Mothers of the Banished

Lights have been sleepless for as long as Liliana Gonzalez can remember. She worries. Always, she worries about Pedro.

Gonzalez was 19 when her son was born, and ever since his toddlerhood, her sleep has been troubled. It wasn’t just the knee scrapes, the falls from trees that keep all mothers of adventuresome sons up at night. She worried how a little boy would survive the floggings from belts and clubs that would continue until his father’s arm got tired. And later, how a 13-year-old, with $50 in his pocket, would survive the journey from their Central American mountain village to Los Angeles, where he would look for her.

Pedro’s arrival here did not end the sleepless nights of Liliana Gonzalez. As she lay awake, listening to gunshots outside her South-Central duplex, she was terrified that one of the bullets would find him. Each time he walked into the bullet-laced darkness, looking for homeboys from the notorious 18th Street gang, she feared he would never return.

“Because I was taking care of other people’s children, I could not be with my own,” Gonzalez explains, as the tears begin. “I did not have the chance to be with him the way I would have liked.”

Now Gonzalez is 46, and she knows where her son is at all times. But her nights are still wide awake with worry. Her son has been reclaimed by a past that he barely remembers.

Pedro is locked away in Mariona Prison, the biggest of the overcrowded penitentiaries in El Salvador’s overcrowded corrections system, where gang fights routinely become deadly riots. And even when he’s done his 12-year sentence for robbing someone on a Salvadoran street, he will not be coming home to South-Central Los Angeles.

Pedro is a criminal deportee from the United States, one of a growing number of Salvadoran citizens convicted of crimes here and sent home to a poor country that is still recovering from more than a decade of civil war. The U.S. justice system has given up on these repeat offenders, whose crimes range from selling drugs to attempted murder. After their umpteenth conviction, usually while they are in prison for their most recent crime, they are sentenced by an immigration judge to the ancient Greek penalty of banishment.

They are flown back to Central America and set free on one condition: They may never return to the United States.

Over the past six years, 9,132 convicts have been deported to El Salvador--more than have been sent to Colombia, a country nearly seven times as large--and more than a hundred still arrive in El Salvador each month. Some of them left home as babies or toddlers; they speak Spanish only haltingly. Most have left families behind in the United States, many in Southern California, home to more Salvadorans than any other region of the U.S. The burden on those families is crushing. And heartbreaking.

Liliana Gonzalez earns $130 a week as a baby-sitter. But every month, after she parcels out money for rent and electricity and water, she sets aside $50 or $60 to send to Pedro to supplement his prison rations.

“Whatever he has done, he is still my son,” says Gonzalez. “I always think about him. . . . People think you look happy, but you are not. At Christmas, Mother’s Day and birthdays, you feel alone and overwhelmed by problems.”

*

Thousands of women struggle every day in southern California, cleaning houses and offices or caring for other people’s children, trying to save enough money to support young men--and some not so young--who got lost in a strange culture, where parental authority has been replaced by the camaraderie of gangs. They’d grown from smiling children into illustrated men, whose tattoos of lost loves and fallen comrades, designed by California’s finest prison artists, foretold a cursed future.

Family members are torn between shame and grief for a child who got caught up in drugs and gangs and is now thousands of miles away. The loss is sometimes impossible to express--how to explain suffering when you barely speak enough English to take instructions from employers, or follow directions to the house of a new client?

Year after year, they desperately search for remedies in situations where only a mother could still find hope.

Some, like Vilma Oliva and Francisco Martinez, raised seven children to be hard-working and respectable, only to see their youngest evolve into a battle-scarred gang veteran, eventually deported.

“They all came here as little children and he is the only one that turned out like this,” Oliva says of 26-year-old Francisco Jr. “All the others are American citizens, and he would be, too, if he had just behaved.”

Starting at age 11, the boy called Paquito by his family rose at dawn to work before school with a brother at a fire extinguisher company. On paydays, he took his nieces and nephews to the toy store. A year after he was deported, they still ask, “Where is Uncle Paquito?”

Ashamed, Martinez and Oliva have told neither their grandchildren nor Francisco Jr.’s former boss that he has been kicked out of the United States and ordered not to return. The loving Uncle Paquito bears little resemblance to the hard-muscled young man called Boxer by gang members in Apopa, El Salvador, a community of street vendors and jobless day laborers on the outskirts of San Salvador. Shirtless in the tropical heat, his body is a mosaic of tattoos and scars: EIGHT STREET in gothic letters across his chest, roses twining up one arm, a bullet scar at his waist and the track of an eight-inch incision up the middle of his abdomen.

