The Girl Was a Fighter

Cristina Figueroa

In 2011 and 2012, while more than 900 people were being murdered on the streets of Chicago, creative-writing students from DePaul University fanned out all over the city to interview people whose lives have been changed by the bloodshed. The result is How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence, an extraordinary and eye-opening work of oral history.

Told by real people in their own words, the book contains the extraordinary stories of 34 Chicagoans. This is one of them.

Cristina Figueroa has seen youth violence from many angles. The child of a Puerto Rican mother and a Mexican-American father, she grew up in a home where beatings and fights were regular occurrences. She also experienced bullying in elementary school. And, during her teen years on the Northwest Side, she explains, “a lot of my friends were gangbangers, because at the time, that’s who I felt had my back.”

As a runaway teen mother, she found herself in an abusive relationship, facing a dead-end future. Determined to turn her life around, Figueroa earned her GED at the age of 22. Since then, she has received a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and a master’s degree in public administration from DePaul University, where she teaches parttime. From 2001 to 2006, she was a juvenile probation officer in Lake County, Illinois, counseling, supervising and helping to rehabilitate young people. Now she works with adult offenders as U.S. probation officer.

A short, dark-haired woman in her early 40s, Figueroa maintains a youthful appearance and has an abiding compassion and empathy for at-risk youth.

Kids are not born bad. There are very few sociopaths out there. Kids are not inherently bad. That’s learned behavior. And I think that if people take the time to investigate kids’ lives and what they go through, it will all make sense to them why they are behaving the way they are behaving.

As a child, I experienced a lot of domestic violence. There were a lot of fights between my parents. My mom was ultimately the victim. That started before I could remember, and it was pretty much all I knew up until I was a teenager.

I always knew when there would be a fight just based on how my dad rang the doorbell. I don’t know why he didn’t just use a key, but he always rang the doorbell when he came home from work, and I could always tell when it was going to be a bad night. It was almost like Pavlov’s dog. You hear a certain ring and you know what your response should be. I knew where emotionally and psychologically I needed to put myself. That’s not healthy for any child. People can’t expect kids to be subjected to that type of environment and to grow up psychologically healthy.

Did I get hit? Yeah, we all got hit. I think my brothers got it much worse than I did. My dad definitely used corporal punishment. Sometimes he would go overboard. The thing about my dad is that he didn’t take pleasure in it. I know that’s how he grew up. He was subjected to very serious abuse, not only at home, but at school. And so that’s how he dealt with my brothers. Back then, it was very difficult to handle and to understand, and I felt a very deep sense of hate. I was robbed of my childhood, because I always lived in fear.

Aside from the violence in the home, there were a lot of issues in school. I mean, fights and things of that nature. I was bullied all the way from first grade to seventh grade, just constant bullying. I remember having to run home from school. You hear people talking, and someone would come up to you and say, “Such and such is going to wait for you after school,” because they wanted to fight. So I would then have to start plotting my exit strategy. I lived seven blocks from my school, Haugan Elementary, in Albany Park. So the moment the bell rang, I would take off running, and I would run nonstop, and I’d have crowds of people chasing me. And this would happen constantly.

The isolation that you feel sometimes, feeling defenseless, both at home and at school, when you can’t stop it, being a victim of it, it’s very impactful. At some point, you get so tired of it. You know, it’s that saying, “When you can’t beat them, join them.” So it just came to the point where I said I was no longer going to become a victim and I became an aggressor.

My first fight was in the seventh grade. A girl and I just kind of got in a spat in the library. Her name was Alma. I will never forget that it was in the library. And I remember she said, “Your mother’s a bitch.”

And I just said, “No. Now you’re going to wait for me after school.”

She came out ready to fight, and we had a crowd, and I fought her. And unfortunately I wound up beating her ass. I say “unfortunately” because, all of a sudden, people started to be nice to me because they saw that I was able to fight. Then it gave me a sense of empowerment and I was no longer scared, so when things would occur, I wasn’t running from it anymore. Now I was confronting it, but confronting it aggressively. I was ready to fight.

