I met Ana Luisa, 21, for our first interview, at the Bethesda Outreach Center. My guide, and soon-to-be interpreter, Stefanie Murray, peeked around the corner into a classroom full of mostly Hispanic women of all ages and said,“Ana Luisa is still teaching her craft class. She should finish pretty soon.”
Twice a month on Thursdays, the outreach center holds a clothing outreach, Bible studies, and some classes to teach mothers how to make cheap recipes and activities for their homes. Sort of like a mini-home economics for women who never had the benefit.
While I waited, I told Rita Wilkinson, an assistant at the outreach center, why I was there. She fondly replied,
“You’re interviewing Ana Luisa? She’s out here all the time. Yesterday she cleaned the bathrooms after she helped out in the nursery. She’s beautiful. Strikingly. You’ll do a double-take when you see her.”
As Rita hustled back and forth between entertaining me and her normal duties, I thought it was strange that she said Ana Luisa helps out there. I was expecting to speak with someone who came out there for help. About that time the class let out, and over 70 women began filing through the warehouse door to find new clothes. I wondered if I ought to grab one of them for the interview instead.
But Stefanie Murray, who’s a fast walker and even faster talker, came cruising around the corner with Ana Luisa in tow. Rita was right. Ana Luisa, or Ana as many of the women refer to her, was dressed nicely in a bright green jacket, jeans and white athletic shoes, and her jet-black hair was pulled in a tight ponytail. She has large empathetic eyes which, as I would later find out, she has passed on to her four-year old daughter.
All three of us sat down in an office and introduced ourselves. Ana reclined in a large chair, and she watched Stefanie and me talk with the kind of posture a teenage girl has when she’s watching t.v. at a friend’s house. She twisted her gold wedding band around her finger while my questions were translated, and she never once sat forward in her chair. She relied on Stefanie to interact with me.
She originally came to Bethesda in September 2006, because her husband, who repairs appliances, was low on work, and her friend would bring her food from the center occasionally. Eventually, she cut out the middleman, and started coming on her own.
However, throughout the interview it comes across that she rarely takes aid anymore. Stefanie even says that they try to get her to take diapers home, for her 13-month old son, but Ana usually replies that she has already bought diapers.
“She’s very independent,” Stefanie says. “She makes $50 a week at the flea-market, and she has to use that to buy groceries, clothes, diapers, pretty much everything for the house.”
I point out that Ana is at the outreach center several days a week cleaning for free and working in the nursery, and if she isn’t coming for aid, then it doesn’t make sense for her to continue coming to the center.
She said, “I’m alone in Amarillo. They are my family.”
From a few conversations I had with people around the center, I gathered that they all considered her family. Everybody who knew Ana praised how hard she worked. And everyone talked adoringly about her children who were playing in the nursery. Her daughter is bilingual, and is the only person in her household who speaks English. Her son is legally a United States citizen because he was born here in Amarillo. When I was leaving, her kids came out of the nursery, and several of the older women helped the little ones into their coats before they went home.
I ask about her relationship with her husband, and I strike a chord.
“It’s a challenge. Right now it’s going well, but off and on, it’s difficult.” Stefanie interjects that Ana gets a lot of marriage counseling at the center.
They met when she was 16, in Chihuahua, Mexico. He was very sweet when they began dating, but Ana is quick to include that she thinks that she was a just trophy to him and his friends. They were kids. The first time they were together she became pregnant. And they married.
They actually lived very well in Mexico. Both of them had full-time jobs at a factory, and she had been accepted to a nursing school. They lived in a nice house, and he bought everything they needed like new furniture and groceries.
But one day while she was at work, his parents came to visit. They had already moved to Amarillo because a relative had told them that there was plenty of work for an appliance repairman. They came back to Chihuahua to celebrate his birthday, and they convinced him to move to Amarillo. When she got home, he told her to pack everything because they were moving. Ana cried because she loved Mexico, but he said that if she didn’t come with him, then she and their daughter would never see him again. So they got work permits and followed her in-laws here.
She called her mom from the States to let her know, for the first time, that she had moved. And now she hasn’t seen her mom, nor her sisters, in three years.
Ana Luisa wipes a tear away from her eye before it runs down her cheek, and we all three sit in silence for a moment.
Her mother sold their house, and all of their things, and sent the money to Amarillo. I ask if things have gotten better or worse since they got here.
She answers, “Peor.” Worse.
***
Her husband works at an appliance repair shop on Amarillo Boulevard, a few blocks from their house. He is able to pay for rent, and their car payment, but she says that she is responsible for the rest with the $50 a week she earns at the flea market. I don’t ask how much their rent and car payment are, but I sense that there is something more that she hasn’t told me.
“He makes a good living, it just goes on other things.”
“What else does he spend the money on?” I recognize the words cantina and cerveza in her response before Stefanie has a chance to translate because I saw them airbrushed on several brightly colored, but dilapidating buildings all along the Boulevard.
Stefanie translates, “What he does in his spare time: the bar, drugs, alcohol. And those bars don’t kick you out. They’re pool halls.”
Later on, Stefanie just plain tells me, without a prompt from Ana, that the husband has a problem with drugs and alcohol.
I ask how long it’s been going on, and she says since he was 16 when they were still in Mexico, and that he picked it up from his father. Stefanie explains that especially in the Hispanic culture, if a father behaves a certain way, then the son automatically gets permission to behave that way.