“I miss everything about back there,” he says in the Spanglish slang of East L.A. Mostly he misses his homies, so different from the Salvadoran gang members who hang out under a mango tree near the soccer field, devising schemes to raise money for weekend parties. “There we sell drugs and charge rent to others who sell drugs,” he brags. “It’s like the Mafia.”

From the time he turned 10, Francisco was fascinated by the White Fence clique, the neighborhood gang that gathered at the liquor store across the street from his family’s apartment in Boyle Heights. “I began hanging out with them when I was 13,” he recalls. “When I started using baggy pants, my dad would burn them.”

His parents could not understand how their loving son could turn into a drug-using thief when he stepped out the front door.

Francisco was 13 when he was arrested for the first time and sent to the California Youth Authority, where he would spend much of his adolescence. As an adult, he toured California’s prison system on various drug and robbery convictions. Finally, he nearly killed a victim in a robbery attempt. Next stop: El Salvador.

During his first year, Francisco has lived quietly in the house that his late grandfather built, passing the time listening to music. Unable to find work, he relies for food and clothes on an account that his parents have set up at the corner store.

“Last month, it was $167,” says his father, a hotel maintenance man. “He can get anything except money and alcohol.” Martinez and Oliva are convinced that their son would use cash to buy drugs and, despite their precautions, he still finds ways to get beer.

While his parents pay the bill at the store faithfully and talk about visiting, they insist that Francisco not be given their new telephone number or address. “It just wouldn’t be a good idea,” Oliva says nervously. Their first reaction when a stranger calls to ask about him: “What has he done now?”

“I’ve got to keep cool,” Francisco says. “Maybe I can get a pardon. . . . We’ll see what my mother says.”

His mother shakes her head of thick, gray-streaked hair as his sister Patricia, a paralegal, answers slowly, “That would be very difficult.”

“He does not want to understand,” says Oliva. “When they won’t listen to advice and instead listen to their friends, that is not going to bring them a good future.”

*

Over the rap beat of drugs and gangs, parental advice seems to be heard only at crucial moments: deportation in Martinez’s case, and a long jail term in that of Pedro Amaya, Gonzalez’s son. Now Amaya visits Salvadoran schools as a prisoner, telling his story and offering advice--advice he ignored--about staying out of gangs.

He had been back in his native country for two months when he was arrested for stealing a gold chain from a passerby. “I didn’t think they would give me a whole lot of years for that,” he recalls in an interview at Mariona Prison, where he is halfway through his 12-year sentence.

In six years, Amaya has been transferred six times because of trouble with other inmates, or gang riots. Wherever he is, his elderly grandmother arrives every month with money that his mother, somehow, saves.

Her husband, from whom she is separated, makes the rounds of public defenders and judges, trying to get Amaya’s sentence reduced. “He’s our flesh and blood,” says Mari Amaya, whose last name Pedro shares because of a long-ago bureaucratic mix-up. “However he is, we have to support him.”

His family is convinced that the young man with the curly hair and ready smile became a troublemaker for good reason. “Pedro’s father does not love him,” says Liliana Gonzalez. “He beat him and abused him with words.”

She aches with guilt over her marriage to a man who abused her and both their sons--especially Pedro--from the time they could walk. “I was very much in love with him. My love for that man was stronger than my love for my son.”

Finally, in 1985, after 12 years of daily beatings, she left the boys with their grandfather and fled the violence of her marriage and her warring country for Los Angeles. Her sister was married to an American and needed a baby-sitter.

“I wanted them to have a better life, but it didn’t turn out that way...I regret what I did, but I could not stay there, either.”

Her sons took the first $50 she sent home and set off to find her. They were separated in Mexico. Pedro, then 13, got to Los Angeles in two months. By the time his 10-year-old brother, Daniel, arrived four months later, Pedro already was in the custody of the California Youth Authority.

“I could do nothing,” says Gonzalez. “I can’t speak English and I had no money for a lawyer.”

Sometimes there was no money for food. The boys “felt they were better off in the street,” Gonzalez says. Desperate to earn more, she took a factory job. But the work was erratic. Then she lost her little finger and the tip of her ring finger in an accident. So she returned to baby-sitting.

“Even though this is very little money, it is secure and I felt sorry for my sister. She has no one else to help her. Besides, I love the children a lot.”

Pedro does not blame his mother for his life behind bars. He is emphatic: “Drugs did all this to me. Crack traps everyone.” He was a marijuana user when he arrived in Los Angeles and soon found friends who would rob with him for drug money. That was when he was arrested the first time. Eventually, he became a member of the 18th Street gang. Daniel joined soon afterward.

