San Diego Reader

Consuelo isn’t her real name.

Where I used to live, the neighbors on one side lived in a small two bedroom, the front half of a duplex, then moved to the three bedroom house on the other side. A sister and her husband had one room, her younger sister and her husband had another room, and the children had the third bedroom. The husbands were brothers. The sisters came from a family of thirteen children, originally from Nayarit. All except one of the thirteen children had come from Nayarit to live and work in San Diego. The sister I spoke to most often was the eldest sister in the house next door, but she wasn’t the eldest in the family. She had told me once that they had land down in Mexico where the family grew peanuts. She said they couldn’t live on what they made, and there were no jobs. So they came here. She said most of the young people from her village were here in San Diego.

All of the family worked somewhere or another, in restaurants, in houses, in shops. One of the younger sisters, Consuelo, worked in a stall, can’t remember if it was clothing or jewelry, in the Farmer’s Market on 21st and Imperial. She met her future husband there. He was originally from El Salvador; his sister runs a successful restaurant in the community. Consuelo married and had a child, a son. I found this out through the sister who lived next door to me. Sometimes when the family had problems, they would ask me for help. The sister told me that Consuelo’s husband was abusive and they didn’t know what to do. I said she could go down to the Family Court and file for divorce, the legal clinic there would help her with the paperwork. I told the sister I would take her whenever she was ready to go.

One day the eldest sister from next door came over to my house knocking on my door. She had her cordless phone in her hand. She said Consuelo was on the phone. I took the phone. Consuelo was hysterical. Her husband had come and threatened to shoot the whole family and had taken the boy. I called the police and they found the husband with some relatives, but no boy. The police didn’t take the husband, and said there was nothing they could do about the boy. After two days of the family searching and tracking the man and his family, they finally located the boy, and got him back.

I took Consuelo down to the court to get her paperwork started. As part of this process, she had to write a Declaration, think it may have been regarding the issue of custody and visitation. I was doing all the paperwork, so I asked her to tell me all of the incidents of violence involving herself and her husband that she could remember. There were several. Slapping was the first. Knocking her into a wall. Hitting her with a door. Beatings that kept getting worse. Threats. Where she drew the line was when he beat their son. The rest of the family had stepped in at that point, and he had threatened them as well. They all lived in fear of his violence.

So I did the paperwork and we brought it in and got a court date. I advised her to bring all the family she could, and on the day of the hearing, the courtroom was packed. The husband was there, with a lawyer. I sat with the sister at the table and translated for her; she answered the judge’s questions. The judge ruled in her favor. Granted the divorce, full custody of the child, limited supervised visitation, spousal and child support. When we were doing her paperwork, Consuelo had told me her husband had stolen her wallet with all her ID in it. At the time, her husband had been helping her emigrate, and she had a green card and California driver’s license, as I recall; with the divorce, she was no longer eligible for citizenship.

Some time later I heard from someone in the family, think it was the oldest sister, that Consuelo’s husband had sweet-talked her into returning to their home. The night she returned, he had sex with her, then savagely beat her, then threw her out in the street.

I remember once talking to the eldest sister from next door, asking her if she would ever return home to Nayarit. She said No. “Our lives are here now. And our children’s lives, especially. There is nothing in Mexico.”

(Next week: David)

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