One Day I’ll Leave This Place
By Victoria Sanchez
I was born in 1975 in Harbor City, which is near Los Angeles. Both of my parents are from Mexico, and they met here when they were teenagers. In Mexico, my mom started working when she was five years old at a place where they make tortillas, so she never really got to be a kid. If she didn’t iron my uncles’ clothes right, they would literally throw her on the floor and kick her. All she knew was, if something didn’t go right, there were beatings. That’s the way my mom was raised, so that’s how she raised me and my five brothers.
When I was around seven years old, I was molested by my uncle. He’d been living with us for a while, and anything I wanted he would get for me, so I loved him. But one Christmas Eve, he climbed into my top bunk and forced me to do it. I didn’t know about sex then. I was so naive that I didn’t know what a virgin meant. All I knew was the Virgin Mary. I felt so ashamed, and I didn’t want to be around my uncle. I wanted to tell my mom, but I knew I wouldn’t be his favorite niece any more. Finally I just told her, and my uncle ended up leaving.
When I got to high school in 1990, I started rebelling and getting involved with gangs. At the time, my mom said, “One apple has gone bad, the rest are not going to spoil,” and she moved down to Mexico with my five younger brothers. My dad and I stayed so he could work and send money to them.
In ninth grade, I dropped out of school and I ended up meeting this guy who was in my cousins’ gang. I was sixteen, he was eighteen. He became my boyfriend and I ended up getting pregnant by him, but I had a miscarriage.
And then, in 1992, the incident that brought me here happened. I got involved in a murder. I don’t want to talk about what happened out of respect for the victim and her family. But I will say this: I was sixteen at the time. I personally did not use a firearm. I did not take a life. But my boyfriend did.
When it happened, my dad said, “You’re going to get killed yourself,” and he sent me to Guadalajara. I fell in love with the ranch life there. People are so different, so polite, and you don’t have to worry about going outside and being robbed.
Eventually I met a man. He played guitar in a band and he was very handsome. He was a very good man. We were in love, and then I got pregnant. I was eighteen at the time, and he was a little older. We lived in Guadalajara together, but when I was six-months pregnant, I said, “I’d better go back to the States and have the baby over there, just to make sure everything is okay,” and he agreed.
I went first, and my parents paid for a coyote to bring my boyfriend over to the States, and we got married in 1994. My husband worked construction with my dad, and I ended up getting a job at Price Club; I was one of those people who demonstrates the food at lunchtime. My son, Ethan, was only four months old when I got arrested in 1995. It was for the murder my old boyfriend had committed three years before.
This is an excerpt of “One Day I’ll Leave This Place”