Prayers for the Stolen

Ladydi’s arrest in connection with the murder of a drug trafficker’s daughter is the latest, and most egregious, in a series of injustices committed against her. She saw a friend kidnapped and broken. She watched her mother descend into alcoholism and become unable to distinguish what is real from what is imagined. She witnessed the community where she grew up being ripped apart geographically and ecologically by the highway construction and the poisoning of the land by programs designed to eradicate drugs, as well as by the economic destruction of its families and the brutal consequences of the cartels’ activities. All this suffering was orchestrated by men and the drug trade. Now, she is being imprisoned for a murder she did not commit and for possession of heroin that is not hers, further consequences of the cartel’s actions. This sense of injustice, moreover, is exacerbated by Ladydi’s treatment during this process. Subjected to the trauma of being handcuffed and bundled into a helicopter, after also losing the man she loved, she is verbally abused by her guard. He declares that “you’re all a bunch of stupid girls” (150) and that “all you stupid b*****s care about is money” (151). She is then “paraded for the press” (152) at the airport. There “reporters screamed out questions” (152) at her. No consideration is given to her potential innocence, nor is any thought spared for the devastating psychological effects that this will have on someone who is still only 14 years old.

Having spent her entire life in a village immersed in cartel violence, trained in the constant need to protect herself—whether by hiding or by self-defense—Ladydi is conditioned to unquestioningly accept the presence of illegal and violent acts, knowing that she is powerless to stop them. To survive, she must act within the very limited range of opportunities available in her world, so she accepts the job that Mike finds for her, knowing that he deals drugs and the family she will work for is likely to be involved with illegal activity. His expensive new car is clearly a product of his role in drug trafficking, but she knows better than to comment on this and places her trust in him as her friend’s brother, someone she has always known. Likewise, when she sees the “Z” tattooed on Mike’s finger she knows this signifies that he belongs to “the most dangerous drug cartel in Mexico” (112), but her circumstances conditioned her to keep quiet. She repeats to herself, “Don’t say anything; don’t say anything” (112).

This tension reaches a crescendo when Mike arrives at the shack with the other drug trafficker. Mike declares, “Don’t worry, man. She’s blind” (116). On one level, this is his pragmatic effort to allay the man’s fears by reassuring him that Ladydi will not be a witness to anything illegal that happens, thus preventing the man from harming her. On another level, it is a metaphor for Ladydi’s position: She must look away and pretend to see nothing, making illegal acts as invisible as she herself was trained to be, as a survival strategy. She is aware that Mike murdered a young girl, admitting to herself, “I knew what happened even though I had not been inside that broken-down shack” (127). However, she silently accepts that nothing can be said or done about it. As she says, “I obeyed. I knew to obey a killer” (120). That Mike has proven himself to be a ruthless murderer makes any attempt to resist him highly perilous. This is especially for a 14-year-old girl with no other support or protection.

As seen in her relationship with Julio, the submissiveness that results from her social conditioning is clear. On a deeper level, she internalized the association of femininity with passivity. She is attracted to someone who “had killed someone with his hands” (139), a patrol guard, and she adopts a highly submissive position in her relationship with him. As she says, “I longed for an order… I wanted to be given instructions. I wanted to obey him. I wanted to kneel” (135). Her desire for Julio seems to be based in the same power dynamics that define her relationship to Mike. This is clear on their day trip, when Ladydi describes how he “liked to treat me like a child” (139) and how she “loved to be his little baby and so I skipped at his side and forgot that he was a killer” (140). The acts of female autonomy she witnessed as a child were rooted in fear—as in the literal and figurative hiding of female children—or resulted in pain and loss—as in her mother’s confrontation of her father, which led to the family’s abandonment. Passivity in her relationship both makes her feel safe, which is unsurprising in someone whose childhood was defined by danger and fear, and is the only strategy she knows for protecting a relationship with a man. She both fears male violence and is attracted to the power and mystique it seems to create in her relationship with Julio. Ladydi’s behavior also responds to the machismo inherent in the hierarchy of the cartels, in which men—macho being the Spanish word for male—gain power, influence, and money by demonstrating their ability to conquer, both by sexual conquests and by physically defeating other men who attempt to challenge them.

Ladydi begins to feel that she was complicit in Mike’s brutality after she discovers that he implicated her in the girl’s murder. As she says, “I did not have to take the road that has always been a river of blood and white milk mixed with car oil” (146). She begins to believe that it is possible for her to begin taking steps to challenge the passive role that she relies on for survival. Her behavior at the press conference indicates the beginning of this sense of being able to resist her fate when, after bowing her head most of the time, she defiantly looks up into the camera and her accusers. She discovers that she can create her own sense of agency and narrative, one that is not dependent on the perceptions or biases of others.