by Tim White
I replied, “Mi nombre es Penny y yo no soy una chica o incluso un ser humano.” (My name is Penny and I’m not a girl or even a human being.)
Belén turned and ran to her dad and started to cry. “If you love Jesus, Daddy, we need to adopt Penny.”
So I rode home with the Santos family that night, and that was the beginning of my faith. I became a member of the Santos family, headed by a former thug named Cruz who married a beautiful Christian lady named Elicia. They had three children: Maria Jose, Pedro, and Belén. I became a member of the Santos family and they were a godsend.
The Santos family lived within a mile of the dump in a little village of squatters living on land they did not own. They did not have running water, but they did have electricity sometimes. It was like heaven to me.
The next year of my life living with the Santoses was a dream. I can’t say I became a Christian, but I definitely had a big place in my heart for Christians. The first time mama Elicia called me daughter, I cried. My addition made three daughters, and Elicia treated us all as strong-minded, intelligent women. She was way ahead of her time in the way she wanted to be treated as a woman and the potential that she believed was in each of her daughters.
In response, I gave them all kinds of trouble. One time I asked Papa Cruz how he could believe in God when we lived so close to hell. Cruz explained that only God understood everything. He explained that he was follower of Jesus Christ because he represents more than religion. For Jesus it was all right to question. He had affirmed the questions of doubting Thomas. And you cannot have faith without doubts or answers without questions. Papa Cruz didn’t know why God allowed kids to be abused in a dump, but as a follower of Jesus Christ, he was going to do everything he could to help.
The Santos family sent me to school, and I learned to read and write very quickly. English seemed to come easy for me. Maria Jose was a child prodigy at playing the violin.
I will always remember the little village one mile from the dump where everyone had a simple home made from blocks and corrugated steel roofs. The kids played football (soccer), and as the sun set, my sister played Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, which was composed in 1934. Her violin brought humanity to our suffering and a soundtrack to our mythological crucible. Even to the most ignorant, this genius of a violin sounded like it belonged. And the sad part that was no one that heard it—the police, the gang leaders or the missionaries—ever suspected that Maria was a genius. It was so common we got used to the fact that she was a genius child prodigy. She played with the Youth Symphony of Tegus until some men broke into our home and stole her violin. Maria Jose Morales never really recovered from that atrocity—the day the music was stolen from her soul.
MS-13 eventually found out about my location, and word came that they were going to punish the whole family because Cruz had once been a member of MS-13 before becoming a pastor. We expected a death squad to come any night. A noted pastor named Jorge in our area came to our rescue, and we packed everything we could. He was sending us to the US on a temporary visa so Maria Jose could play violin with the San Francisco Youth Symphony.
When we arrived in San Francisco, we could see the men from MS-13 checking us out. They were American looking, but the colors and gang signs were easy to spot, so we simply did not show up for Maria Jose’s concert. We used all our money and bought bus tickets to go to the Pacific Northwest, where we were told that Latin people could work for fair-minded farmers who needed our labor to make their farms work.
Every illegal has his own story, and ours seemed much easier than those who traveled here with untrustworthy criminals called coyotes. We were not the only illegals living in Finley, Washington, fifteen miles outside of Kennewick. We lived in the orchards at first with all the other illegals that this country counted on to harvest their crops. Our whole family worked during the summer. And we all worked after school. But because our dad, Cruz, was a man of leadership, integrity, and strong Christian faith, the farmers soon found that he could be trusted to run these large fruit farms. We were given a trailer house for our home. Our days of living under a bridge and never knowing plumbing were over.
There was Ku Klux Klan in Kennewick, and they expected people of color to be out of town by sundown. The African-Americans lived in East Pasco, and the railroad was the dividing line. We Latinos lived on the reservation in the Yakima Valley, north of Richland. People didn’t know the difference between a Mexican, a Guatemalan, a Columbian, or a Honduran. We were all Mexicans to them. But we knew the difference, and so gangs kept us divided. I kept my tattoo on my neck and chest covered. I detested my tattoo.
