Unruly Teens Packed Off to Mexico : Families: Immigrant parents are sending youths away to get them in touch with traditional values and away from gangs.

Three years ago, Esther De La Cruz went to school to check up on her sixth-grade daughter Maria’s grades. The East Los Angeles mother found that the girl had not been in school for a week.

“I beat her with a hose real bad,” De La Cruz said.

The next three years became a tug of war between the mother and the streets. De La Cruz, fearing her daughter might end up pregnant, in juvenile detention or dead, tried desperately to pull the girl home. But Maria, who had been flirting with drugs, sex and gangs since age 11, would not be moved.

So last December, De La Cruz and her husband dragged 15-year-old Maria to the airport and shoved her onto a plane to their native Mexico. It would be seven months before she came back.

Increasingly, desperate and fearful Latin American immigrant parents are sending their teenage children home for months or years to separate them from Los Angeles’ violent environment, social workers, parents and police say.

These parents are gambling on the “small town” atmosphere of most Latin American communities, in which criminal and sexually active teens are viewed as outcasts, while education, hard work and sexual abstinence before marriage are encouraged, said Ramon Salcido, a USC social work professor who has studied street gangs in Los Angeles.

“There’s full family control of the child,” Salcido said. “Parents want their children to be normalized into these traditions.”

Cheryl Maxon, a USC social science researcher, said the immigrant parents are mirroring an older American tradition in which urban parents send troubled teens to live with relatives in slower, smaller U.S. cities.

Immigrant parents say Latin America offers more rigid school discipline and law enforcement, and encourages stiff corporal punishment--a welcome contrast, some say, to America’s softer legal and social systems.

To Esther De La Cruz, a homemaker, and her husband, Victor, who works as a machine operator in a clothing factory, the differences were obvious, even though they had lived in Los Angeles for 20 years.

Esther is still bothered by the fact that when school officials here saw the bruises from the beating she had given Maria, they warned her that she could go to prison.

“If they send me to jail for disciplining my daughter, is the government going to take care of her?” she asked.

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It galled her when Maria began to threaten to call 911 to avoid physical punishment, while De La Cruz was required to enroll in parenting classes to avoid criminal charges for beating the girl.

When she sent Maria to live for seven months with an aunt in Guadalajara, De La Cruz told the aunt to beat Maria if necessary. She was confident that authorities in Mexico would give parents far more leeway.

Maria, afraid her aunt would hit her, did not misbehave. She said she found out that “in Mexico, that’s your child and no one else’s business. The police don’t care.”

In Los Angeles, De La Cruz had wanted to make her daughter get a full-time job after school to keep her off the streets. That was something else American law did not allow children to do.

In Mexico, however, Maria worked at a clothing store seven days a week, full-time on weekdays and part-time on weekends. Her day started at 6 a.m. She had to help clean the large house, wash, cook and clear dog droppings from the yard before heading to her job.

“Here, Maria had everything,” and no reason to change her behavior, her mother said. “She knew I would always be there for her.”

In June, De La Cruz showed up in Mexico and asked her daughter if she was ready to come home. She was.

Today, Maria has replaced gang parties with the LAPD Explorer Academy. A ninth-grader, she has made finishing high school her highest priority. She says she wants to be a nurse or a probation officer.

“I wanted to try the life of a gangster, but what did I learn out of it?” she said. “Nothing, except how to steal. But how is that going to help me when I have a family? It wasn’t worth it.”

She said seeing the few comforts children her age have in Mexico made her appreciate what she had in her parents’ modest home in the Boyle Heights section of East Los Angeles. In the northeast Los Angeles community of El Sereno, another mother took even more drastic action.

The mother, asking that she not be identified because of her shame, said her unruly 14-year-old daughter, a private school student, refused to stop dating a gang member. The mother sent her back to the Mexican state of Guerrero to live with an uncle for six weeks. But when the girl returned, she resumed hanging out with the gang.

So four months ago, the parents sent the girl back to her uncle’s home--this time vowing to make her stay four years, until she turns 18.

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The mother said she was upset that Los Angeles police did not deal harshly enough with her daughter when the girl ran away from home; to the mother’s dismay, officers said the girl was not eligible for Juvenile Hall.

Mexico, she said, was another story. The girl, angry at her parents, physically attacked them and was put in jail for three days by Mexican police, until the parents took her out.

“That would never happen here,” the mother said.

From her uncle’s house, the girl calls frequently and promises to leave the gangs if she’s allowed back home. But the mother says she’ll leave her there--not only because the girl is away from gangs, but also because she believes schools in Mexico offer a better education as well as more stringent discipline. Students must wear uniforms and may not wear makeup.

If the De La Cruz family needs a standard to measure the change in Maria, it can use her pants size.

In the last month of her daughter’s sixth-grade year, Esther De La Cruz noticed that Maria, a petite schoolgirl, was beginning to wear size 36 pants, an equally oversized white T-shirt and heavy makeup: gang clothes.

“I always wanted to be like a gangster,” Maria said. “I thought I’d be happening.”

Esther tightened the reins on her daughter, rarely allowing her to go out. Maria figured that since she couldn’t have any fun after school, she would have it during school--just not in math or English class.

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She, along with male and female gang members, would go to “ditch parties,” she said, where 100 people packed a house. Most of the party-goers, between the ages of 11 and 20, would be in the living room drinking and doing drugs.

In the seventh and eighth grades her pants size increased from 36 to 40, to 46, eventually reaching 60, though she was no heavier.

Once when Maria ran away, her mother got a lead from a friend’s mother on where to look. It was one of those houses where ditchers do drugs, Esther said. “My daughter was there. I knew it.”

She dragged a detective to the house and Maria was found hiding in the shower with two other girls.

Late last year she ran away for the last time.

For 15 days, De La Cruz investigated where her daughter could be. When the parents found her, they took her back to the detective’s office, where Maria sat in a room alone while her mother arranged for plane tickets to Mexico. The mother had already made arrangements with her sister in Mexico to send Maria there when she was found.

“I thought I’d never see my boyfriend again,” Maria said.

She was right. He was killed soon after she left.

In June, after seven months of banishment, her mother showed up to bring her home.

Driving back, “I was pinching myself in San Diego,” she said.

Today, wearing size 29 pants instead of size 60, Maria smiles.

“Now that I dress different, even college guys talk to me,” she said.