"María José" is also part of my novel MASKED MAN, the first 20 pages of which you can read here.
Who am I? You’re
just now asking me? Ok, I’ll tell you my story, though you won’t understand me.
I’m from Guadalajara, I was born there. My father worked in a panadería, a
bread store, and mother worked in a tortillería, where tortillas are made. The
real kind that smell good and you can eat them warm and fresh right from the
over. My parents had three children. Me, my little sister Marta, and my little
brother Arturo. Bueno, when I was twelve, my father left. He was sleeping with
another woman and my mother found out. She didn’t tell him to leave, just got
angry and called him stupid and a hijo puta, because he was, and then he left
with the other girl. She was closer to my age than my mother’s, which is
strange. They went to Mexico DF and we never heard from him again. In Mexico, a
man doesn’t have to take care of the wife if he leaves. Yes, there are laws but
they don’t matter.
You want to know
how I learned to shoot a gun? We stayed with my Tío Octavio and his family a
lot. The brother of my father. My mother had to take another job. His house was
out in the country and he used to be a mili, a soldado, and he had guns. He
taught all of us to fire guns, even us girls, because he said one day the
people would rise and take back the country from los ricos. And also he said
that mexican girls should know how to defend themselves. From who? From mexican
men. And he was right.
As soon as I was
old enough I quit school and started working at the tortillería, but even then
there wasn’t enough lana, enough dinero. Tío Octavio paid for our house. Then
his wife, Tía Linda, found out he was sleeping with my mother. Ay ay ay, she
even came to the tortillería to scratch out my mother’s eyes!
After that, Tío
Octavio never talked to us again and never gave us any more money and my mother
had to sell the house. We had no family there, her parents had died before. She
had a friend in Puerto Vallarta who could get her a job working at a hotel, she
couldn’t take all of us. Or bueno, sí, she could have, but she had another plan.
We have family in Phoenix. She wanted to send my sister and me, and later my
brother when he got older, to Phoenix, where we could make a lot more money.
The problem was
that we didn’t have enough money to get my sister and me to America. We could
barely get to Santa Teresa by bus. There are men, even in Guadalajara, who will
take people to America, but the majority of them are narcos, los
narcotraficantes, the ones who sell drugs, and my mother didn’t want nothing to
do with them.
But my mom’s plan
was for us to go to Santa Teresa and work at one of the maquiladoras and make
enough money to pay a coyote to get us across the border. My mother knew
someone who worked here, and called her, one time only, and told her that we
were coming. Then she put us on the bus. I just turned sixteen.
When we arrived in
Santa Teresa, my mother’s friend wasn’t there. We called the phone number but
the person we talked to said she didn’t live there no more and she didn’t know
where she went.
In Santa Teresa,
there are men who wait at the bus station, looking for girls to work in the
maquiladoras. I didn’t know what to do. We didn’t even have a place to stay! A
man said he could get us work, but that there was what he called a hiring fee,
which was just a bribe. I told him we didn’t have no money and he said, That’s
ok, we’ll take it out of your check. So I said yes. What was I supposed to do?
And the man took us to an apartment building filled with other girls working at
the maquiladoras and found us a room to stay and said he would take the rent
out of our check too. I said ok because I’m stupid. But I was only sixteen and
had to take care of my sister, you know? We didn’t have almost no money. The
guy, he had us sign papers, and told us where to go to work. Then he asked me if
we needed money for food. I thought he would just take that out of our checks
too, but no, He said he’s give me some if I sucked him! He said it right in
front of my sister! Hijo de puta! Of course I said no. He just shrugged like it
was no big deal and left and I sat and cried, and my sister cried and there we
were, we didn’t know anybody, crying and holding each other.
Our room was the
size of closet and we shared a bathroom down the hall. But it was ours, and we
started work the next day.
The other girls
were nice. They were from all over Mexico. All of us doing the same thing,
except some wanted to go to America and some just came because they thought
they could make enough right there. I thought so too, until saw our first
checks! Thieves! Ladrones! All of them!
What did we do? We
sowed shirts. This shirt I’m wearing? My maquiladora probably made it!
Here’s what they
do. They give you a job on first shift, during the day. The maquiladoras are
filled with girls. Some guys, but mostly girls. The men are the supervisors, of
course. Los jefes. But then there are the jefes of the jefes, the men who come
in suits, they walk around, look at everything. They go in the office, they
come out of the office. They drive around in their fancy trucks, theirs SUVs,
watching, looking. When they see a girl they like, they take her. They ask her
jefe, Who’s that? What’s her name? Then they wait outside for the girl, and
tell her to get in. This happens a lot. And the girls get in. Why? Because the
men have money. The men tell them they’ll take them out, to restaurantes and
clubs. To dance and drink. Except, sometimes the girls don’t come back. I
didn’t learn this until later.
Mostly it’s just
guys. Regular guys. Meaning mexican guys, so cuidado anyways, but yes, girls go
out and nothing happens. They drink. They dance. They fuck. The girls come back
crying. Or not. They come back smiling. Or not. They get pregnant and have
abortions. Or not.
The jefes of the
jefes, they want a girl, here’s what they do. They tell the little jefes to
change a girl’s schedule. Suddenly she’s not working the day shift any more.
Now she’s working the night shift. Now the buses aren’t running. Now there’s
not people in the streets. Now she has to maybe walk home in the dark. Now
she’s a little scared. Then there’s a rich guy in a fancy SUV asking if she
needs a ride. He and his friends will give her a ride. And why doesn’t she ask
one of her friends if she wants to come along too. That’s another way. They get
one girl, who will invite other girls. Not her friends. One time I had a girl
that I didn’t know ask me if I wanted to go out dancing that night. She wasn’t
even smiling. She looked scared and desperate and had a bruise on the side of
her face. When I said no, she looked like she was going to cry.
