rings that travel across the United States do not come from abroad. They were born and live here.

Right now in Austin and across the country, the two options these adolescents tend to face are time in juvenile detention or placement within the catchall net of shelters operated by state child protective services or private nonprofits. These places cater to abused and neglected children, domestic violence survivors and their families, but social workers say they are not equipped to handle the complex trauma of trafficking survivors.

And most have not yet developed ways to screen for sex trade victims.

Through special training and years of experience, Ellen has found her own ways to tell apart the young girls and teens caught in the life.

Sometimes, she listens for the subtext in their conversation. Often, she watches what they carry. Wads of cash they stuff under a mattress or in the dark corner of a drawer. Expensive cell phones. Brand-named clothing. “Those things they could not have afforded on their own,” she says.

“¡Hasta la madre!” — “We have had it!”

Mexican poet Javier Sicilia and fellow activists under the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity are expected to descend upon the steps of the state Capitol Sunday in protest of U.S. drug policies.

Their stop in Austin is one of 26 in an estimated 6,000-mile journey — from the Mexican border city of Tijuana to Washington, D.C. — where the group hopes to draw attention to the role they say the United States has played in fueling a struggle that has cost the lives of thousands, including Sicilia’s son and other loved ones.

The mission seems so far removed from a city that prides itself on live music festivals, green measures and shopping local. But it’s not if you look a little harder.

Back home in El Paso, where on Tuesday the caravan held a vigil for drug war victims, the effects of this battle are everywhere. There are students in classrooms coping with post-traumatic stress disorder. There are business owners who have opened shop on new ground after fleeing Ciudad Juarez. There are entire families who have been cut off from part of their culture after generations of living on both sides of the Rio Grande.

The news first came back to me in snippets, conversations with my family or pieces of Mexican newspapers snail-mailed by my grandmother. Gore in photos and headlines splashed across the front pages of newspapers. Decapitated heads, limp bodies and blood, pools of it, bright red spilled on the streets.

That is the sexy story. That is what some media outlets only seek to cover. Narco lords and their inconceivable wealth. The ruthlessness of the latest execution. And it is always Mexico’s Drug War.

But in recent months, I have been writing about this little corner in East Austin, where police say a trade of mostly marijuana and cocaine has for decades thrived. The steady stream of crime the business brings tends to be petty rather than fierce and a stark contrast from the shootouts that break out at all hours of the day in many Mexican cities. The players – both buyers and sellers – are typically the ones at the lowest rungs of the game.

And yet, every major city in the United States has a 12th and Chicon. The drug hub, like those across the country, provides another glimpse, another layer of the people most affected by this vicious, unrelenting monster. It is our burden in a shared fight.

On the road with my crazy mother

My younger sister and I grew up in my mother’s red, beat-up little Escort, traveling the 15-hour plus ride between Texas and California, back and forth. Twelve childhood years packed up in brown, cardboard boxes.

First, it was my father’s new job that led us to the Golden State, and then it was the divorce that drove us back, followed by my mother’s new love and new marriage with a U.S. Marine that returned us to the Sun Valley in California. That didn’t work out. He left one cold morning, when the fog had just settled. He didn’t look back at us. Not a glance. And so we arrived again in El Paso, just the three of us.

For her sporadic changes of mind and heart and location, my mother has been described euphemistically as a “free spirit” and bluntly as, well, “crazy.” And maybe she is, a little. She likes to blast the music on the radio and revels in the open road. The odd jobs she has taken on have been as fickle and short lived as her hair color, which has gone from brown, to black, to red, to orange, to a mesh between dirty and metallic blonde. But she is beautiful, in my eyes, a curvy woman with disheveled tresses and soft painter’s hands. Don’t ask me why she does what she does. Like all else in her life, she just does.

And we have had our fights. Bitter ones. I have stormed out of the house in outrage. She has slammed the door in my face so hard the windowpanes shook.

Some times were rough. At 13 I thought I knew everything. I reproached her for everything. I wanted clothes and shoes and stuff she could not afford. I wanted her to be normal, whatever that was. To bake cookies or give me a curfew, or something. To stop moving us around. It wasn’t until I left for college that I realized she had given me more than I could possibly ever need. She gave me all her love, her adventurous spirit and her strength.

A few weeks ago, when I last visited my hometown of El Paso, she and I held each other close in one final embrace before I drove by myself from the western tip of Texas to the southern one, back down to Brownsville. All of our arguments and disputes were far behind us. It was only the two of us in my old room full of high school memories, a room that for a short while had stayed exactly as I left it, hoping for my return.

This year will be tough for my mother. My sister, now 18, also will leave soon to attend a university in Massachusetts. So many roads we have traveled together, and now we are each learning to travel them on our own. But we will always remain close.

On this Mexican Mother’s Day, I want to tell my mother that I love her, with all my heart, with everything I’ve got.

As published May 10, 2010 in The Brownsville Herald