By Lizzie Presser
A group of Latina women across the country have been working in secret, turning their homes into shelters for abused immigrant women.
Valentina* drove two hours up the California coast to the flat farming town of Santa Maria and stopped outside a white motor home. “Silvia,” she sang, tilting her head out the car window on a recent afternoon. With broad shoulders and dyed-blond hair framing her soft face, Valentina is striking even without her signature crystal-encrusted shoes. Silvia looked up from the cactus she was planting and walked to the car. She dangled her crimson fingernails for Valentina to admire. Valentina, who is 60, had been encouraging her to indulge in little luxuries, like walks on the beach or manicures, and she smiled at the sight of Silvia’s hands. Like Valentina, Silvia is from Mexico, and she was trying to leave her partner.
Since the mid-’90s, Valentina had assisted hundreds of Latina women who were beaten at home, harassed at work, assaulted. She had a particular affinity for Silvia, whom she’d met a few years earlier. Silvia was reserved, a truck driver, a mother of five who often looked defeated, with deep lines around big brown eyes, her shoulders folded in. She had come to the United States in 1985 as a teenager to join her father, and she’d been with her partner for nearly 30 years.
The two women drove to a bakery at a nearby mall, where they sat under fluorescent lights discussing Silvia’s options once again. Valentina was the first person Silvia had told about her problems at home. She didn’t want to call the police or go to a shelter. She wasn’t ready for the courts. Her partner had one domestic-violence report already, and if she accused him now, he’d likely be picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “If he were deported because of me, because of my situation, I think I’d lose my kids completely,” she started to ramble. She still had two children in the house, and she worried their father would take them to Mexico. “But if you had an emergency,” Valentina asked, “you’d call me, right?”
*With the exception of Mily Treviño-Sauceda, all names have been changed.
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