Although it empowered me, I hated it. I was very, very good at what I called “verbal judo,” very good at talking my way out of things. Sometimes, when I could sense when something was escalating, I would quickly be able to de-escalate the situation verbally because I didn’t want it to result in a fight. My biggest fear was that I would wind up in a fight and they would wind up killing me. So I didn’t run around looking for fights, but I wasn’t going to back down from one, because I felt that if I backed down, I’d become the victim again.

I was 17 or 18 when I left home. You know, I don’t remember the exact situation. I know that it was a fight with my dad. I’m not necessarily going to blame him for the fight. I know that it was because of something that I did. At that point, I was just a rebellious, hard-to-deal-with teenager. And I’m going to take full responsibility, because I just didn’t care. I went to a friend’s house for a little bit, and then I kind of bounced around wherever I could stay. If I was able to sleep somewhere, I slept somewhere, and if I didn’t have a place to sleep, I would just stay up all night. Hang out with whoever was willing to hang out. All night. I did that for about two months.

Then during that two-month time period, I met my daughter’s father on a street corner. I was waiting for the bus and he was at a gas station. And he stopped. He said hello. We talked. We exchanged numbers—pager numbers. I didn’t have a phone. We just started talking, and then we went out on a couple of dates with some friends. I didn’t want to go out with him by myself. And I would say about two or three months afterwards, I found out I was pregnant. And in some sick kind of way, it was almost like, “Yes, now I’m pregnant. I got somewhere to live.”

And so I moved in with him into an apartment where he had no gas and no light because he couldn’t pay the gas or light. They shut it off. I’ll never forget. It was February 1991 when I moved into that apartment, and it was horribly, horribly cold. I was still in school—Wells High School, which is in West Town. Even though I ran away from home, I was still going to school, but I was always afraid that my parents would show up there trying to find me. Now I was pregnant and didn’t want my parents to find me, so I said that’s it and I decided to drop out.

But I didn’t even know this guy, clearly. After three months, he started to become physically abusive. And I didn’t want to say anything to anybody. And at the same time, in some sick kind of way, I had developed a love for him. I was in love, or whatever that was, at the time. He wasn’t only physically abusive, but he was psychologically abusive. He would do things like go out and not come home, and I wouldn’t know where he was. There was this whole fear: Is he dead or is he alive? I would imagine that he would be with somebody else. That was very difficult. I couldn’t sleep, and here I was pregnant. I had no job. I had no education. I had no insurance. I had nothing, so now I was fully dependent on him.

For months, my parents didn’t know if I was dead or alive. But my best friend was in total disagreement with what I was doing. So one day, she figured out a way to get in contact with my mom, and my mom showed up at the apartment. My parents were basically, “We don’t want you to struggle. We want this to be over and we want to help you.” That pretty much mended the relationship with my parents. My dad just wanted to make sure that I was okay. And I let them back into my life and started over with them.

My parents helped us get a nice little apartment, and my dad gave us the security deposit. They gave us a whole bunch of furniture. We had a pretty nice place to live in Humboldt Park. But the day that I was giving birth, the moment I was giving birth to my daughter, I could hear him on the phone with another woman and that changed my life—I mean, big time. The rage and the violence just came back. I was tremendously hurt, because here I was having this baby. I was a mother, and now I had to deal with something I’d never dealt with. It affected me so much psychologically and emotionally that I found myself fighting a lot with him. And this time, when he would fight me, I would fight back. I’d come out really beat up.

And so in 1993, when my daughter Syra was 2 years old, we had a really big fight, and I called the police. And the police came and he was just wearing jogging pants, no shoes, no socks, no shirt, and it was winter. It was December 10th. And there was so much snow outside. And so they were going to take him into custody and he was begging me, “Don’t let them take me. Don’t let them take me. Don’t press charges. Please, please just don’t.”

