"He Has Me Tied with the Blessed and Damned Papers": Undocumented-Immigrant Battered Women in Phoenix, Arizona

Human Organization, Summer 2004 by Salcido, Olivia, Adelman, Madelaine

In addition to physical violence or hiding her mail, Arnulfo can withdraw the LPR petition at any point. He has used his citizenship to control and contain her-in this way, immigration policy serves as a convenient battering strategy.

Crossing the Border Between Violence and Illegality

Sonia crossed the border with her two Mexican-born daughters in 1993. The girls' father had died in Mexico and Sonia faced financial hardships as a young widow. She married Sebastian, another man from her hometown, whom she had known since childhood: both families got along well. But, "I really didn't know him, and when I married him I started to find out his ways. He would stay at the cantina with prostitutes and he would come home drunk and drugged to beat me." After Sebastian threatened to kill Sonia, who was pregnant at the time, she contacted her sister in the United States and decided that crossing the border illegally was the only way to secure her physical safety.

They...steal everything from you, even your shoes. But I kept telling myself "You may lose your shoes here, but back there [in Mexico], you will lose your life." My friend and I, well,...with all the fear we became friends right there while crossing that gross tunnel. My children got through the borderline with my nieces' papers. That hole was eternal, with all the smelly water.

Sonia made it to Phoenix and gave birth to her third daughter, but Sebastian, a legal resident of the United States and a coyote, tracked her through friends and family living in the U.S. He crossed the border, located Sonia, and beat and sexually assaulted her so severely she was hospitalized, during which time he convinced her sister the girls should be with him.

What was I supposed to do? So I went to live with him for three eternal months. After what he had done to me I could not abandon my girls. God only knows what he would be capable of doing to my older ones that weren't even his. In those three months, I turned yellow and I didn't know at first, but I was pregnant.... The girls and I relied on him for food and whatever little I would get, I would let them [the girls] eat it. As you can see now, I am a plump woman, but then I was a skeleton. He never believed that I was pregnant. He'd say that I had been having affairs with other men while he was not around. On one occasion, he made me so mad that I had to talk back to him and that is when he beat me up with a racquet...if I would not have grabbed the ledge of the chimney, I would have landed head first into the fire. The police came [after neighbors called], took pictures, saw my injuries and the tennis racquet, and locked him up for 180 days.

During the time he was in jail and on probation, Sonia worked in a restaurant and cleaned hotel rooms, gave birth to her fourth daughter, and contacted her family in Mexico for help to cross the border again to escape Sebastian's violence.

I would swathe myself to go to work, otherwise, can you imagine who would give work to a pregnant undocumented woman?...My family from Mexico came to pick me up at the border, and I stayed with them for a short while, but then...he was looking for me again and this time it was real easy to find me being that I was in my hometown...so I crossed the border again. This time I sent my girls to another sister that lives in another part of the U.S. At the border, I don't know how to explain it, I don't know how it happened to this day, but we ran into each other. We began to run through the street, but he lost me because I went into a hotel and I dressed as a man with a baseball cap and my brother's clothing. I had done this because, although I thought it was far-fetched, this was always a possibility. I was walking like a mouse through the streets, keeping low. That is how I got across. I think about it now and I don't know how I did it. He was left with the impression that I had stayed in Mexico, but after a while of not locating the girls or me in our hometown [he started searching]. I had saved up enough money to leave. I have not had contact with any...family members since then. They must think that I am an ingrate, but I have to think of my girls; God forbid that one day I should not be around and ...he would end up with their custody.