13 minute read
Testimony of Faith - The Hurtado Sisters
TESTIMONY OF FAITH
FROM THE MIRE TO THE MIRACULOUS!
A Compelling Story of Three Sisters
Text by Editor Leo Aguilera
Sisters Jackie Walls, Rosie Estrada, & Josie Barraza
Workers in the field
- PART ONE -
(Editor’s Note: A decade ago we ran the testimonies of the Hurtado sisters. Their dynamic and sometimes harrowing stories are an inspiration of our Savior’s mighty delivering power. We do an encore presentation of their narratives which will be told in four parts. Read again and be prepared to be fully engaged!)
SWEAT AND TEARS
Once California was a part of Mexico--its majestic mountains, fertile valleys, and spectacular coastlines were envied by kingdoms and nations. But it was the Americans who came, hungry for land and gold, who challenged the Mexicans, fought a war, and won the land over 170 years ago. Americans no longer had to squat on the arable land, but now they could own it, farm it, and leave it to their children. In the great Central Valley of the state and the other fertile valleys of Santa Clara, Salinas, and San Fernando, the early twentieth century found those children selling their farms, and these small farms were disappearing to the businessmen who formed large corporate farms. Farming in California became a huge industry, and they needed pickers to harvest the crops. Once again the Mexicans came back to the land, but this time everything was different.
To say that Mexicans faced rough living conditions in the fields is to recognize the demands the farming industry expected of its laborers. The work was usually hot, miserable, and physically exhausting. The crops changed for the picker--from fruit trees to the stoop crops, depending on the season. But it was the stoop crops, sweet potatoes, artichokes, lettuce, cauliflower, that made the picker crawl between the rows, stay on his knees for hours at a time, and bend his back to pull the sack of cotton. The laborers’ wives and daughters were not spared these discomforts, yet all were paid the same starvation wage for each full basket or sack that might be enough to feed one’s family if each family member worked sixteen hours a day.
It was in this culture of labor and poverty that Julio and Joaquina Hurtado started a family. They were migrant workers and newly-weds, she from Texas, he from California, who started picking the harvests in the Imperial Valley of Southern California in the late forties. They soon discovered that to make the most money was to follow the crops’ harvests from one end of the state to the other. For that reason, Rosie was born in San Jose, Josie was born in Ventura, and Jackie was born in Santa Clara, not to mention their other siblings who were born in different locales.
A farm labor camp
The earliest memories of the three sisters were the fields. Their parents needed everyone working. Rosie recalls working with her oldest siblings as young as nine. She remembers the heat, the sweat, and the long hours picking everything from grapes in Fresno, strawberries in Salinas, potatoes and carrots in Watsonville, to string beans in Santa Monica. California was different back then. There was less concrete and more open farmlands between the cities and towns. That is how Rosie remembers seeing the state in the late fifties and early sixties.
She recalls when Josie was born, their mother had to place the newborn under the shade after a good feeding, so she could sleep while their mother picked. But it wasn’t long before other women laborers came to Joaquina and told her of a crying Josie. The young mother had been threatened by her husband to keep picking the vegetables, but she refused and returned to a bawling Josie, covered with insects, begging to be picked up. Someone had to stay home and take care of the young ones, like Jackie, who was the baby of the family of Julio and Joaquina. Turns were taken, but Julio needed everyone picking. Those baskets and sacks had to be filled, weighed, and valued by the quantity to get the few dollars that began to add up by sunset. Josie and Rosie remember at the age of eight and nine, their mother applied lipstick and makeup to their young faces to make them look older, so the foreman of the field would not hesitate to hire them on the spot for the next field to be picked.
SHELTERS WITH NO MERCY
The labor camps were at best shacks of one room for entire families to find shelter, or sometimes, the back of barns would have to do. There were only camping stoves to cook the beans and rice, and heat up the tortillas that were the staples of the migrant families from Mexican roots. Hung blankets served as room dividers, and the outhouse was shared by several families in the row of shacks found on any large corporate farm. With no air conditioning and limited floor heaters, the Hurtados were at the mercy of the weather, which fortunately in California was tolerable year round.
School attendance was another story. Only until the harvest was picked, were the Hurtado children then enrolled in the school of the town they found themselves in late October. Rosie can hardly remember how many schools she and her older siblings attended. She doesn’t recall when she began to read and write. The sisters remember the harvests were the priority of the family. School attendance was sketchy, at best.
The winter months were the cruelest. Most of the fields across the state had been picked. Whatever money their mother had managed to save was for the food they would need until the spring. The girls recall that with the misery of poverty came shame. Teachers soon began to take notice of the Hurtado children. They were the ones without warm clothing to guard against the cold wind and rain. Their shoes were mended to cover up the holes in the soles, heals and toes. After walking to school in a cold downpour, the school secretary would let the Hurtado girls warm up in the office, letting their clothes dry out, before sending them to their classrooms.
A migrant school
AN ABUSER WITH VICES
Back at home, it was not just the poverty that gripped the family with the curse of bitterness. Julio was a ladies’ man, a gambler, and a hard drinker. He was also very jealous of his young wife. It was incomprehensible to the girls seeing their hard-earned money during a hot summer week wasted in one single night at the local beer joint, in the poker room in the back--with a few dollars left over to feed the family until the next pickings. Joaquina had to endure his vices, and then his beatings, if he was so inclined. The girls remember how beautiful both their parents were to their own fault - he to attract the women, she to attract his jealous rage in violent outbursts. And the beatings were not just directed at their young mother. The sisters painfully recall the kick from his heavy boots, and, after a while, they feared to be alone with him. They loved their mother unconditionally, and sadly, many times she took the hits that he intended for them.
