Adelita and Calista
From Trying to Make It: The Enterprises, Gangs, and People of the American Drug Trade from Cornell University Press.
1 [A Psalme of Dauid.] The Lord is my shepheard, I shall not want.
2 He maketh me to lie downe in greene pastures: he leadeth mee beside the still waters.
3 He restoreth my soule: he leadeth me in the pathes of righteousnes, for his names sake.
4 Yea though I walke through the valley of the shadowe of death, I will feare no euill: for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staffe, they comfort me.
5 Thou preparest a table before me, in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oyle, my cuppe runneth ouer.
6 Surely goodnes and mercie shall followe me all the daies of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for euer.
Psalme 23, King James Bible (1611)
The Town of Guadalupe, which incorporated in 1975, sits just beyond the city limits of Phoenix. The town’s Catholic priest, Father David Myers, has been there, serving the community, since before incorporation. He talked of various drug traffickers and dealers who had come and gone throughout the years. The early ones were Mexican men who had brought part of the wholesale trade with them and whose presence became the lynchpin of the drug trade the community experienced. While drug use continues in the community – glass being the flavor of the day – Father Myers told me that “It’s not common, and there’s not a lot of people doing it.”[1] Those who eventually end up using, dealing, or trafficking represent a minority of the community. However, that minority garners considerable attention from the press, the community, and law enforcement.
I learned from Natividad Mendoza, whose non-profit used to operate in Guadalupe, that the town had, historically, produced street gang members, several of whom, during their incarceration, had become involved with the Arizona Mexican Mafia, which, like elsewhere that has a prison gang with that name, was locally referred to as “the Eme.” One of the highest-ups in the Eme, who at the time was in prison, hailed from Guadalupe. Its street gang culture appears to belong to a particular generation whose members are in their 30s and 40s. Most youths do not participate in gang culture in the same way that the older generation did. Father Myers described the current gang activity of the town: “Some kids [might be] walking down the street looking for a fight and maybe they are high, although not necessarily, and they see some other kids and they say, ‘Well, let’s beat them up.’ And then they say, ‘Well, it’s our gang against your gang.’ That’s about where it’s at.” His description of a small, loosely organized gang presence was supported by local gang members I interviewed.
Nevertheless, as the drug trade and different street gangs have come and gone, the core problems of Guadalupe have remained the same. According to Father Myers, during his 40-year stay, poverty, low graduation rates, and high suicide rates consistently rank as the community’s biggest problems. “Of every 100 children who enter first grade, two graduate from high school,” Father Myers explained. Drugs appear to be a symptom of these prevailing problems.
To illustrate his point, Father Myers recounted a time when he taught an ethics class at the Guadalupe campus of Stone Mountain Community College. He posed the following scenario to his students: “You want to support your family and you can’t get a job and you’ve really, really tried. Really, you’ve tried. You can’t get one. Would it be okay to sell drugs? Everybody said yes. Everybody. Men, women, young, old. They said yeah. And I gave them a scenario in which you have to support your spouse and your children, so it’s not to get rich, just to support your family.”
Julie Marquez, a lawyer who had once defended members of the Cosa Nostra, echoed this sentiment and applied it to a broader scale, in referring to the motivations of the small proportion of people who become gang members, cartel operatives, or mafiosos: “The common denominator in this world of organized crime is poverty. You have to realize that the driving force of crime is economic. People choose to commit crimes because it looks like a good way to get what they want. They continue to do so because it proves to be their best option, all things considered.”
The world of poverty was one that Adelita and Calista knew intimately, while growing up in Guadalupe. As girls, they were childhood friends with similar lives. Both had fathers involved in the drug trade: One man facilitated the importation of cocaine; the other facilitated its sale on the street. Their neighbors included gang members and low-level drug dealers.
As teens, Adelita and Calista began to follow in their fathers’ footsteps and joined their neighborhood street gang. They did not finish high school, but they grew up fast. Calista was pregnant at 14 and became a single parent at 17, when the father of her baby was shot to death. At 18, Adelita pleaded guilty to a drug charge to protect her lover, who had prior convictions, from a prison term much longer than the six years she was sentenced to.
