A Mother With a Will as Strong as Her Love

Sylvia sat on her living room couch and wiped tears with the back of her hand, her two eldest daughters on either side. They had never heard the whole story of the torture their mother endured before risking a border crossing into California, so they hung on every word.

“They hit me with sticks and pieces of wood as big as that,” Sylvia said, pointing to a wooden column on a set of bookshelves.

“In some ways,” said daughter Maria, 21, “I think we’re still running.”

Before I go on, let me explain why I happened to be in her apartment.

I met Sylvia at 6 one morning on Vermont Avenue near 1st Street in Los Angeles. She was selling candy for one school benefit and rallying parents to support the building of another school. Her knitting poked out of her purse, because while volunteering at yet a third school, she would try to finish a blanket and sell it.

Sylvia was my guide as several hundred students boarded buses at Virgil Junior High to be shuttled across the city. It’s a mad daily scramble in Los Angeles, where schools are insanely overcrowded. Sylvia knows the routine because she has six kids and raises them on her own. The fathers all ran off like stray dogs.

There is, of course, the question of how many single parents with six children Los Angeles can accommodate before it begins to mirror the places immigrants are fleeing. So many families end up trapped in broken-down schools, surrounded by crime, working two or three jobs and getting nowhere.

And so I asked Sylvia, who came here nearly 20 years ago, if she thinks she did the right thing.

“Yes,” she had said on the street that morning. In the Mexican state of Hidalgo, there was no opportunity, no hope. In California, there’s a chance, at least.

Last week I went to her apartment to find out more. The sign out front promised luxurious living, and I parked in the lot under the building, where garbage overflowed from the dumpster. Graffiti was scratched into the elevator.

The landlords didn’t mind that she was an illegal immigrant when she moved in seven years ago, Sylvia said. They “signed some papers” for her, and gladly accept her money each month.

I asked if she was worried about being found out, and she seemed puzzled by the question. It’s not as if she’s in hiding, she said. Being undocumented in Los Angeles is so common, it doesn’t enter her mind.

Sylvia pushed through the front door of her $580-a-month home, and we were in the living room, where she and another child sleep. The five other kids cram into the one bedroom, and they all share a single bathroom.

One son worked on a computer as Sylvia sat me down, offered fresh-baked cupcakes, and breathed a deep and troubled sigh.

She was a nervous wreck, she admitted, because I had told her I planned to visit the Mexican town where she grew up, compare the schools to those in Los Angeles, and see how her family lives back home.

Please don’t go, she begged. All her relatives are loco, she said, trembling.

“She thinks they’ll find out where we are,” said 19-year-old daughter Celenia, “and try to kill us.”

Sylvia said her parents abandoned her as an infant. She was raised in rural Hidalgo by aunts and uncles who put her to work -- at the age of 4 -- on the family’s parched ranch. As a teenager, relatives beat her with sticks and fists when she resisted an arranged marriage to a cousin.

You’re the senorita of the family, they told her, and you’ll do as we say.

One day, Sylvia came across a stash of letters from Los Angeles, addressed to her aunt.

“When are you going to tell my children that I’m here?” one letter asked.

Sylvia’s hands trembled.

“That was when I knew my mother was alive,” she said. “They had told me she was dead.”

Sylvia asked why she had been lied to, and her aunt slapped her until she spit blood.

“I raised you,” said the aunt. “And you owe me.”

At 16, Sylvia fled to another town with a young man who later forced himself on her. The concept of rape did not exist in that culture, Sylvia said. But men either had their way, or they beat the living daylights out of you.

“When I told him I was pregnant, he said, ‘That’s your problem.’ ”

Sylvia decided to leave him when baby Maria was born.

“If you leave, I’ll kill the baby,” said Maria’s father. “Kneel before me. Now beg me to give you your daughter back.”

“I begged,” Sylvia said.

Then she took a small knife, lunged, and stabbed him in the stomach.

“It was a small wound,” Sylvia tells me as her daughters look on, riveted. “But he was a coward.”

Sylvia ran for her life with Maria in her arms, wandered from town to town, begged in the streets, and finally met up months later with a sweet-talking man who promised to take care of her.

He, too, raped her. When she threatened to leave, he bashed her head against the refrigerator, punched her and waved a machete at her.

Sylvia escaped with her life once more, only to find out that she was pregnant again, and that Maria was sick with a potentially deadly stomach disorder. A doctor made a connection with a convent in Los Angeles, and Sylvia was on her way to Tijuana for a border crossing she hoped would save Maria’s life.

“At 5 a.m. on Feb. 22, 1985,” Sylvia tells me as Maria and Celenia look on with a mix of amazement and pride, “I set out to cross the line.”

She was 7 1/2 months pregnant with Celenia, and she was cradling Maria, not quite 2. She toted all their belongings in a suitcase and a backpack. Sylvia says a guide who had been paid $350 to get them across the border refused to help with the bags, even as they climbed the hills east of Tijuana.

First she abandoned the suitcase. Then the backpack. All she had now was Maria and two diapers.

At 3 p.m., they arrived at the home of the guide’s relatives on U.S. soil. They changed clothes and were driven to East L.A., where they lived in a convent for several months while a doctor nursed Maria back to health.

She tracked down her mother, who still lives in East L.A., but the bitterness over the abandonment has kept them apart. And Sylvia has maintained her streak of being sweet-talked by no-good men who promise roses and then blow away like weeds.

“We don’t need them,” claimed Angela, another teenage daughter.

“She’s the mother figure,” said Maria, nodding toward her mother, “and Celenia and I are the father figures.”

Sylvia looked around the room and admitted this wasn’t the life she dreamed she would have in the United States. The three oldest girls all work to help pay the bills, and still, they barely get by each month.

But the two who made the trek across the border with her are now in community college, an accomplishment that makes Sylvia so proud, she dabs at tears again.

Maria wants to go to UCLA and be an engineer. Celenia wants to go to Boston University, study art history, and run a museum in London. Angela, a high school student who just won a poetry contest, wants to be a writer.

I saw four plaques on the wall over a kitchen alcove and assumed they were academic honors for the kids. With a closer look, I realized they were all commendations for Sylvia.

“There’s lots more,” Celenia said, and Sylvia’s brood began pulling trophies, certificates and plaques off shelves and out of drawers and cupboards. There were at least 20.

Congressmen, councilmen and school district officials have all honored Sylvia, an illegal immigrant, for good citizenship. She’s been cited for volunteering at schools, tutoring, organizing parents, leading committees, providing computer training.

“She tells us she’s just making connections so she can secure our future,” Celenia said.

“She wants us to go off on our own,” Angela added, “and be independent.”

Sylvia is an inspiration, illegal crossing and all. Her story tells you there is no way to stop people from trying to carve out better lives for their children. But it also illustrates the harsh limits of a stressed-out region that has too many people and too few Sylvias.

Maria wished they could figure out how to nominate Sylvia for mother of the year.

“In Los Angeles?” I asked.

“No,” Maria said, “in the United States.”

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.