Prayers for the Stolen

“Being in a place without men is like being asleep without dreams.”

Rita’s describes what it is like to live in a village after all the men have left. Her comment suggests that it is an existence that is in some ways deficient or lacking due to the lack of sexual and romantic possibilities and the hopes and dreams that come along with these things.

“I don’t want to be loved, Maria said, so who cares?”

Ladydi’s friend and half-sister, Maria, responds to her own mother telling her that due to her harelip no man will ever love her or want to marry her. On one level, her remark can be interpreted as self-defensive bravado. On another level, it is Maria’s indirect way of saying that she is not interested in the love of a man and instead wants the affection of Ladydi and the other women in the community.

“She would have cooked up a stew of fingernails, spit, and shredded hair. She would have mixed it with menstrual blood and green chilies and chicken.”

Ladydi suggests her mother would cook this meal for her father, Rita’s husband, if he ever returned to the village. The strange and repulsive nature of the recipe reflects the depth of the anger Rita harbors toward her husband.

“My hands were miraculously beautiful to me.”

Ladydi has just had her nails painted for the first time at Ruth’s beauty salon in town. She reflects on how beautiful her adorned hands now look and how feminine that makes her feel. Unfortunately, this will merely serve to intensify her awareness of what she is being denied because of the threat of abduction by the traffickers. To avoid notice, she must instantly remove the nail polish and cannot wear it outside.

“She let every one of our friends know that he’d left home without even saying goodbye to his daughter.”

Rita’s revenge against her husband for abandoning her also includes making sure the women of the village know that he showed no concern for his own child. She seeks to show the depth of his callousness and cowardice. However, by telling others about this, she drags Ladydi into her revenge, humiliating and hurting her in the process.

“On that first day of school we just looked like ourselves. We were messy and born from the jungle so we were like the relatives of papaya trees, iguanas, and butterflies.”

A new young and handsome teacher has arrived at the school. The girls in Ladydi’s class feel exposed and revealed by his gaze. Specifically, because the teacher is from the city, they feel uncivilized, uncultured, and excessively rustic in his eyes.

“Jose stood still and breathless at the sight of my mother’s mound of hundreds and hundreds of brown-glass bottles dumped in piles and lying under swarms of bees.”

Ladydi’s mother invites the new teacher, Jose, to their house. When he shows up, she gets very drunk and passes out. Ladydi then shows Jose the mountain of beer bottles that have accumulated in the garden. This is a testimony to Rita’s addiction to alcohol. It also indicates Ladydi’s desire to elicit help from an outsider by demonstrating the desperateness of her situation with Rita.

“I was just turning inside out, turning inside out so that my bones were on the outside and my heart was hanging there in the middle of my chest like a medallion”

When she wakes up from her alcoholic stupor, Rita reflects on her encounter with Jose. She felt exposed and humiliated by the gaze of this supposedly cultured man. Her comment also betrays the sense in which living for so long without men leaves her emotionally vulnerable, her heart too easily seen and grasped.

“Nobody even asked what Paula would do as she now lived like a baby and was locked up in her house all day.”

Ladydi makes this comment while discussing the limited options for her and her friends now that they have graduated. Unfortunately, Paula, who recently returned to the village after being abducted by the traffickers a year earlier, seems to have no options at all. That experience has so traumatized her that she now lives as an infant, afraid to leave the house and being bottle-fed by her mother as she recovers.

“She should have been a legend. Her face should have covered magazines. Love songs should have been written to her.”

Part of the tragedy of Paula, according to Ladydi, is the sense of what she might have been were it not for the traffickers and their abuse of her. Her beauty, which Ladydi claims surpassed that of any other woman in Mexico, could have made her wealthy and famous. However, it is this very beauty that attracted the attention of the traffickers and led to her kidnapping and abuse.

“The only person who did not know that her harelip had been God’s curse was Maria.”

In the village, it is believed that Maria’s harelip was a punishment from God for Ladydi’s father’s affair with Maria’s mother. This reflects the continuing influence of religious superstition in Chulavista. It also shows a degree of cruelty, since Maria’s birth defect has, unbeknownst to her, marked her as cursed.

“My mother watched television because it was the only way out of our mountain.”

Ladydi’s mother constantly watches television, especially documentaries. This allows her to gain a surprising amount of knowledge about history and the natural world. However, it is also a form of escapism that distracts her from a dangerous, lonely, and loveless existence in the village.

“My mother threw her head back and rolled her eyes. Yes, yes, yes. Some days I pulled, tore with my teeth, the skin around the sides of my fingernails and gave them to you to eat.”