With Adelita’s incarceration in adult prison, the women’s lives diverged. For nearly 24 years, Adelita and Calista traveled along parallel roads, even though their lives crossed through the men in their families who participated in the drug trade as members of a street gang, and, later, as members of the Eme. Calista, who was the epitome of Father Myers’ example, developed a business that was low-profile and managed to avoid trouble.
“I never wanted to rely on selling drugs. I always had regular jobs. But whenever I would become unemployed, I would always fall back to selling. That was my biggest problem,” Calista said. “I didn’t like it, but it was the only way I knew how to make enough money to pay for everything. Even when I was in school, I would sell. It was easy money and I had so many mouths to feed; it was a way for me to do that. Throughout my life, I guess I just met the right people. I would sell for the Eme and for myself. Because of that, I had little risk. I never sold the drugs on the street. I’ve always had people under me. I just managed the spots.”
For many years, Calista enjoyed the protection of the Eme and did not have to worry about any threats to her illicit enterprise. She kept her operation low-key, dealing to known associates to avoid the risks associated with selling to strangers.
By contrast, Adelita spent most of the next two and half decades developing a presence in Perryville, the prison where she invariably returned. With no help to be had, her addictions got the better of her; the dirty urine tests resulted in one parole violation after another. Her prolonged and repeated experience of being incarcerated forced her to teach herself how prison politics worked. She became the top inmate on the women’s prison yard, astutely maintaining order and adjudicating disputes among her peers.
But then Adelita and Calista’s roads crossed. Having spent three months short of 24 years in prison, almost her entire adult life, Adelita was ready to transition out of prison and stay out. Meanwhile, Calista was adjusting to the notion that she would be going to prison, as she prepared to plead guilty to a drug charge that would send her to Perryville for four and a half years. She had gotten romantically involved with a member of the Eme, who was considered a good earner. He had set up a trap house in her home and was selling drugs.
“I didn’t like it, but I went along with it. He was the boss. Whatever he said, went,” she told me. “I didn’t know how to stop it. I guess you could say that I was intimidated.” Calista feared that if she turned her back on her boyfriend, his fellow gang members might retaliate. So, she pleaded out and was sentenced to four and a half years of incarceration; she would serve every day of that sentence.
The violence and coercion Calista experienced formed a common but seldom assessed story among women who are incarcerated, and such violence and coercion may compel women to reoffend.[2] Violence and coercion also formed a strong undercurrent in Adelita’s life. Her partner in the free world was constantly jealous and controlling. Although he was uninterested in returning to a life of dealing drugs, his behavior meant that Adelita, like many women who struggle to establish financial autonomy upon release from prison, could not live independently.[3] As the women transitioned into each other’s domains, each helped the other to face her new reality. They found comfort in the protection of the Lord as promised in Psalm 23, but they knew that they needed to learn from one another if they were to survive.
Knowing the rules of prison is critical in serving out a first prison sentence minimally scathed, so Adelita prepared Calista for life in Perryville. First, however, Calista had to arrange for her departure from the free world, the most important matter being the wellbeing of her young children. Adelita’s child had been raised by members of her extended family; the same was about to be true for Calista’s children. Who would care for them, pay their bills, and ensure that their future would not be marred by the temptations of a life of crime? These were Calista’s primary concerns.
Adelita, heading in the other direction, was also concerned and scared, and rightfully so. Calista introduced Adelita to people who could employ her and help her get on her feet and teach her about life outside prison. But Adelita, now far from the heights of power she had occupied within prison, found herself worse off than a nobody. Nobodies concern no one. But Adelita was a somebody, a somebody with a criminal record, a scarlet letter that for most is a brand burned into the skin rather than a piece of felt pinned onto a dress. The law-and-order crowd repeat the old adage: “If you do the crime, you do the time.” However, for the vast majority of former inmates, the time never ends.