I was just done. I looked at the cops. I just said, “Take him.” When I said that, all I felt was a fist right in my face. He punched me so hard and I hit the ground and there was blood everywhere. And the cops were struggling with him to handcuff him, so they started beating him to restrain him, to handcuff him. And they were walking him out the door, and, the moment they got out the door, they all slipped and fell because of the snow. So when the two police officers and my daughter’s father slipped and fell, he jumped up and took off running. And he was handcuffed. They took off running and they couldn’t find him.

They looked and looked and looked. They called other cops, and other cops came, and when they couldn’t find him, one of the cops came in and said to me, “You’re under arrest.”

And I looked at him and I was like, “What do you mean I’m under arrest?”

“You’re under arrest for obstructing the police.”

And I’m like, “What are you talking about? What do you mean obstructing the police?”

And he’s like, “Ma’am, just come with us.”

Now, I had my 2-year-old daughter and my 4-year-old stepson with me, because at this point, his son was living with us because his mother had abandoned him. They put me in the police car with these two kids and took me to the police station. While I was sitting in the police station, confused, a cop came up to me and told me, “This is off the record. If you ever say it, I’m going to deny it. The only reason we are taking you into custody is that he escaped handcuffed, and we can’t find him, and we need to blame somebody. If we don’t, we could be suspended for two weeks with no pay. If you say it, I’ll deny it.”

When we went to court, I chose not to press charges. I was 20 years old with no money. I didn’t know anything about the law. I didn’t know anything about rights. I was threatened with two or three years of jail time if I didn’t plead guilty, but if I plead guilty, they would plead for six months of supervision. So I pled guilty and walked out of there.

I didn’t leave him right away, but a few months later, when he went to work one day, my best friend and her brothers came with a moving truck, and in a matter of three hours we packed up the apartment and cleared it out. I left him with a mattress and a roll of toilet paper. We put all of my furniture in storage and I went to live with my parents. At that point, I decided I had to do something with my life. I said, “I can’t live like this.”

And that’s when my best friend and I decided to go take our GED test. The moment I looked at those results, I went straight to Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and I started college. From then until I graduated, I went to school full-time and I worked full-time in a pharmacy and I was taking care of my daughter.

My initial plan was to go on to law school, but I began to volunteer at the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center here in Cook County, and I would visit kids who didn’t receive visits, and I became interested in kids that were involved in the juvenile-justice system.* So I applied in Lake County as a juvenile probation officer, but I couldn’t be a probation officer right off the bat because I didn’t have experience, so I had to work in the Detention Center. I came in with a law-enforcement kind of attitude. I was like, “I’m going to tell these kids what to do. And if not, there’s a consequence.” That was my thinking.

I walked in and got a wake-up call real quick, because now I was dealing with kids who had the same attitude I had when I was 13, 14, 15: “I don’t feel. I don’t care. Lock me up in my room.” I mean, I had never been to jail or anything, but some of these kids had been in and out of juvenile detention, so me saying I’m going to put them in their room was not a threat. They would curse me all the way there and sometimes they would have to be restrained. What it did was change my attitude with the kids.

It involved me doing less talking, and I started doing more listening, just to kind of understand who these kids were, what they were doing, where did they come from. Because of legal reasons, I couldn’t talk to them about the offense they committed. But where did they live? Where did they come from? Is there a mom? Is there a dad? I would notice the kids who didn’t get visits or some of them that got visits that would be very contentious. The kids would come back very upset. And then there would be those who had visits every week, very positive visits, so I saw there were all different types of kids with different types of experiences.

