Birth of a nation...

Leah Ordoñez Cruz was born the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter▬which means nothing! People see her hanging at the edges of McArthur Park and wonder why some individuals seem to have no meaning in their lives, no value, no purpose (and certainly no gift of the kind to which there are those who believe a seventh son is born endowed with). Life came at Leah like a freight train and she never saw it coming. She was married at thirteen, the union arranged by her parents in an effort to lessen the burden on the family’s purse strings, and the first in a long line of mistakes bordering on catastrophes in Leah’s life even if this one was not at all Leah’s doing.

But the second one was having children. She only had three, two boys and a girl, and the decision (if it could be called that) to stop having them was made for her, too, when her husband came home drunk and beat her into miscarrying the fourth. She became incapable of carrying another. And her husband, Nacho, an avid cocksman, lost all interest in her anyway. Floundering in a world she never made, Leah sought solace in (or got duped into) a lover’s arms (a third mistake), and when Nacho found out about it, he threw her out of the house.

Living alone in a distant relative’s backyard tool shed, Leah, hardly trained in the art of survival, was forced to steal to eat▬and she got caught. So, anybody keeping score might have concluded that at just short of sixteen years of age, abandoned and disowned, thrown out into the world naked, made barren and corrupt, and now institutionalized in the Texas system of corrections, Leah’s life was as good as over. But for all the bumbling uselessness of society’s (and the law’s) efforts to rehabilitate the wayward, it sometimes helps those less likely to reform, maybe because reformation wasn’t the issue to begin with. Leah had never had a chance to form, let alone reform! She blossomed in the reformatory!

She graduated from high school behind bars, and under the watchful eye of the probation people, went on to college and became a teacher. But the seven years that she spent teaching the first grade in a small Valley town, removed from genetic discord and most traditional social relationships, were only a short recess from the train wreck that had always been her life.

In ’69, she received a letter from (of all people) a sister-in-law in California who was asking for her help with troubles that Leah’s daughter Willie (Wilhelmína), who she hadn’t seen practically since birth, was having. It seems Nacho had moved the family west some ten years before. Leah was more than willing to go to California to help her family and reclaim whatever ties she still might have to them.

It wasn’t a happy reunion. The two boys, Jerry (Gerónimo) and Gus (Agósto) were already in some kind of gang training, and Willie’s problems were of a darker nature than were free to be aired in polite company in those days, although they were to become a cliché in dysfunctional family matters in later years. Willie kept running away from home.

Leah wasn’t qualified to solve child problems any deeper than a runny nose or a playground bruise, but she still had a mother's heart. She took a sabbatical from teaching and took an apartment close to Willie, but the conditions under which she and her daughter tried to bond might have been too pathological for even a last chance. Nacho and his sister might just have been looking for a scapegoat for the ruins that they had made of Willie's life. She disappeared again one day, and this time, she burrowed deep and would not be found. LA is a long, labrynthine street. A thirteen year old girl was lost in it.

Lea spent over a year searching, rousting social services, the law, the church, the street gurus, but she felt trapped in a dimension from which her cries for help went unseen, unheard, unheeded, as if she had been buried herself behind a wall of glass through which only she could witness the indifference of the world she’d always known.

One day, Leah walked out of her apartment in East LA with her bag packed and stood for a minute beside the taxi that she’d called to take her to the airport, and then paid the driver, waved him off, and walked on down the street. About a block away, she righted a grocery cart that had been laying on its side on the sidewalk, dropped her gear in it and pushed it along into the maw of the city, and vanished into it.

No one came looking for her, although she’s easy to find. But she looks into all other faces with care: the one that she picks up out of an alley where she lies dying of an overdose and she takes to a hospital; the one on the side street that she bandages with rags to keep her from bleeding to death where her pimp has slashed her; the one that she props up and props herself against on the way to find medical help where both have been beaten senseless, the girl for resisting, Leah for trying to keep her from getting raped in a back lot. She herself has lost count of the times she has been raped, not as often now that she has gotten old. How many times has Willie been beaten and slashed and raped? She’s still out there somewhere, thirteen years old, and tired and scared. Leah will never give up the search, even if she herself is kind of thirteen years old, and tired and scared. She has never known any other way to live…

Noe.