Marta loved to design clothes and she loved to sew them. She taught herself, using scraps of fabric to make clothes for dolls, and later made clothes for herself and for her mother and sisters. She filled notebooks with her designs, but the family couldn’t afford the fine fabrics she craved. She made do with coarse materials, but the family was still by far the best dressed in their lower middle class neighborhood. When she was fifteen in 1965, she begged her parents to send her to Tegucigalpa, Honduras’s capital, so she could apprentice with a dressmaker and designer known throughout the country for dressing for the elite and wealthy. Her father was a tailor in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second largest city, and while he wanted to make Marta happy, he doubted that she could get into the great man’s workshop. He was touched by her brave spirit though, and so he took her to the capital on the bus, with her notebooks and a trunk full of her designs, and sat in the waiting room while Marta asked for a meeting with Mr. Alvarez, the famous designer. She got the interview that very day, and as her father later said in confidence to her mother, it wasn’t because of her looks either. It must have been talent and determination, since Marta was the plainest in the family, and had little time for social graces.
Marta stayed in the capital and worked for the designer for almost a year, learning to cut fabric. She would have gone on in her apprenticeship, but her father died suddenly, and she had to return to San Pedro Sula to help her mother run the tailor shop. Her sisters were still in high school, and had no interest in tailoring. Her mother did the business side, and Marta made the clothes: suits and shirts for men, as her father had done for thirty years. She hired a young man to do the measuring and fitting since it was completely unacceptable for a woman to measure a man, and she began making clothes for women too. Her sisters grew up and married, and Marta and her mother kept the shop going. It wasn’t the life of high fashion that Marta had dreamed of, but it did allow her artistic scope, particularly when her customers gave her a free hand. The business did well until the early 1990s when rival criminal gangs warred over who owned San Pedro Sula, and the middle class customers who had been loyal to Tito’s Tailoring for generations fled the city for safer suburbs, or the capital, or the US.
One of Marta’s sisters, Rocio, had gone to the US on a visitor’s visa, and then met and married an American. When she became a citizen in 1995, she offered to bring her mother to the US as a resident, but Marta’s mother was hesitant to leave Marta. Under US visa laws, permanent residence is immediate for parents of US citizens, but brothers and sisters of US citizens have to wait in line. The line might take years; the US Congress determines the number of visas available every year, and there are never enough for all those who want them. The tailoring business had fallen away to nearly nothing by 1995, and their old neighborhood was now ugly with burnt-out buildings and ankle-deep trash. It was dangerous to go out even during the day. Marta urged her mother to go to the States, and told her that she herself would get a visitor’s visa and come to visit. Marta’s mother made her promise that she would move from the neighborhood and live with a sister and her family in the capital, where she would be safer and could try to get work. Then when Rocio’s visa petition for Marta became available, Marta could get her permanent resident card and come to the US.
After her mother left, Marta sold the sewing machines for what little she could, and she did try to live with her sister, her sister’s husband, and their four children in their small apartment in the capital. But she felt that she was in the way, and she could not find a job, no matter how many tailoring shops she visited to show her portfolio. She knew what they said when she left each shop: she was too old. She had thought it herself when she had her own business; she wanted young people who she could train in the way she wanted, not those who already had their ways set.
She applied for a US visitor’s visa twice, and was turned down each time. Each visa appointment cost $50 US dollars, money she had to borrow from her sister. She was 45 years old and felt that she had come to the end of her options in Honduras. She borrowed money from another sister, and flew to Tijuana, Mexico. There she found a coyote, a smuggler of human beings, and paid to be taken across the border as part of a group of young men and a few young women. She was older by 20 years than the oldest in the group, and she struggled to keep up. She made it to San Diego, and she got a bus to Seattle where her sister and mother lived. She lived in her sister’s mother-in-law apartment with her mother, and got a job in the clothing alterations department in a big department store in downtown Seattle. After a few years, she had saved enough money to open a little alterations shop of her own in Burien, a town south of Seattle where many Hispanic people lived, and she designed and sewed dresses for recent immigrants for weddings and other special occasions.
Her mother died in 2001, and her sister was divorced shortly afterwards. Her sister had to sell the house, and Marta went out on her own to look for a place to live. She found a trailer park in Burien that she liked, and bought her own trailer to set on her rented plot. She was surprised by the sense of freedom she felt, living alone for the first time in her life. She thought she might be lonely, and she considered what she would do if she did. She could join a church, or try one of the new internet dating services, or join a singles group. But she wasn’t lonely. She worked most days from 9-7 p.m., except Sundays when she worked in her tiny garden, cooked for the week, cleaned, did her errands, and read fashion magazines for new ideas.
She didn’t know most of her neighbors, except for a friendly Mexican family that invited her to their many gatherings. Their trailer was no larger than hers, but they had three children and various other family that stayed for periods of time. She turned them down most of the time, but went for an hour or so sometimes, bringing her special dish, pan de coco – coconut bread rolls, or sometimes fried sweet plantains with sour cream. One night, one of the children brought home a puppy, of some indeterminate mixed heritage that he had found walking alone along a main road, but his parents refused to let him keep it. Marta surprised herself and them by saying that she would take it. She had never had a dog in her life, or ever thought she wanted one.
The first few weeks were confusing, both for Marta and the puppy, but they both persevered by some grace, and by the time three months had gone by, they were inseparable. She named the puppy Jennifer, an American name she had heard and liked, and took her to the shop every day. Jennifer didn’t shed hair, which was fortunate, and she was of a peaceful and friendly disposition. Customers mostly liked her, and Jennifer knew how to stay out of the way if someone didn’t like dogs. Marta started taking long walks with Jennifer at midday, which was good for both of them, and going to a dog park on the weekends so Jennifer could play with other dogs. By the time six months had gone by and Jennifer was no longer a puppy, Marta could not imagine life without her. Jennifer slept at Marta’s feet, ate when Marta ate, and learned to chase balls and return them for treats, which made Marta laugh.
A year after Jennifer came to live with her, Marta went one summer evening to the Mexican family’s trailer for a birthday party for one of the children. She left Jennifer at home since she thought she was better off away from the noise and confusion of the party, with so many people in such a small space. Right before Marta got up to leave the party, four agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement knocked on the door, pushed it open, and arrested every one of the adults, including Marta, after demanding that everyone show them “papers.” No one had papers to show, and they were all handcuffed with their hands behind their backs, put into a van, and after a two hours’ wait while the agents loaded more handcuffed people into the van, driven to the immigration detention center in Tacoma. The agents took the children to a neighbor’s trailer, a neighbor that the family didn’t know well, but who said they’d take them when ICE asked.
To be continued...
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