Without resources, the stigma of a criminal record is hard to outrun. Adelita was not among those, like television personality Martha Stewart, actor Robert Downey, Jr., former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, or former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who could have a second act, with no detrimental strings attaching them to their pasts. Adelita, like the majority of formerly incarcerated people, was not free to resume life as a restored person who had atoned for her misdeeds. And most of the times she was released from prison, she lacked the capital and support she would need to get back on her feet, make a fresh start, and avoid reincarceration.[4] The struggles that Adelita had faced upon her release were ones that Calista, later, would be destined to face upon hers.
****
Adelita needed help moving some furniture, so she enlisted me, the only person she knew with a truck and time. I met her with the red pickup at her mother’s house at eight o’clock in the morning. Hungry for breakfast, I offered to take us to a café on the way. When we got to the café, Adelita’s eyes lit up. She lagged behind the hostess, walking slowly to our table, absorbing all of the décor and ambiance of the place. We ordered coffee; that was the easy part. The menu options were a bit too much for Adelita; in prison she never had very much choice. She settled on a bagel with cream cheese. As we waited for the food to arrive, we chatted about what it was like for her to be out and about.
“This is only the third time that I’ve been out someplace since I got out of prison. It’s really nice here. My nephew took me out one day, and another time we went to Denny’s. It doesn’t sound like much, I know, but I enjoyed it.”
The waitress brought us our bagels, and Adelita was thrilled.
“Oh, yay! They’re toasted. You know in the joint, back in the day, we used to take those old-fashioned popcorn cookers they gave us to toast the bagels in the microwave.”
She spread her cream cheese evenly on the two bagel halves and bit into it cautiously, somehow doubting the flavor she had chosen.
“Wow. This is really good!” Adelita exclaimed after one bite. “It might be the best bagel I’ve ever tasted. I’m going to have to tell my sister about this place.”
Enjoying her experience at the café was part of Adelita’s adjustment to her new life, a life, she insisted, without further incarceration.
“Things are different now. Lots of my siblings, who I used to do drugs with, have died. I don’t have them as partners in crime anymore. I miss them, but I don’t have them as triggers anymore. I’m learning the value of honestly earned money. It used to be, when I was selling drugs, easy come and easy go with the money I earned. Now, I appreciate the few things that I have been able to get for me and my family. I’m trying to find a job, you know, but it’s been hard. Lots of people won’t hire felons.”
“Didn’t you tell me you got some kind of license when you were in prison?”
“Yeah. I did. But I did that more as a challenge for me, not because I really wanted to do that work. My big problem here is that I don’t have my driver’s license.”
“Why can’t you get it? Did it expire when you were in prison?”
“I owe something like sixteen hundred bucks on it. I have to pay that before I can apply for it again.”
“What on earth did you do? You’ve been locked up for so much time.”
“It’s from something that happened in ’94. I was in an accident without a license. I never paid the fines and, over those twenty years, the interest on them just accumulated.”
That financial burden was just one of the many obstacles – the ongoing punishments – Adelita faced in her journey to reintegrate into society. I paid our bill, and we left to drop off the furniture. As we drove through the streets of Phoenix, Adelita discussed the frustrations she was facing in her new position. With no license and no car, she couldn’t move easily through the city. With no steady work, she couldn’t provide as adequately as she would like for her family. And, she struggled with her relationship with her child, which had frayed during her long incarceration. As she talked to me, she had worry painted across her face, as if the weight of her many, new free-world concerns could come crashing down on her head at a moment’s notice.
We pulled up to Adelita’s relative’s house, located in a well-kept and decidedly middle-class neighborhood in south Phoenix. As I backed into the driveway, I was concerned about blocking the neighbor’s exit.
“Oh, don’t worry about that. That vato got busted for selling coke or some shit. Nobody lives there anymore. Sometimes, the kids go around back and play on the trampoline that got left behind.”
We collected and dropped off our cargo and continued with the day. Adelita reflected on the many things that were new to her upon her release from prison, such as the new light rail and other technological advancements that had changed everyday life.
“I have only been here once and that was when I rode the light rail,” Adelita said as I navigated the streets near the downtown campus, looking for parking. “I had read about it when I was sitting in prison, and I wanted to ride it, to see what it was like.[5] I thought it would go lightning fast. It didn’t, but it was all right. A lot has changed, you know, since I was out before. It’s funny. I don’t even know what all of the rules are out here. You see those lines there? I don’t even know what they mean. And I still know all of the prison rules inside and out.”