We moved around with the crops and, yes, we endured the police constantly threatening us with deportation. The farmers helped to hide us. They could not afford to harvest their crops and use white labor.
The first time I saw Ulysses Looking Glass Sundown, we were both very young. He and his brother Patty were working alongside some of their friends—Lalo Rivas and Adolph Perez. I had not seen an Indian before.
The Latinos treated Ulee and Joey like family. Their families took them in and fed them a hot breakfast and lunch. Whole families worked together in those days. Ulee stood out like no one I had ever seen. His hair was blond and his skin was fair but freckled from the sun; he was the most muscular kid I had ever seen. His eyes always seemed to twinkle with courage and humor. I always thought dark hair and dark skin was more attractive, but there was something about this kid who spoke Spanish like Tarzan. His Spanish was so bad that it was laughable. I asked about him and they said he was an Indian. I had never heard of an Indian except in school and did not think they existed anymore.
“Isn’t their hair black and their skin brown?” My brother, Pedro, told me that Ulee’s brothers were mostly dark haired and dark skinned. But their mom was Scottish/Irish and that was where Ulee’s looks came from. But he was more Indian than the rest.
Caleb and Elizabeth Sundown had moved to the Tri Cities—Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland, Washington—to take a small church after Caleb graduated from college and seminary. He took this church and changed its name to the Cathedral of Joy and then made it a church for all nations. The church was small; Elizabeth worked as a nurse. She worked the night shift at Kennewick General Hospital. And the seven boys worked the fields and split their time in the Wallowa Mountains about four hours away. Their grandparents helped to raise them; they were a handful. They all hunted and fished with their spare time like they were Huck Finn.
Ulee got in a lot of trouble, so his dad had a Marine friend and vet of Korea start him on Jiu Jitsu when he was in the second grade. Ulee had his black belt by the time he was in the sixth grade. He then started with a friend into Taekwondo and had his brown belt by the time he was fifteen. All the Sundown boys were outstanding basketball players, spending their time playing street ball in East Pasco with the blacks. Ulee also won the conference wrestling championship when he was in junior high after he was kicked off the basketball team. Ulee was a star wide receiver on the grade-school football team. Before he died, his older brother, Joey, was the star quarterback, who was inspired by Sunny Sixkiller, a Cherokee quarterback and basketball star from Ashland, Oregon, who dreamed of going to Oregon State but was recruited by the University of Washington. Joey and Ulee had the chance to meet Sunny Sixkiller and play basketball with him. He had a major impact on both their lives.
When Joey died at 15, Ulee, who was 13, became the quarterback and practiced passing through a tire 200 times a day all year long—even during basketball season. He threw with the same release that his hero Sunny Sixkiller had taught him. Every day, Ulee was obsessive about his workouts. He would wake up and run ten miles.
He and his brothers lived in the desert farmland of the Tri-Cities and spent the summers in the Wallowa Mountains of Eastern Oregon with their grandparents at their family lodge. They slept down by the river whenever they wanted. They seemed to not be afraid of anyone; the seven boys were like a y
oung pack of wolves.
One day, as we were picking cherries, the INS showed up in force. The farmer, Mr. Allen Truman, yelled, “Run, the INS is here.” But by the time we got down to the swamp bordering the cherry orchard, my sister Maria Jose and my mother Elicia were gone. Everyone was crying at the swamp. Ulee stood there as if he wanted to do something or say something. His friends were laughing. What were you running for? Your skin is white.” You will never imagine how broken and lost we were to lose our family like this.
Cruz set about applying for US citizenship. Citizenship was possible because Papa Cruz was so favored by church leaders in the area and the farming community. Pedro was sixteen, but looked older, so he joined the Army and asked to go to Vietnam. His reward was citizenship. Belén and I were allowed to go to Finley Elementary School; no one asked about our citizenship. Our whole community depended on Spanish labor—and the disappearance of our family members was an unexplained horror. When Cruz became a citizen, he borrowed money from the Truman farms to go back to Honduras to look for our family.
