by Marcus Monroe

I want to begin this column with a big THANK YOU to all of you who shared your stories. As I had hoped, Juggalos and Juggalettes from all across the country emailed me their stories for this column. While I will get to each of them as we go along here, I had to begin with the most heart wrenching struggle of a Juggalette. For the record I never use the full names of anyone involved in these stories so as to protect their privacy. That said buckle up and get ready.

Mexilette is a Mexican-American woman from the Brownsville, Texas area. Her life story began in conflict in 1987 in Juarez, Mexico. Her mother, a Mexican citizen, wanted to make sure she was born in the United States. Paying her life savings to drug runners, she was taken underground into a tunnel used for trafficking drugs and weapons into the United States. She was placed into a mining cart and covered with a linen sheet. Then they began rolling her for miles underground. On the U.S. side she emerged to a light shining into her face and then a hood was dropped over her head. She was forced into a van, driven miles outside El Paso, Texas and dropped off with one bottle of water. While on the phone, Mexilette emotionally reflected on this moment,

“They dropped a pregnant woman off in the middle of the desert with a bottle of water. We could have died and they wouldn’t have cared.”

Mexilette was raised under strict Catholic rules by her single mother in El Paso. Her mother worked two to four jobs during Mexilette’s childhood. Their only real time together was always Sunday mornings, when they would dress up and head to mass.  She remembers her mother fondly brushing out her tangles and fussing over frilly, pink dresses she wore. Most school day mornings she would wake up, her mother already at work, her breakfast laid out on the table. She would dress herself and find someone to either take her to school or walk.

“I was on my own at 8. Cooking, cleaning and even watching the younger kids in the complex we live in.”

During her teenage years, Mexilette moved to San Antonio, Texas and attended Lanier High School. “It was a rough place to live, we shared a one room apartment and I would walk to school. I hated school and my body and everyone really. I would cuss my mom out for the smallest things. All she asked was I graduate and then I could do what I wanted.” Mexilette’s life changed even more when she awoke to “loud pops” from the street in front of her apartment.

“I looked outside and there was this car slowly moving away, headlights came on and it speed away. Then I noticed the body in the street. It was moving, crawling to the curb.”

One of her neighbors, Miguel was shot 3 times and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. “It was a nightmare I can still see it in my head you know? His son Roberto was a little older than me, we became real close after that. He came to me at the funeral and we talked. He would ignore me at school, act normal. He always would come see me at home when he needed to talk. I crushed on Roberto before, but we needed each other after his father was killed.”

Mexilette and her mother had a falling out after Roberto wanted Mexi to move in with him after his graduation. “She really freaked out, said I was throwing my life away. I was starting my life, she just didn’t see it. I pushed her away.” Mexilette found out that she was pregnant two days before her classes started for her senior year. Roberto had graduated and began working at a machine shop, making parts for automobiles. “Roberto was so happy, he start talking names as soon as he found out.” Mexilette reflected on the moment she told Roberto the news. Once Mexi began showing her “baby bump” school administrators pressured her to leave Lanier and enter an “adult education center”. It was there that Mexilette discovered our Juggalo Family. When she began this part of her tale she began to cry, “I felt isolated and alone when I got there. I didn’t know nobody. I didn’t do anything wrong and I got kicked out of school. Then you start talking to people and they are the same. Crossways was kicked out for smoking weed in the bathroom, Lonni was sent there for missing too many classes cause she was sick. They didn’t try to help any of us. They just sent us away to make their schools look better.” Crossways and Lonni are Juggalos that Mexilette began to hang with shortly after beginning alternative schooling.

“I had never heard ICP before and it spoke to me. They believe in God and a different way to teach it. Saying it’s ok to tell people to get off your back. I was mad at the world for giving up on me.”

Mexilette, Crossways and Lonni stopped going to their alternative school after Christmas break 2003. “My baby was due in April, I wasn’t going to be able to finish school anyways, Cross and Lonni just hated school,” she explained why they dropped out and left. Mexilette and Roberto welcomed their baby girl Octavia Miguelina into the world in April of that year. “She is our world was what Roberto said to me when he handed her to me. My mom came and got to meet her. She stayed and helped me recover and watched Octavia to let me sleep. Octavia saved our relationship.”