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Categories / Documentary Portraiture / Documentary Reportage /Tags / Ciudad Juárez / domestic violence / girls / Mexico / Quinceañera / rite of passage / South America / Click here to open comments section, click again when done to close / 1 Comment

One Response to “Waltzing With Normalcy”

1. ford lover, on August 30th, 2010 at 10:28 pm Said:

   Excuse my English but, This post makes my mind spin at the speed of dark.

   Sent via Blackberry

In Ciudad Juárez, there is violence outside on the streets that everyone knows about, and there is violence inside, hidden in the hearts. Each one needs to other to exist. And finally, they are one and the same.

The weekend of August 14 and 15, 2010 the city of Juárez recorded 51 violent, drug-related deaths. And as always, the blood that these 47 souls shed, the blood that fell, didn’t slowly congeal, before getting hosed away by some concerned citizen neighbor, buit it quickly desicated, lost all its liquid – only dark red cells remaining to indelibly stain another small patch of the streets of Juárez.

On Saterday the 14th of this deadly, all-to-familiar weekend, Erika Contreras was trying desperately to erase stains of a different sort – those that physical and sexual violence can leave in your heart. The kind that had caused her to physically abuse her daughter. This day that oldest girl would celebrate her Quinceañera, the Mexican ceremony for fifteen year-old girls that marks the passage from adolescence to womanhood. This daughter Erika had been on the brink of giving away when she was born. The brutality that she had suffered at the hands of her mother, and the sexual abuse that the mom’s boyfriend had meted out, had convinced Erika back then, that raising a girl child was impossible. She knew her own fate would be repeated with her daughter. She had decided to put the child up for adoption, but somehow, against her wishes, she was convinced to keep her.

Erika called her Paloma, ‘dove,’ and took her home to the violence inside.

When Paloma was eight months old, her father broke her arm into three pieces. Erika left him and the town of Villa Ahumada and moved sixty miles north to Ciudad Juárez. The maquiladoras that later transformed the corrupt border town into a city of a million and a half were hiring and jobs were plentiful. But over the years, the mind-numbing work if the plant left her exhausted each day and the old demons soon surfaced. Unable to cope with seven children – the result of a second marriage to a man who was more absent than present – she fell back into familiar patterns of the heart and began hitting them when she got home.

Realizing what she was doing and where it was leading, Erika decided to surrender her four daughters to the care of an orphanage in downtown Ciudad Juárez. Today, her job as a maid that pays $80 US a week doesn’t permit her to raise a family of seven and pay rent on her 500 sq. ft. house on the dusty outskirts of the city. Paloma and her three sisters spend Monday through Friday at the Casa Hogar Maria Niña and ride city buses to be with their Mom and three brothers every weekend. To save her daughters from her own worst impulses and to give them a chance at survival, Erika made the ultimate sacrifice and gave them up.

Paloma’s light blue quinceañera gown, denated by the city government that staged the quinceañera celebration for 150 girls, fit her perfectly but had a large, dark red stain (wine, red salsa, blood?) on the bodice. But you deal with the dress that Juárez gives you. Erika worked to remove it with solvents and now the gown was spotless. Neighbors and friends lent a hand to do Paloma’s hair and nails. An escort who would dance the first dance, the traditional waltz, with Paloma was lined up. Outside, as the violence on the streets of Juárez continued, inside, where it really mattered, for this one day, Erika Contreras was happy.