Elicia and Maria Jose had made it on their own after being dropped off in Honduras by the INS. Finally they met a very friendly Christian wearing a hat and clothes to cover his gang tattoos. They thought this Hernando was a Godsend. Both of them were drugged and abused. They were separated and forced into prostitution; Elicia fought her way out until she got help from a kindly priest. Thankfully, the day came, and with the help of some of the churches in town, Cruz was able to travel to Honduras, where he found Elicia in sanctuary at the Catholic cathedral. They both searched for Maria Jose, but they never found her. When Cruz got there, he knew his way around the streets and the rival gangs. He had lost his daughter, the tenderhearted one who was a virtuoso violinist. She had the brains to become a doctor but would spend her life as a slave prostitute someplace in the world. No one would listen to him, and he could not get a visa to get to the nation where she remained enslaved. But he did find his beloved Elicia, and they returned with broken hearts that would never heal. Miraculously, they returned to Los Angeles where the Truman family came to get them. While Cruz had earned his citizenship, Elicia was still an illegal. Belén and I lived with the Truman family.
Cruz threw himself into his work and became very trusted by the farmers in our community, and he earned more than any Latino had ever earned—at least in this area. All the money he earned went to his attempts to find Maria Jose. He never quit trying. We never heard violin music without one of us breaking out in tears. We never had a family prayer in which she was not remembered, but we were so thankful to have our strong-willed mom back with our loving dad. Everywhere we went, we realized that boys and men stared at Belen and I. It seemed like such a dangerous world out there. After my past, to be considered attractive always felt like a curse. We both grew our hair long though, which was the style of the times, and we were both cheerleaders starting early in junior high. We both wanted to be accepted by our foster nation, and being non-citizens, we tried to hide in plain sight.
One night, a pick-up truck pulled up to our trailer. My dad, Cruz, met the four men at the door. They looked like trouble to me. I was afraid they were MS-13. He told me and Belén to go hide under the bed and asked Elicia to go get the shotgun. The men opened the door before we were ready and in Spanish told Cruz that they had run out of gas. He asked in his street-savvy way, “You ran out at my doorstep?” One of them pulled a gun and ordered him to go outside with them.
We watched from behind the drapes as he got into their car and they drove away. We never called the police, but we did contact the Truman family who ran the farms we worked for. They called the police, and within twenty-four hours, we received a ransom demand for $50,000 or our dad would be killed. We did not have close to that kind of money, but the Truman family put the money together and gave it to the FBI.
Papa Cruz disappeared; somehow the men got the money and we were all certain that they killed our dad. We don’t know which gang it was—they all specialized in kidnapping and home invasions. And they targeted illegals like us. After a year they found Papa Cruz’s body.
Pedro returned from his tour in Vietnam; he was now the man of our family. Later, we held a funeral service for Papa Cruz at the Salvation Army in Pasco. After, several people spoke about Cruz and what he had meant to them. I walked up to let Mama Elicia, Belen, and Pedro Santos know what Papa Cruz meant to me. As I stood there, I never liked to be in front of a crowd, I was overwhelmed by all the grief of my life: the end of my first family in a village in Honduras; becoming a slave to the MS-13 gang, living in the dump with Gabriela, the INS taking Maria Jose away. Life was not fair. I heard someone whisper – “ella es una belleza incredíble” or “wow, she is an amazing beauty.”
