How Long Will I Cry? (26 page)

I was going through a phase, a need to fit
into my environment, a need to socialize and be cool or whatever.
That’s why it was so hard to stop talking to people like Corey. I
think the wake-up call was when my mom cried. I was, like, 17. She
never cries, so when she cried, it was when Corey called me from
jail. He called collect and I accepted the charges. My mom was
there and I was trying to play it off like, “Oh no, it’s somebody
else.” But the house phone’s kinda loud, so she got pissed. I guess
she felt disappointed because she raised me better than that. She
yelled at me and she cried. I mean, I saw her cry about other
stuff, but I wasn’t the cause of that, so I didn’t really feel
guilty about it before.

See, despite all this stuff, I never really
liked making my mother upset. I just wanted to be rebellious, but
it caught on to me that I had to stand up and help my mother, take
care of her. When I hit 18, I was like, “Really? I’m smart. I’m not
going to be socializing with you people. Why would I put what I
have on the line? I have scholarships lined up for me to go to
college. Like, I’m a straight-A student.” You gotta look at
reality. Where can you get without an education? I mean, that stuff
that people do on the streets, like, it’s fast money, but I mean,
you can’t get retirement and pension to come out of that.

Now I’m a freshman at UIC. I thought about
going to University of Michigan, but I couldn’t afford it. But
either way, I think I would have still chosen to stay home. I’m
studying criminal justice. I want to be a detective. I mean, it’s a
lot of people that complains about a lot of stuff, like, “Oh, this
is happening, that is happening,” but they don’t do anything about
it. And what’s better than getting paid for something you want to
do? Which is, like, make a change in society.

I want to go into homicide because I feel
like that’s something that’s most dangerous. And then I want to get
my graduate degree because I don’t want to be a cop my whole life.
I want to go do other stuff, too, like be a prosecutor.58

I went to visit the county jail on my own. I
wanted to see what was really going on in there, because, it’s
like, I hear people, you know, coming out of jail, like, “It was
horrible” and I just wanted to see it. It’s actually a wonderful
place. They actually get help, but they can only give you so much
so if you don’t take anything from it while you’re in there, you
come back out and, you know, do the same stuff. And it’s
understandable that some people can come out and do the same stuff
because it’s not like they ship you out to Harvard University when
you get out. They ship you back to your freakin’ neighborhood.
That’s all you know, that’s all you’re exposed to. But there are
people in my neighborhood that are in the same situation that I’m
in and I’m doing better than them, so I guess they need motivation.
But I don’t know. I don’t know how to help these people.

That’s one reason why I want to move my
family out of the neighborhood. If it changes, then I’ll come back
because, I mean, I grew up here, this is my home. All 18 years of
my life, I’ve seen the same thing—the same cycle.

If my mom was able to have a good mother,
like fortunately I have a good mother, she would have been able to
come over here when she was younger and she could have went and got
her education. She would not be in this neighborhood and the
assault would not have happened to her and she would have gave
birth to me somewhere else nicer where I don’t have to deal with
this stuff. In 20 years, I don’t want someone to attempt to rape me
like my mom. It’s like a chain. That’s why I say the change should
happen now. Just break the cycle or it’s going to happen again and
again and again.

—
Interviewed by Stephanie Gladney
Queen

Endnotes

56 Congress passed the American Homecoming
Act—also called the Amerasian Homecoming Act—in 1988. It allowed
Vietnamese children born of American fathers to emigrate to the
United States.

57 The West Argyle Street Historic District
is known for its Vietnamese
restaurants, bakeries and shops, as well as for Chinese, Cambodian,
Laotian and Thai businesses.

58 When we last spoke with Kim, she reported
that she no longer wants to be a detective. She has decided to
enroll in law school after receiving her bachelor’s degree.

The Girl Was a Fighter

CRISTINA FIGUEROA

Cristina Figueroa has seen youth violence
from many angles. The child of a Puerto Rican mother and a
Mexican-American father, she grew up in a home where beatings and
fights were regular occurrences. She also experienced bullying in
elementary school. And, during her teen years on the Northwest
Side, she explains, “a lot of my friends were gangbangers, because
at the time, that’s who I felt had my back.”