At first, crack was a way to make money. Then Pedro “got curious.” Soon he was stealing to buy crack.

During his various drug and robbery sentences, he learned printing, woodcarving and leather work. He acquired tattoos of a spider web, nude women, the word Guanaco (a slang term for Salvadorans) and XVIII in two-inch Roman numerals, evidence of his growing involvement with the 18th Street gang. He also threatened witnesses against other gang members and, between prison terms, was arrested for attempted murder.

Liliana Gonzalez visited him in prison only once. There was no car and no rides. Gonzalez has not seen her son for eight years.

Pedro has become the family’s bad example, the threat of what could happen. In fact, while he was still in prison in the United States, his aunt decreed her own deportation order for his 13-year-old cousin, Cristian Rivas, who was being pressured to join gangs in his Los Angeles neighborhood. It was 1992; a peace agreement had ended the civil war, and rural El Salvador seemed a safer place than South-Central for a teenage boy.

“From the time I was in fourth or fifth grade, my friends spent more time on the street than in school,” recalls Rivas, now 21 with dual U.S.-Salvadoran citizenship. He tried transferring to another school to get away from gang influence, but gangs were everywhere. “I did not even have a friend to go to the movies with,” he says.

After gang members assaulted him at a bus stop, the family decided that his grandmother, Mari Amaya, who had been living in Los Angeles, would move back to Cojutepeque with him.

“If my mother had not sent me here, I do not know what would have happened,” he says, seated in the living room behind his grandmother’s tiny store in the village. “In school, friends have more influence.”

Liliana Gonzalez notes that “Pedro’s experience has had a big impact on Daniel.” Now 24, the younger brother who followed Pedro into gangs started a construction job in Los Angeles in June and comes home too tired to go out and get into trouble.

Gonzalez’s hope is that the latest amnesty for Salvadorans will allow her to obtain legal U.S. residency so that she can visit her parents and Pedro and still return to the United States. “I wish I had enough money to put the family back together,” she says. “I see that as something far off, but I do not lose hope.”

*

For Silvia Rodriguez, even such distant hopes seem futile. The longtime Pacoima resident, with the close-cropped salt-and-pepper curls of a woman who would rather play with her grandchildren than fuss with styling brushes and hair spray, has been disappointed so many times by her son, Salvador.

“He was always in jail. When he was a prisoner, he would always say, ‘I’m going to straighten up.’ Then, ‘When my children are born, I will straighten out.’ ”

He made that promise the last time three years ago, when his daughter, Silvet, was born while he was in Mariona Prison. Years before, he had been deported from the United States after a bungled bank robbery attempt in Lennox.

Rodriguez, a diabetic with arthritis who cleans houses when she is well enough, went to El Salvador shortly after her son arrived there nine years ago to furnish the old family home in the poor Amatepec neighborhood of San Salvador with a refrigerator, a dinette set and other things he would need.

Even though he had been in jail constantly as a teenager, the shock of returning to the country he had left at 13 seemed to impress him. “When I came back, I did not want to get involved in gangs,” says Salvador, squatting on a corner in downtown San Salvador, where he spends his time.

Rodriguez sent handkerchiefs, shampoo, toothbrushes any time a relative traveled from Los Angeles. She knew that with his tattoos and criminal record, he could not get a job in El Salvador.

At first, she visited twice a year--usually on his birthday in July and on Christmas--and found the supply boxes partially used. Then she began to notice that the boxes were gone. She found out that he was selling the supplies and gifts to buy drugs. “Once I sent him a watch with my grandson and, right there, where my grandson gave him the gift, he sold it.”

Soon after, while he was in prison for robbery, Salvador got another chance. Silvet’s mother, Claudia Reyes, spoke with him about an idea that she and other gang members had for an organization to help homeboys and girls overcome their addictions, learn trades and get jobs. Salvador became a founder of Homies Unidos.

After he was released, he was too busy helping to build the new organization to think about drugs. Other members were so impressed with his enthusiasm that they asked him to go out and recruit gang members for Homies Unidos projects.

But “when he began working with the active gang members, where there were drugs, he could not resist the temptation,” says Reyes, who has remained drug-free. “He is not even close to the person he was.”

Through her contacts with Homies Unidos, she put Salvador into a drug-rehabilitation program, but he could not overcome his crack addiction. Emaciated, with broken nails and stringy hair, he now lives on the streets.

“I have lost all hope for him,” says Rodriguez, who sends her gifts for Silvet directly to Reyes. “It’s been a long time. He is nearly 35. The day he dies, I am going to give thanks to God that his suffering has ended.”