So I start to
learn what’s going on. Our friends, the other girls, start to talk, tell each
other what we heard. Help each other survive. Tell each other about when a girl
is found out in the desert, dead. Killed. And more than killed. Tortured.
Raped. And then one of the girls was someone I knew. Tatiana. She lived in our
building. One day she never came home. Nobody knew what happened to her. We
thought she just left. Some people do that, just leave and go home. But then
two weeks later we knew what happened to her. Two boys found her out in the
desert. It was on the news, but you know what? No police ever came to our
buildings to talk to us. No police ever came to our maquiladora. They didn’t
ask us anything. Only because her family came to Santa Teresa and asked did
they know anything.
And then my sister
got moved to night shift. I told her no, don’t do it, but she said it was ok,
she would always go with friends, and that it would be better for us to work
different shifts so that we weren’t crowding each other in the room all the
time. And I said ok, está bien, because you know? That sounded good. I was
tired of living in the building and tired of being with my sister all the time.
I was egoísta and said, está bien. And then after a week, just one week, she
didn’t come home. I knew, but I had to ask anyways. I found some of the girls
she was friends with, the ones she said she would always come home with. And
you know what they told me? That she got in the car with a man. She said it was
ok, she knew him. And then she never came home.
And so...And so I
had to be the one to call my mother and tell her. I had to be the one to listen
to my mother cry over the phone. I had to be the one to listen to my mother ask
why I didn’t take care of her. I had to be the one to listen to my mother get
angry with me, yell at me, for letting my sister get killed. It was my fault.
I never went back
to the maquiladora. I just never went back inside. But yes, I did go back once,
to look for the car. I waited outside for two days looking for a car that fit
the description of what my sister’s friends described. And then it appeared. It
was parked out front, down the street from the entrance, where they could watch
all the girls leaving. There were two men inside. I walked to it and pounded on
the window. The driver, he rolled down his window and I started yelling,
Where’s my sister! Where’s my sister!
And the man asked
me, Who’s your sister, and I said her name and without even thinking about it
he said, I don’t know her. Then the hijo puta asked me if I wanted to get in
the car so we could go look for her. And they laughed. So I kept yelling,
calling them names, insulting them.
Then the driver,
he pulled out a pistol and pointed it right at my face and called me a puta and
told me to shut up. The other guy kept laughing and I hated them both. The
driver said that my sister was a puta and that she got what she deserved and
that I was a puta and that I would get what I deserved. Then he told me he
would come find me some night and show me where my sister was. And he asked me
if anyone would care if he shot me right there in the street.
What could I do? I
was so angry, but I backed away. I thought if I turned around he would shoot me
in the back, so I backed away, down the sidewalk, and when they stopped looking
at me I turned around and started walking.
So what does a
girl do to earn enough money to pay a coyote if she doesn’t work at a
maquiladora? What does she do when there are thousands of other girls the same
age who are coming to Santa Teresa to do the same thing? Well, I’ll tell you.
She can’t work at a restaurant and even make enough to survive. Or a
supermercado. So, she can become a puta, just like that man said. They call us
putas and then make it so that’s all we can do if we don’t want to die. So I
become a dancer, because being a dancer is the least bad way of being a puta.
It’s not so bad.
You get used to it. You separate yourself from it. You separate yourself from
your body. You act they way you know you’ll get the most money. And men don’t
care. They don’t care if you are pretending. I don’t know if that’s because
they’re stupid or because that’s they way they really want girls to act. Which
is stupid also. So either way men are stupid. Or that’s how it is in Mexico.
In America men
must not be like that. Both of you are caballeros. That’s a joke. You are
caballeros, but you are also crazy. That’s ok, está bien. I’m crazy too.
So why did that
pendejo hate me so much? Well, because when I left the maquiladora, I just left.
I didn’t go back to my apartment. There wasn’t anything there anyway, just
clothes. I left. Vanished. Everyone probably thought I was another dead girl
they’d never see again. That’s what I wanted. I didn’t want to have anything to
do with that place or those people.
But there was
another reason. Before I started saving my money to pay a coyote, I started
saving my money to buy a gun. And dancing at El Torre gave me plenty of chances
to buy one. I never did some things, like drogas, neither sell them or do them,
or prostitue myself like most girls do. Never. But I did buy a gun. I made sure
it was from a guy who wasn’t a regular.
And then I went
back to the maquiladora and waited for that car. Three days waiting. Then it
was there. I walked by it to see who was inside, and it was the same two men. I
would never forget them. They didn’t even recognize me the first time I went
by. They just whistled and asked me if I needed a ride. I walked past them. I
was scared. I wasn’t sure if I would do it. Then I heard one of them laugh and
call me a puta. That did it. I walked down the street and back, and when I got
to the car I walked up, raised the gun and shot the driver twice. Then before
the other guy could get out his gun I shot him twice. Then I kept shooting until
the gun was empty and I left.
It was easy to
disappear. People saw me do it, but I just walked away and no one said
anything. I walked a couple blocks, took a bus into the city and got off after
a couple blocks and took another bus. No one knew where I was, or where I
lived. Just another girl. Just another puta. But I was a ghost, come back from
the dead for vengeance.
So now you know
why I want to go to America. Not because of my mother, not because it’s what
she wants, but for me. To leave. To leave Mexico forever and never come back
and all the mexican men can go to hell and die.
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