Retired From the Brutal Streets of Mexico, Sex Workers Find a Haven: Casa Xochiquetzal, named after the Aztec goddess of beauty and sexual love, opened its doors in 2006 after Carmen Muñoz, a former prostitute, discovered some of her former colleagues sleeping under cardboard in La Merced, a popular red-light district nearby. After a lifetime spent working the streets, the women were destitute and alone, and had nowhere to go.
Ms. Muñoz took them in and began looking for allies. A group of prominent Mexican feminists offered to help, and with private and public money, plus a building lent free of charge by the Mexico City Mayor’s Office, they founded Casa Xochiquetzal, a haven where older prostitutes rescued from the streets could live with dignity.
Angie in her room. Mexico City, Jan 2018.
Read the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/world/americas/mexico-prostitutes-shelter.html
“It is a recurrent fact that family members, even their children, abandon them, even hurt them, when they find out they are sex workers,” said Jesica Vargas González, the shelter’s director. “It is still a very stigmatized occupation.”
Violence and abuse, damage and loss, are the threads that link all the stories in the house. Maria Norma Ruiz Sánchez, 65, was raped when she was 9, while walking back from school in a small rural town in Jalisco. The scar on her left thigh from the knife ripping off her school uniform is still there.
She ran away from home at 14, to escape her abusive brother. A truck driver gave her a ride to San Francisco. There, she spent her 15th birthday alone in a bedroom, eating chicken sandwiches and drinking beers.
But before long she returned to Mexico. She had the first of her four children at 16, worked in the fields, owned a cabaret, became a professional wrestler and had countless lovers but only one real love. She also tried to kill herself four times, the last time in a rented room at the Bar Nebraska on the outskirts of Guadalajara.
Maria Norma Ruiz Sánchez, 65 (Normota), is surprised by a birthday cake at Casa Xochiquetzal, a shelter home in Mexico City for elderly sex workers rescued from the streets.
Ms. Sánchez still occasionally goes to her office, as she calls it, a park by the Hidalgo subway station where new clients and old memories converge in a haze. “I’m very tired, everything hurts,” she said. “I make jokes about my life so I can live day to day, but my sadness has no end.”
“I never want to go back to the streets. It’s too hard. You lose your dignity as a human being.”
Norma Angélica Sánchez Garduza, 53
The 16 residents, ages 53 to 87, are responsible for cooking their meals and cleaning their rooms and all the public areas. Here, Angie takes a break while cleaning the bathroom.
Marbella Aguilar keeps her collection of used books tucked into a hidden shelf in her room at Casa Xochiquetzal, a big yellow colonial house in the heart of Mexico City’s bustling downtown.
“I love reading and writing,” said Ms. Aguilar, 61. “Poetry, prose, anything. I can’t go to sleep without my books next to me.” She mentions “Les Misérables” and “Lolita” and the works of Pablo Neruda and Leo Tolstoy.
“I don’t want to talk about my past, only forget.”
Marbella Aguilar, 61
Marbella working at the quinceañera doll shop across the street from Casa Xochiquetzal, a shelter home in Mexico City for elderly sex workers rescued from the streets.
She does not like to talk about her past, and every time she starts her story she cannot hold back the tears. Instead, she recited part of a poem she wrote:
“I am the one who loves you
I am the one that listens to you when you are sad
I am the one that comforts you in your nights of pain
I am the one that warms you when you are cold
And even when you ignore me
I’ll always be there for you.”
.
“It still hurts me, the remorse. What hurts me the most was having to do it.”
Sol, 60
Patricia Robles Orozco (Paty) 68, holds a picture of herself at 18 in her room at Casa Xochiquetzal.
Payi was a vedete, a cabaret star. She has many newspaper clippings with photos of her. Many details about her are unclear, since she can't hear or speak. She also lost vision on her right eye.
Paty in her room, where she likes to spend the afternoons coloring printed out drawings.
Raquel was part of the first group of women to move into the house in 2006.
Her husband was killed by his drunken coworkers, pushed out of a third floor hotel room window. At 22 and with three young children and no family in Michoacán, she started cooking: tacos, puzzles, tamales, tostadas. But the money just wasn't enough.
“ I managed to put all my children through school", she says, with a proud smile. "I bought my daughters two typewriters, one for each, so they could do their homework. And not just any typewriters. The Olivetti, you know? The good ones."
Norma Angélica Sánchez Garduza, 53, (left) known as Angie, with a shelter volunteer. That day Angie was in charge of cooking and serving lunch.
The neighbors also call her Maria Felix, an allusion to the famous Mexican actress and singer. She likes to dress up. Always in full skirts, high heels, a scarf around her neck. Orange lipstick, a bit smudged. She's been living in the shelter for 5 years but dreams of going back to her childhood state of Tabasco.
Rosa Belén Calderón Velázquez, 68. She likes to be called Belén: "There are too many Rosas", she says. She started working at the Salon Bombay, a cabaret in Mexico City, when she was 17. She was a single mother of a 2 year old girl then. "I needed to work to buy her food, clothes."
She was first introduced to prostitution by her own husband, him a 30 year old alcoholic mariachi, her a 14 year old girl - he took her to a prostitution house in Oaxaca. "I left him, but I didn't know I was already pregnant."
Belén likes to keep her room at Casa Xochiquetzal sparkling clean and is always busy mopping, dusting and fumigating everywhere. " People say I'm cold. But I can't cry, it just doesn't happen to me."
Norma Sanchez Espinoza (Normita), 83.
Normita was married young to a French American truck driver. When he died and left her alone, she couldn't raise their son by herself. " I loved working as a janitor at the airport", she says. " They gave us food. I never enjoyed having to work as a sex worker. Made me very sad".
Norma Sanchez Espinoza (Normita), 83, during her 83rd birthday celebration.
Maria Ramirez Canela, 76.
Canela was found sleeping under cardboard boxes, just outside where today is Casa Xochiquetzal. She's been living in the house since it opened its doors. " if I could live again, I would rather be alone than in bad company", she says.