As a runaway teen mother, she found herself
in an abusive relationship, facing a dead-end future. Determined to
turn her life around, Figueroa earned her GED at the age of 22.
Since then, she has received a bachelor’s degree in criminal
justice from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and a
master’s degree in public administration from DePaul University,
where she teaches part-time. From 2001 to 2006, she was a juvenile
probation officer in Lake County, Illinois, counseling, supervising
and helping to rehabilitate young people. Now she works with adult
offenders as U.S. probation officer.

A short, dark-haired woman in her early 40s,
Figueroa maintains a youthful appearance and has an abiding
compassion and empathy for at-risk youth.

Kids are not born bad. There are very few
sociopaths out there. Kids are not inherently bad. That’s learned
behavior. And I think that if people take the time to investigate
kids’ lives and what they go through, it will all make sense to
them why they are behaving the way they are behaving.

As a child, I experienced a lot of domestic
violence. There were a lot of fights between my parents. My mom was
ultimately the victim. That started before I could remember, and it
was pretty much all I knew up until I was a teenager.

I always knew when there would be a fight
just based on how my dad rang the doorbell. I don’t know why he
didn’t just use a key, but he always rang the doorbell when he came
home from work, and I could always tell when it was going to be a
bad night. It was almost like Pavlov’s dog. You hear a certain ring
and you know what your response should be. I knew where emotionally
and psychologically I needed to put myself. That’s not healthy for
any child. People can’t expect kids to be subjected to that type of
environment and to grow up psychologically healthy.

Did I get hit? Yeah, we all got hit. I think
my brothers got it much worse than I did. My dad definitely used
corporal punishment. Sometimes he would go overboard. The thing
about my dad is that he didn’t take pleasure in it. I know that’s
how he grew up. He was subjected to very serious abuse, not only at
home, but at school. And so that’s how he dealt with my brothers.
Back then, it was very difficult to handle and to understand, and I
felt a very deep sense of hate. I was robbed of my childhood,
because I always lived in fear.

Aside from the violence in the home, there
were a lot of issues in school. I mean, fights and things of that
nature. I was bullied all the way from first grade to seventh
grade, just constant bullying. I remember having to run home from
school. You hear people talking, and someone would come up to you
and say, “Such and such is going to wait for you after school,”
because they wanted to fight. So I would then have to start
plotting my exit strategy. I lived seven blocks from my school,
Haugan Elementary, in Albany Park. So the moment the bell rang, I
would take off running, and I would run nonstop, and I’d have
crowds of people chasing me. And this would happen constantly.

The isolation that you feel sometimes,
feeling defenseless, both at home and at school, when you can’t
stop it, being a victim of it, it’s very impactful. At some point,
you get so tired of it. You know, it’s that saying, “When you can’t
beat them, join them.” So it just came to the point where I said I
was no longer going to become a victim and I became an
aggressor.

My first fight was in the seventh grade. A
girl and I just kind of got in a spat in the library. Her name was
Alma. I will never forget that it was in the library. And I
remember she said, “Your mother’s a bitch.”

And I just said, “No. Now you’re going to
wait for me after school.”

She came out ready to fight, and we had a
crowd, and I fought her. And unfortunately I wound up beating her
ass. I say “unfortunately” because, all of a sudden, people started
to be nice to me because they saw that I was able to fight. Then it
gave me a sense of empowerment and I was no longer scared, so when
things would occur, I wasn’t running from it anymore. Now I was
confronting it, but confronting it aggressively. I was ready to
fight.

Although it empowered me, I hated it. I was
very, very good at what I called “verbal judo,” very good at
talking my way out of things. Sometimes, when I could sense when
something was escalating, I would quickly be able to de-escalate
the situation verbally because I didn’t want it to result in a
fight. My biggest fear was that I would wind up in a fight and they
would wind up killing me. So I didn’t run around looking for
fights, but I wasn’t going to back down from one, because I felt
that if I backed down, I’d become the victim again.