Ladydi’s mother tells her about some of the sacrifices she had to make for her while she was a child. It is not clear whether the details of this strange story are true. It may be that Rita is trying to express, in confused and symbolic form, the depth of her sacrifice for Ladydi. However, the comment is also an insight into Rita’s deteriorating mental state and her diminished grip on reality, which are exacerbated by alcohol and depression.

“Hey, don’t worry, man. She’s blind.”

Mike, Maria’s brother who belongs to the Zetas cartel, says this to a menacing-looking trafficker he has met beside a shack. The lines refer to Ladydi, who is in the car. On one level, this is a lie intended to protect her by reassuring the trafficker that she will not be able to observe or report their illicit activity. On a symbolic level, the comment reflects Mike’s warning that Ladydi must never talk about or acknowledge what she sees there. That is, she is encouraged to affect a moral and political “blindness.”

“I’d seen my life on television.”

Ladydi’s excessive consumption of television at home has led to her viewing events in her own life in the manner of a television show. Thus, she is aware that Mike killed the man by the shack and his daughter. However, because it seems like something that she has seen on television, it does not seem entirely real. This blurring of fiction and reality allows her to avoid thinking about the disturbing implications for herself and Mike of what she has seen.

“He walked right into my body.”

Ladydi describes her feelings on seeing Julio, the gardener in the house in Acapulco, for the first time. It is love at first sight. However, the speed and ease with which she falls for Julio reflect the absence of men in her life and make her vulnerable to being hurt or exploited physically and emotionally.

“He liked to treat me like a child… I loved to be his little baby and so I skipped at his side and forgot that he was a killer.”

Ladydi describes her relationship with Julio in this way. At first glance, this can be interpreted in terms of the innocent playfulness with which young lovers often relate to each other. At the same time, it might also suggest something more problematic. Especially in the absence of her own father, Ladydi may be seeking a father substitute in the older Julio and, thus, blinds herself to what is dangerous and suspect about him.

I looked into the camera and deep into my mother’s eyes and she looked back.” 

After being harangued with questions by journalists in Mexico City and bowing her head, Ladydi finds the courage to look up directly into the camera that is filming her. The feeling that her mother is probably watching her inspires her to perform this small act of rebellion. Thus, Ladydi has a strange sense of connecting deeply with her mother at that moment. This event prefigures their later reunion and Rita’s rescue of Ladydi.

“During the night Luna had covered me with a blanket and a couple of towels. Small acts of kindness could turn me inside out. I never would have believed that someone who had shot a child in a break-and-entry robbery… could loan me a sweater, give me a cookie, or hold my hand.”

Luna, Ladydi’s prison cellmate, is a convicted murderer. Nevertheless, she instinctively realizes that Ladydi needs warmth, both physical and emotional, and helps her. This highlights that many common assumptions about people in prison, such as the idea that they are brutal or non-empathetic, may be wrong. These acts of kindness also form the basis for a continuing bond of solidarity between Ladydi and Luna.

“You don’t want to get off to urinate when the train stops for a few minutes and the men get off because they’ll watch you, make fun of you as you squat by the tracks, or rape you.”

Luna describes one of the challenges of being a woman on an immigrant train from Central America headed for the United States. This is one of a number of injustices that Luna has dealt with, including losing an arm when she slipped on the train and nearly died, and it casts her as a sympathetic character despite the violent crimes she has committed.

“As we walked in the blue-and-beige chessboard world, my eyes longed for green plants, yellow and red parrots, blue ocean and sky.”

The threat of violence and retaliation is not Ladydi’s main concern in prison, despite the knowledge that many prisoners want to kill her for her association with a rival cartel and for the charge of having brutally murdered a child. Rather, the monochrome, sterile nature of life there is her biggest challenge. This makes her appreciate and long for the colors and flora and fauna of Chulavista.

“Her father never hugged her but when she killed him, as he died, he held on to her. She says she had to kill him for him to hug her.”

Ladydi is told about the story of Violeta, a fellow inmate, who murdered her own father. Part of the reason for this was vengeance, since her father killed her mother. However, as the comment suggests, it was also a perverse and crazed way for her to get close to the father who neglected her. This story echoes those of the other women in the prison, almost none of whom, including Ladydi, were loved by their fathers.

“Rats need to be poisoned, right?”

Aurora, another inmate in the prison with Ladydi, explains that she was abducted and raped by traffickers. In retaliation, she poisoned the drinks of a group of traffickers, killing five of them. Her question raises the morally problematic issue of whether revenge and murder are justified responses to abuse.