“If mom and dad don’t say anything, then the wife probably shouldn’t say anything.”
I ask Ana if she has seen any difference in his behavior since she began coming to Bethesda. And she has, but it’s an interesting answer. Her mother-in-law began coming to Bethesda with her, and before long she started seeing what her own husband, and what her son were doing was wrong.
“Now my mother-in-law talks to my husband. Last week, she pulled him aside and told him, ‘You think she’s alone because she’s here [Amarillo], but she’s not. Bethesda has stepped up, and they will help her take care of her kids.’ It really weighed on him. He began thinking. Usually he’ll go out on Sundays while I stay home with the kids. But all day Sunday he stayed with me. We went to the park and did family stuff.”
Stefanie adds, “Anytime something happens here, he’ll go through a string where he’ll stay with her. He won’t go out to the bar, won’t do anything, and he tells her he wants to change. She told me yesterday that when he’s not doing it, he doesn’t want to do it, but of course it’s an addiction that comes back. Especially when dad’s doing it.”
***
I begin to understand why the husband relapses as I drive to their house for a follow-up interview. There are at least ten cantinas around the area that he lives. Everyone generally stays in the area of their home when they socialize, especially if they have limited means of transportation. Add to that the fact that he only speaks Spanish, and that this small area of town with the competing cantinas is the only area that caters to Spanish speaking people. He lives in a very isolated sphere in Amarillo. Ana has gotten lucky, and found a group of Spanish-speaking women with whom she can socialize, and a safe place she can take her kids in Bethesda, but his world consists of work with his father who is using, and anybody else that enters that sphere. The circumstances seem a bit helpless, and I have a bit of a frustrated moment as I pull up to the address they gave me.
I’m promptly relieved of my contemplation as a ferocious terrier mutt meets me on the front porch. His orange and white hackles bristle as he strains at the rope that is tied to his doghouse on the porch. He sounds the alarm incessantly in little high-pitched barks. Yip! Yip! I cautiously reach from beyond his restraint, knock on the door, and wait. The dog continues to bark. Yip! Yip!
The house seemed bigger than what I had imagined. Ana had said that she, her husband, and their two children lived in a one-bedroom house. The house I now stood before was much larger than a one-bedroom.
But this was the address I had been given. It said so in little metal numbers right in front of my face.
Yip! Yip! When the door finally opened I did not recognize the girl looking at me, and by the look on her face, she did not recognize me.
“Is Ana Luisa here?”
“¿Uh?” The girl turned and called her abuela. The woman came from another room and yelled at the dog,
“¡Silencio!”
The dog obeyed, and went back into his house.
“I’m looking for Ana Luisa.”
She pointed towards her driveway, and hooked her arm to the left, pointing at the back of the house.
“Aqui, aqui.”
“Um, gracias.”
I stepped around the side of the house, and hidden at the back of the driveway behind a few cars was a tiny white house. This seemed more like the description I had received.
Ana met me at the door with Rosinda Hoehnes, another interpreter and volunteer from Bethesda. When you walk into the house there’s a bedroom. You are literally standing in their children’s bedroom. There’s a crib to the right, and a very small and neatly made bed in the far right corner. The room is painted a bright purple, and there are stuffed animals in little groups. There’s a tiny television above the crib with a shelf of children’s movies. High on the far wall is a shelf with framed pictures of Ana’s family. She shows me her mother and three sisters. The middle sister just had her quinceañera in February, and her family is supposed to be sending pictures of it soon. The youngest sister, who is ten, is posing in a white Cinderella dress that her mother made her. They sent that dress to Ana for her daughter’s fourth birthday, and she took it in so it would fit her. I see a picture in a yellow, fabric covered frame, and could swear it was Ana when she was little. She says no, it’s her daughter, in pigtails. They have the same empathetic eyes. I don’t see any pictures of her husband’s family.
The next room is she and her husband’s bedroom. There is no door between the two rooms, just some Mexican beads that are pulled to one side of the broad doorframe. This room opens directly into la cocina, again with no door. The bathroom is in their bedroom. It has a door.
Rosinda and I sit down at the kitchen table while Ana puts her son in a high chair, and gives him a bottle. He’ll hold your gaze for a long time, like children his age do, and he’ll get a big kick out of it. He’s very well behaved. Her daughter, she tells me, is at school. The kitchen is furnished with a refrigerator and a gas range. Above the kitchen table hanging on the wall is a painted mirror with the Ten Commandments written in English, although no one in her household can read them.
Ana joins us at the table, and tells me a story about her daughter. She had just had surgery removing a lump from her neck. The doctors had worried that it might be cancerous, so they removed it and performed two biopsies. But the volunteers at Bethesda had prayed over her daughter several times, and the lump was benign. She said the doctors considered it a mystery.Rosinda adds that many people at the outreach center had pitched in and raised almost $2,000 for the surgery.
There’s no doubt that her husband took notice of this. It reminds me of something Stefanie Murray told me before I left the previous interview.
“She’s been a light for her family coming here to church. She calls it church. This is church to her. And the example that she brings to the family now, it’s amazing how everybody can be in the wrong, but you can bring light and it begins motivating. That’s what’s helped her husband [recently]. Just seeing what church has done for her, and he’s starting to be challenged to grow in that.”
* Photos by Joseph Elliott