I thought of all the entitled white kids who lived in our community and knew nothing of our lives—faces of the children I had met in the dump that did not even have a birth certificate let alone a nation with citizenship. I remember the children in the dump riding bicycles that had no tires with big smiles on their faces. I just began to cry—no sounds, just tears running down my face openly showing my shame and self-pity. People started to whisper. I thought, where is Homer? Where is Maria Jose? And then I began to sob. Not a soft sob. No one knew the injustice I had experienced. How could there be a God? How could there not be one? The sob grew louder than anyone had heard someone sob. No brave words of tribute, just a moan coming out of the heart of a girl who knew what it was to be a slave, standing at the funeral of a man who had rescued me and become more than a father figure to me; he was a genuine Christ follower.
Chapter Three
Ithaca
WE TOOK A break for the evening as the children started to become sleepy. Some wanted to stay up and listen some more. Others cried, hearing my story. I tell all not to feel sad about my story, but to be grateful that their lives are without such pain. I tell them that I am grateful, as well, to have survived. “Every day of my life is a gift,” I say. “I have never taken one day for granted.”
The next evening we gather again in the lodge, food sizzling and its aroma filling the air. The river again woos us and the drumbeat sounds to get our souls in rhythm with our hearts. The children want me to continue with the story of my life because they know my story belongs to their heritage.
My side ached, my muscles were exhausted as I struggled for oxygen and endured this pain. The desert sunshine of eastern Washington burned down on me as I forced my stride up the hill with sheer willpower, passing boys with far less tolerance for pain. As I rounded the flag, one of the women teachers in the school yelled, “You are in first Penny! You are beating all the boys! Keep it up!” My stride turned into a gallop, running down the hill as I imagined I was a horse. I was drenched in sweat. The breeze felt refreshing as I accelerated. The smell of sagebrush in the spring smelled like freedom to me: freedom from slavery, freedom to dream, and freedom to discover who I was in this great nation of opportunity. A boy at least a foot taller yelled at me as we ran. “I am not going to let a girl win, you tomboy.” I smiled and picked up the pace.
No boy could keep up with me when I ran. I ran the Finley Grade School cross-country run with all the other kids in the sixth grade. I was fifty yards ahead of the fastest boys in the school when I finished. It felt to me like the male teachers stared at me. One thing I had learned in my unfortunate pilgrimage was that most men were driven by lust and a need to control. I knew I was humiliating the boys, and I enjoyed it. I had set a new school record. The male teachers berated the boys of the school for losing to me. This race was a part of our Presidential Fitness Test. It was about a mile-long run, but I made them pay; there were no girls’ sports in those days. I knew that my teachers would let Mama Elicia know at the teacher-parent conference. We were all given physical fitness at Finley Elementary School. Everyone wanted the Presidential Fitness Award. I also worked hard in the classroom. All the pain of my life turned into a work ethic—like many of us who were immigrants. Rednec
ks used to tell me to go back to my homeland. I had no homeland. I would never be able to go back to Honduras. If I tried I would disappear, like my birth family or Papa Cruz or Maria Jose. And yet this wonderful land in the Pacific Northwest was not mine either. I was an outsider. It was a contradiction. My brown skin and accent made me invisible to many. When we spoke in Spanish, it brought too much attention to us, so we only spoke our native tongue with our immigrant friends when we worked.
The farmers we worked for were friendly; their economy depended on us, since most immigrants were not paid fairly. The Truman family was the exception—they were real Christians who had heard God’s instructions and followed his purposes. They were some of the best people in the world. We were happy to be there. The teachers knew we were not citizens, but they just loved kids. Every spring, as part of the president’s physical fitness program, we had an all-school race. The winner would qualify for the all Tri-City race in one of the high school stadiums. We were allowed to run the border of the school property in the spring. I, Penelope Isabela Morales Santos, held the school record. I think we were all surprised when I was invited to go to the all-city elementary track meet at Kennewick Stadium. I was the first girl ever invited to this track meet. Finley was a small school only fifteen miles from Kennewick, so we were considered part of their school district. But we were the outcasts; they called us goat ropers. But in this kids’ meet at Kennewick Stadium, only the best kids in each event were invited.