I was 17 or 18 when I left home. You know, I
don’t remember the exact situation. I know that it was a fight with
my dad. I’m not necessarily going to blame him for the fight. I
know that it was because of something that I did. At that point, I
was just a rebellious, hard-to-deal-with teenager. And I’m going to
take full responsibility, because I just didn’t care. I went to a
friend’s house for a little bit, and then I kind of bounced around
wherever I could stay. If I was able to sleep somewhere, I slept
somewhere, and if I didn’t have a place to sleep, I would just stay
up all night. Hang out with whoever was willing to hang out. All
night. I did that for about two months.

Then during that two-month time period, I met
my daughter’s father on a street corner. I was waiting for the bus
and he was at a gas station. And he stopped. He said hello. We
talked. We exchanged numbers—pager numbers. I didn’t have a phone.
We just started talking, and then we went out on a couple of dates
with some friends. I didn’t want to go out with him by myself. And
I would say about two or three months afterwards, I found out I was
pregnant. And in some sick kind of way, it was almost like, “Yes,
now I’m pregnant. I got somewhere to live.”

And so I moved in with him into an apartment
where he had no gas and no light because he couldn’t pay the gas or
light. They shut it off. I’ll never forget. It was February 1991
when I moved into that apartment, and it was horribly, horribly
cold. I was still in school—Wells High School, which is in West
Town. Even though I ran away from home, I was still going to
school, but I was always afraid that my parents would show up there
trying to find me. Now I was pregnant and didn’t want my parents to
find me, so I said that’s it and I decided to drop out.

But I didn’t even know this guy, clearly.
After three months, he started to become physically abusive. And I
didn’t want to say anything to anybody. And at the same time, in
some sick kind of way, I had developed a love for him. I was in
love, or whatever that was, at the time. He wasn’t only physically
abusive, but he was psychologically abusive. He would do things
like go out and not come home, and I wouldn’t know where he was.
There was this whole fear: Is he dead or is he alive? I would
imagine that he would be with somebody else. That was very
difficult. I couldn’t sleep, and here I was pregnant. I had no job.
I had no education. I had no insurance. I had nothing, so now I was
fully dependent on him.

For months, my parents didn’t know if I was
dead or alive. But my best friend was in total disagreement with
what I was doing. So one day, she figured out a way to get in
contact with my mom, and my mom showed up at the apartment. My
parents were basically, “We don’t want you to struggle. We want
this to be over and we want to help you.” That pretty much mended
the relationship with my parents. My dad just wanted to make sure
that I was okay. And I let them back into my life and started over
with them.

My parents helped us get a nice little
apartment, and my dad gave us the security deposit. They gave us a
whole bunch of furniture. We had a pretty nice place to live in
Humboldt Park. But the day that I was giving birth, the moment I
was giving birth to my daughter, I could hear him on the phone with
another woman and that changed my life—I mean, big time. The rage
and the violence just came back. I was tremendously hurt, because
here I was having this baby. I was a mother, and now I had to deal
with something I’d never dealt with. It affected me so much
psychologically and emotionally that I found myself fighting a lot
with him. And this time, when he would fight me, I would fight
back. I’d come out really beat up.

And so in 1993, when my daughter Syra was 2
years old, we had a really big fight, and I called the police. And
the police came and he was just wearing jogging pants, no shoes, no
socks, no shirt, and it was winter. It was December 10th. And there
was so much snow outside. And so they were going to take him into
custody and he was begging me, “Don’t let them take me. Don’t let
them take me. Don’t press charges. Please, please just don’t.”

I was just done. I looked at the cops. I just
said, “Take him.” When I said that, all I felt was a fist right in
my face. He punched me so hard and I hit the ground and there was
blood everywhere. And the cops were struggling with him to handcuff
him, so they started beating him to restrain him, to handcuff him.
And they were walking him out the door, and, the moment they got
out the door, they all slipped and fell because of the snow. So
when the two police officers and my daughter’s father slipped and
fell, he jumped up and took off running. And he was handcuffed.
They took off running and they couldn’t find him.