I found parking, and we went up to my office as Adelita needed to use a computer to complete an assessment for a job application she had recently filed. I showed her how to look for free things on Craigslist and how to check her email. All these skills came slowly to her. She was figuring out some of this newfangled technology, especially enjoying the marvels of Facebook on her smartphone, an older model that one of her family members had given her so she could be connected to her family in the modern way. Adelita resisted other bits, saying that she wanted to live as basic as possible. She was an anachronism. I was often surprised to learn what Adelita had never experienced. With her skill set, she was a person who would have functioned well about fifteen years before her release, but as she sat in Perryville, the world had passed her by.
That evening, there was a quinceañera and I was invited along.[6] We rolled in a bit late; there was no beer or water left. The only beverage available was hard liquor. Since I was tired and driving, I passed. The friendly barman, who was packing up, poured out three shots of vodka for Adelita. She picked up the small white cup and smelled it.
“Whoa! What is this stuff?”
“It’s Ketel One,” I said.
“Ketel One? What’s that?”
“It’s a kind of vodka.”
“Oh, okay. You’ll have to forgive me. You know I’ve been away for a long time.”
“Sure, don’t worry about it. I only know that brand because I used to tend bar. I don’t drink much hard liquor myself.”
Adelita sipped on the chilled, clear liquid, and, before I knew it, all three of the little cups were sitting stacked up within each other, empty.
“Wow, I’m already starting to feel buzzed.”
“Vodka will do that to you.”
“You know, I’ve never had it before.”
“Really? I guess it’s better than diesel fuel.”
“What’s that?”
“Grain alcohol.”
“People drink that?”
“Yeah, it’s stupid cheap.”
“I don’t know how people drink this shit,” Adelita said wincing as she sipped on another shot of vodka.
“Well, a lot of times people drink vodka with a mixer. Put it in some orange juice and it’ll go down easy.”
After a short while, Adelita started to get woozy. She sat and smoked a cigarette and greeted different people who she hadn’t seen for years. Her drunken state accelerated quickly, and, as the party came to a close, I offered to drive her home. We got into the truck and set out for her house. As she sat slumped to the side in the passenger seat, she became aware of how drunk she was.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to get this drunk. You have to realize, I’ve never drank this stuff before. Oh my God. I can’t believe how bad I feel. My head is spinning.”
It was kind of funny, actually. It reminded me of the first time I got totally shitfaced drunk. I was visiting my friend in Italy and I took advantage of being able to drink freely and legally before the age of 21. After a splendid evening, I was sick and throwing up in the back of his car. Fortunately for me, Adelita didn’t puke, but I saw a glimpse of my nineteen-year-old self in her stupor.
“I’m never going to drink this shit again. Oh … my … God. It’s really hot in here.”
I was kind of cold, but I blasted the air anyway.
“Ha! That’s what we’ve all said. Next time you’re at a cookout, you’ll be asking for those margaritas again.”
“No. I mean it,” she slurred. “This feels awful. I don’t know why people drink that stuff. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Well, how on earth did you get that drunk?” I asked. After all, she only had maybe four standard drinks. “Did you eat tonight?”
“Not really.”
“Well, that’s a rookie mistake. You’ve got to eat.”
“Well, I don’t think I could eat anything right now. Can you pull over somewhere?”
“Do you think you’re going to throw up?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, we’re almost to your house. We’ll be there in five minutes. Do you think you can hold out?”
Like a teenager, she didn’t have keys to the house, so she pulled out her phone and called her mom to let her in. Her mom was up, waiting for her to come home. I pulled up to the house, opened the gate, and watched her go to the door, reminding her to drink plenty of water. The next day, she told me how, after downing a glass of water, she passed out with her clothes on – the first time that had happened to her while on alcohol. As a kid, she skipped that experience and went straight to heroin. Free again, she was able to dial back and have a proper introduction to the age of nineteen, even if it happened twenty-five years late.