And after I became a probation officer for juvenile offenders, I began going into their communities, into their homes. Here I saw kids who didn’t have parents, or girls who had a dad but didn’t have a mom, or Mom was a drug addict. What I realized is that people judge these kids on their behavior in the communities and schools, and they have no idea what they’re going through at home. Just like how people judged me when I was their age, and I was acting like this, a little delinquent. But they had no idea what I was going through at home, no idea. I was not going to say, “Oh, poor kids, I know you’re having a hard time at home. Go out and act a fool.” But I felt a sense of connection with these kids.

I dealt with some of the most thuggish gangbangers. I dealt with some of the snottiest kids from the snootiest suburbs, and they were still kids that came from dysfunctional homes and were judged just by their behavior. That was a whole new awakening for me.

I wanted to have all of them understand that there is a better way, and that there is hope, and that there are things you can do to get out of your situation. You cannot make this the rest of your life. You have to change. And when I told them my own story, they felt like, “She understands. She’s not okay with what I’m doing, but she understands.”

So now I had them listening. I had their ear.

There was this young girl that I met. She was probably 15 years old when the case was first assigned to me and I’ll never forget, when I drove up to her house there were all these gangbangers in front of her house. I mean, our policy was if you don’t feel safe, drive off, but I was like, “No, no, no. This girl’s not going to be hanging out with gangbangers.”

So I got out of my car and I walked up to her and she just had this mean look on her face. I identified myself and said, “They got to go. We need to talk.” I explained my role and told her what was acceptable and what was not, and then I set up appointments to meet with her at the office. When I started to get to know her, I realized she lived with her aunt, uncle and cousins. And then I found out that the mom was in and out of prison, and when she wasn’t in prison she would just be gone. Mom was a crack addict.

This girl was a fighter. Oh my God! All this girl would do is fight. She was on probation for hitting a kid over the head with a padlock at school. She ran around with the Satan Disciples in Waukegan and she got high. Smoked a lot of marijuana. That’s what she did, smoked a lot of marijuana. She was this angry, angry girl, and it was almost like I was seeing me at her age. Me and her would butt heads all the time and I would give her a run for her money and she would get very angry with me. And then I started to realize that she didn’t have her dad. Her mom had prostituted herself. She had witnessed this as a very young girl. I’m sure she went through some sort of abuse. She cut herself a lot.

In one of our moments, I said to her, “You know, it’s not your fault. I’m sorry you went through what you went through, but it’s not your fault.” I think that was like a breakthrough for her. Somebody had given her permission to be angry. And I don’t think anybody had ever said that to her. All of a sudden I discovered this little girl. This little girl. I just think she was just trapped in that traumatized body of hers. I mean, I have lots of stories, but for me that was probably the most impactful because that’s where I knew that what worked for me was going to work for her. That was just accountability, structure and someone to listen, to say, “It’s okay.” And to celebrate the rewards, dish out the consequences when needed, and let it work for her own good. She was on probation for a long time. She would email me every so often to ask me how I was doing and tell me she was doing well.

The last time I Googled her name, just to see, oh my God, what am I going to find? Was she arrested as an adult or something like that? And what I found was an article of her with a bunch of other people in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. She was down there helping to rebuild homes. So it was a proud moment. It was almost as if she was my daughter, and I was like, “Wow! Here was this thug, wreaking havoc in the town of Waukegan and she’s now in this town in Mississippi, helping people rebuild.” That was awesome.

See, if you’re not going to try to figure out what is going on or what has happened with a young person, then you’re simply punishing the kid; you’re not dealing with the behavior. So you can’t restore. That’s the real question: How do you restore?

Endnote:

*According to the Cook County website, “The Juvenile Temporary Detention Center provides temporary secure housing for youth from the age of 10 through 16 years, who are awaiting adjudication of their cases by the Juvenile Division of the Cook County Courts. The Center also provides care for youth who have been transferred from Juvenile Court jurisdiction to Criminal Court. These youth would otherwise be incarcerated in the county jail.” See http://www.cookcountygov.com/portal/server.pt/community/juvenile_temporary_detention_center/304/juvenile_temporary_detention_center