One time Julio was out all night, and Joaquina had just put the children to sleep on some packing crates in their shack. She then saw a large lizard head under one crate, and she pulled it out, discovering instead that she was holding onto a large snake. Her screams brought a neighbor in who killed the snake. Upon his return home the next morning, Joaquina told Julio about the neighbor doing the family a favor the night before. Suddenly, Julio began to savagely beat his wife in front of the children - no explanation given. Another time, Josie recalls hugging a puppy in the back seat during a drive. She became aware that her father was watching her in the rear-view mirror. He then stopped the car and began hitting her with a shoe. Again, no explanation was given. His abuse of the family would go on through Rosie’s and Josie’s teens.
Julio was a con man and used his good looks to get that special attention deal on the side, even jeopardizing the security of his family. The sisters reminisce how he used them in several “coyote” schemes at the border between Mexico and the U.S. The illegal aliens were placed under a tarp in their van. Then they and their siblings were seated on top of the tarp, or stretched out, feigning sleep, while Joaquina was passed through customs. Yes, it was their mother who had to drive the immigrants over the border, for Julio refused to do the pick up of the immigrants in Mexico. He would be waiting for them on the U.S. side, where he would collect the money and then make the drop-offs of the immigrants in the various towns of their destinations. Finally, someone told the authorities about Julios’s criminal scheming, but it was Joaquina who was arrested at the border, the children placed in temporary foster homes, and the weeks it took to get Joaquina out of jail and the children out of foster homes before Julio finally stopped this criminal activity.to make a God to whom they could pray. They saw their father make the sign of the cross many times, but it was their mother they remember seeing praying for them and for their safety. But all the sisters admit that there was no personal relationship developed or fostered between them and Jesus Christ. It was a void they did not recognize at the time.
A TURNING POINT OF ABSOLUTE TERROR
Despite the dysfunctional parenting of Julio, he seemed to be a devout Catholic. The most compelling memory of their childhood was taking a trip to Mexico City. There, Julio made his children watch him crawl on the hard stones of the plaza in front of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe for the penance of his sins. Despite the pain and torn knees, the sisters saw him make it into the large church. But it was Joaquina who instilled into them the belief that there was a God to whom they could pray. They say their father make the sign of the cross many times, but it was their mother they remember seeing praying for them and for their safety. But all the sisters admit there was no personal relationship developed or fostered between them and Jesus Christ. It was a void they did not recognize at the time.
Most of the time, the Hurtados stayed in the Los Angeles area. They lived in the projects, and finally a home was bought by their parents in the unincorporated town of City Terrace in East Los Angeles. It was here where the sisters in their early adolescence began sneaking around and drinking any alcoholic beverages they could obtain. They would hide or fool their father when he followed them to see what they were up to. Josie admits that she may have already been an alcoholic in junior high.
The Hurtado marriage was finally reaching a crisis when Rosie and Josie reached their mid-teens. Too many fights, increasing violence in the home, and their father running into the streets, taking a large knife and threatening suicide, took a toll on the sisters.
Then the trauma reached a climax. Josie was sleeping uneasily after her parents had an unruly argument about close relatives. The sound of a gun going off awakened her and her siblings. Josie ran to the living room, finding her father lying on the floor next to the stereo. He had been hastily covered with a sheet. Her mother was standing near the body holding a .22 long rifle, her eyes glazed, and she was muttering incomprehensible words in Spanish. Rosie came running into the room so fast that she slammed into the wall knocking herself down to the floor. Their brother, seeing the horrific scene, began leaping into the air again and again, to- tally in shock. He tried to grab the rifle from his mother, trying to damage and disable it, but Joaquina would not let it go. The children flung the sheet away from the body and found their father drenched in blood. Jackie, only ten-years-old, grabbed towels from the bathroom and ran back to her father, pressing them to his head, trying to stop the flow of blood. Suddenly, their father staggered to his feet and holding his balance against the wall, made his way to the couch where he collapsed, still gasping for breath. Josie heard her mother say to her children, “What do I do? I need to free you from him!” That’s when Josie noticed the green foam coming out of her mother’s mouth, as she quickly walked to the couch, aimed at his head and pulled the trigger one last time.
The screams awakened the entire neighborhood, and the police were there within minutes. The daughters immediately tried to take the blame for the shooting. They loved their mother, and they wanted to protect her. A red-haired cop was surprisingly sympathetic, even to their mother, and quickly surmised what had happened. Their mother was taken away in a catatonic state, and the six children were immediately sent to the home of maternal relatives.
AN UNBELIEVABLE PARDON
Joaquina was placed in the psychiatric ward of the county jail. Three days later, it came to her what she had done. She screamed, and then begged that she be allowed to go to the funeral. She was not permitted. For nine months she went through intense psychoanalysis in prison. Some of the motives that made her pull that trigger twice began to be revealed to her therapists. She knew her husband was not only terrorizing her children but why her daughters feared to be left alone with him. Several times her psychiatrists broke their pencils in disbelief, and two even exclaimed, “What took you so long?” Nine months later, the judge determined on the advice of the state psychologists and supportive character references letters that years of mental, physical, and verbal abuse had caused Joaquina to suffer temporary insanity. It was an incredible miracle for that time that she was released from incarceration to be reunited with her children. The sisters admit they were left psychologically scarred for many years, but at the same time felt RELIEF that the toxic marriage was over.
Now identified as a single-parent family, the Hurtado children would find themselves no longer bound to the fields or their father. Rosie, Josie, and Jackie could sense everything was going to be different. They were young, attractive, and determined to start enjoying life. But they were each heading toward a divine intervention that would light a different path for each sister—like nothing they could ever have imagined!
To be continued in the 2022 Summer issue of The Newsvine to be released the first week of July on issuu.com.
Psalm 18:6 (NLT).