Adelita didn’t manage to stay out of prison; she relapsed and violated her parole once again, but that stint would be her last. Once out, she continued to look for work, occasionally getting some. In prison, she had exhibited skills that would have made her an excellent employee. She was organized, regimented, and rule-based, but in the free world she was relegated to doing menial labor; in another life, she could have been a general manager for a successful business. In 2020, she had been out of prison for four straight years, her longest consecutive stretch of freedom since she was a girl. She had finally succeeded in avoiding the behaviors that had deprived her of her freedom for so many years. She lived her life honestly, contributing to the needs of her community and encouraging young people in her circle to avoid crime and the trouble it brought.
Just before Halloween, a group of four people went on a robbing spree throughout the greater Phoenix area.[7] Their last stop was Guadalupe. As they attempted to rob someone, Adelita intervened, preventing the robbery. But one of the assailants shot her. Adelita was taken to the hospital, where she died six weeks later from her injuries; she was 49 years old. Adelita’s freedom had been taken from her once again. And despite her gang affiliation, a court never took her freedom from her because of that affiliation; rather the revocation of her freedom was a function of two pernicious plagues: addiction and gun violence. That her killers are in custody and will likely be convicted, unlike Facundo’s murderers in Juárez, is only a small consolation.
For millions of former prisoners, redemption is elusive, with society broadly stigmatizing them for the rest of their lives and refusing to recognize them as people who can positively contribute to society once again. Society condemns them, at worst, to a future of further incarceration, to be expressly erased through their express exclusion, or, at best, to a future of toiling at the margins of society, to be forgotten in their obscurity. But Adelita had value in her community. There, she was living proof to her community that violence and a life of crime were best avoided. As an elder stateswoman, she had respect and people listened to her as she warned them off of illicit activities.
Yet, outside her community, her accomplishments followed the typical script that rendered them invisible and unrecognized. Nevertheless, Adelita’s last act of life was selfless, heroic, and visible. She came to the aid of a stranger on the street. She lived her ethics and refused to stand by and allow harm to come to another person while she was present. And despite that, Adelita was never named in any of the newspaper articles that covered the incident. The journalists only reported that the robbery was interrupted by a woman, and that she was in critical condition, but was expected to survive her wounds. When she died, there was no follow up to the original story; no obituary appeared in any newspaper. However, an outpouring of love, stories, and admiration for her bravery, reminding us that she had intervened when too many of us would have been afraid to do so, adorned her Facebook page. And though Adelita struggled to shake off the negative labels associated with her incarceration and gang association as she tried to navigate and reintegrate into the free world, it was clear that, within her community, she was recognized for what she was: a hero, unbothered by anyone else’s judgements.
[1] Glass is methamphetamine.
[2] Barbara L. Zust, “Assessing and Addressing Domestic Violence Experienced by Incarcerated Women,” Creative Nursing 14, no. 2 (2008); Donna Blair-Lawton, Elaine Mordoch, and Wanda Chernomas, “Putting on the Same Shoes: Lived Experiences of Women Who Are Reincarcerated,” Journal of Forensic Nursing 16, no. 2 (2020).
[3] Cynthia K. Sanders, “Promoting Financial Capability of Incarcerated Women for Community Reentry: A Call to Social Workers,” Journal of Community Practice 24, no. 4 (2016).
[4] Mark Halsey, Ruth Armstrong, and Serena Wright, “‘F*ck It!’: Matza and the Mood of Fatalism in the Desistance Process,” British Journal of Criminology 57, no. 5 (2017).
[5] The Phoenix Metro Light Rail began operation in late 2008.
[6] A quinceañera is the celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday. The girl is dressed up in a formal evening dress, usually a ball gown.
[7] Laura Lollman, “4 Arrested In Connection To Deadly Armed Robbery in Mesa,” AZ Family (Phoenix) 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20210107011354/https://www.azfamily.com/news/4-arrested-in-connection-to-deadly-armed-robbery-in-mesa/article_3978568a-1895-11eb-9045-4fa6d8c66b7a.html.