Fair warning as you embark on the story of one woman’s journey across borders and barriers: It would be difficult to exaggerate the complexity of Sonia Priscila Ticas’ family structure. The small child whose light hair and pale skin earned her the nickname of la gringuita — the little white girl — grew up with grandparents, step-grandparents, siblings, half-siblings, surrogate parents to whom she was not vaguely related and, yes, actual parents.
She moved from place to place in her native El Salvador and ultimately crossed the southern United States border illegally to end up in California. Sonia Priscila was 11 years old and spoke no English when she arrived at her grandmother’s crowded Los Angeles apartment. Undocumented for years, she bounced from home to home and school to school before, remarkably, attending California State University, Northridge, and the doctoral program at UC Berkeley.
But first, let’s go back to a family whose twists and turns could cause whiplash.
Start with this: Her mother, Aida, was living in El Salvador with her own father and stepmother when she was married off almost as soon as she became eligible to leave the family home. She was 18, and the “suitable husband” her parents found for her was a widower 26 years her senior with seven kids in tow. Aida’s new stepchildren were not much younger than she was.
Aida’s husband, José Alberto Ticas, worked as an administrator on a hacienda. He also tried his hand building a small business. Eventually, he took to selling medicine door-to-door, town-to-town.
On Dec. 20, 1968, Sonia Priscila Ticas was born in Usulután in southeastern El Salvador. She was the second child born to Aida and José Alberto, exactly two years after their wedding.
Both Aida and José Alberto were evangelical Christians, Protestants who originally belonged to the Church of God (Seventh Day) and who lived by the teachings of the Old Testament. (Later, José Alberto joined the Israelite Church of God.) They abhorred any sign of paganism, such as dancing or performing in public. José Alberto adhered to a strict patriarchal role. Tenderness was seldom in evidence.
Soon after she started school in 1975, Sonia Priscila remembers learning dances as part of a fundraising project.
“Dad found out,” she said. “I came home and he was waiting with a belt. It was all considered paganism.”
When she was 10 years old and living with her grandparents, Sonia Priscila’s teacher, Niña Anita, introduced her to poetry. For Sonia Priscila, it was love at first stanza. She quickly became enamored with the works of Rubén Dario, the leading poet of a Latin American literary movement called modernismo. Gabriela Mistral, who became the first Latin American author to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, also entranced her.
When Sonia Priscila was chosen to read a poem at a Mother’s Day celebration, she knew there would be trouble at home. Clearly, such unholy writings were bound to send the 10-year-old on a direct path to Hell and damnation.
Her grandfather admonished her: “You know you are not supposed to be taking part in worldly things.”
But in her heart, Sonia Priscila felt differently.
“I was quite the extrovert,” she said. “Very dramatic. I loved the attention.”
It was Niña Anita who intervened. The teacher went straight to Sonia’s step-grandmother. This child was meant to perform on a stage, the teacher implored. Niña Anita persisted until Sonia’s step-grandmother finally caved. All right, she said, but just this once. To this day, Sonia can recite the verses she presented at age 10.
Luckily, work was not considered pagan. Sonia’s mother had a small stall where she sold juices. Sonia Priscila — extroverted and unafraid to shout “fresh fruit juices for five cents!” in the market — helped her out.
“By now we were 13 children, including a newborn,” she remembered. “We just could not make ends meet.”
Sonia Priscila was 9 years old in April of 1978 when her mother left the family to live in the United States. Work there was said to be easily attainable and also more lucrative than employment she could find in her own country. Five years earlier, her own mother had emigrated to Los Angeles, so Aida had a place to stay once she reached the U.S.
Far from scandalous or even unusual, “it was commonplace for the woman to leave,” Sonia said.
Still, her mother’s departure was not easy for her.
“You don’t understand it,” she said. However, “when you are used to moving around as a child, you become resilient.”
Her father then decided that the three boys would stay with him, along with his 18-year-old daughter from his earlier marriage. Sonia, her older sister Blanca, and the youngest sister, Raquel (just 3 months old), were taken to her grandfather and his wife. Now they were living in the westernmost area of El Salvador, a region dotted with gold mines.
Following the guidelines of their church, Sonia Priscila was instructed to refer to her step-grandmother as Hermana Elisa: Sister Elisa. Her grandfather was just as zealously evangelical as Sonia Priscila’s father had been. The newly reconstituted family lived in a small hut built by her grandfather.
Almost two years after her mother’s departure, Sonia Priscila learned that her parents had divorced. Recently, she discovered the original divorce petition in which her father wrote that Sonia’s mother was living in a nearby town and that there had been no children in the marriage.
Sonia’s grandfather was a minister of their church, so the divorce was a bit of a scandal in their righteous and religious family.
“My grandfather and his wife spoke so badly of my father,” Sonia said.
‘I Am Taking You All’
It was not only her family that was rocked by turmoil. With its long history of social and economic inequality, El Salvador in 1979 was plunging into what proved to be a 12-year civil war. According to the United Nations, more than 75,000 people died in the prolonged conflict between the Salvadoran government and a coalition of guerrilla groups called the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front).
Out in her own community around that time, “we would start to see dead bodies on the roads when we were going to church,” said Sonia, as she is now known in the United States.
The rebels were organizing in nearby hills, and Sonia Priscila’s grandfather worried about what would happen next. Sometimes Sonia Priscila eavesdropped so she could catch wind of what the grownups were saying about the unrest.
The rebels, she said, “were portrayed as communists, even though they were not. Many were just humble peasants,” hoping for a better life. (For its part, the Salvadoran government was backed by the United States.)
More disruption transpired one day in June 1980, when her mother showed up unannounced at the hut of Sonia Priscila’s grandparents.
“When she stepped through the door, we were just thrilled to see her,” Sonia said.
Her mother embraced her children and declared: “I am taking you all.”
For Sonia, going to the United States to be reunited with her mother was the realization of a dream. But it wasn’t that easy. They needed travel documents and permission from Sonia’s father for their children to leave the country. Raquelita, now just 2½ years old, didn’t recognize Aida. Hermana Elisa, for her part, was not eager to give up the little ones she was raising as her own.
“Please, please, leave Raquelita with me,” she beseeched.
But Aida was firm: “I am taking all my children,” she insisted.
Sonia Priscila remembers being loaded into a truck, and then a bus that took them first to Guatemala City and then into Mexico. At one point, one of the trains in Mexico derailed, stranding the passengers for three days. All the while, Aida handed out cash bribes to the corrupt police agents who expected such payoffs.
It took them about two weeks to reach the Mexican city of Guadalajara, where Aida had connections through her church in Los Angeles. Passing her family off as Mexican while they crossed through that country, she cautioned the children to stay quiet, so their Salvadoran dialect would not blow their cover.
Eventually they made their way to Mexicali, the border city that sits directly across from Calexico, California. Rebeca, Sonia’s grandmother in California, had hired smugglers to help them with this final leg of their journey. In order to make sure there would be men around while Aida dealt with the Mexican smugglers, she also sent Sonia’s brother-in-law, as well as a friend, Delbert Bennett, who was originally from Belize. Sonia didn’t know what to make of him.
“We had never seen a Black man,” she said.
But Rebeca knew him well because they had worked together in a convalescent home in Los Angeles — and at some crucial point in any immigrant’s illegal scramble across the border, there is little choice but to trust.
“Don’t worry,” Aida told her children. “God is with us.”
When it came time to make the crossing, they decided to break into smaller groups. Sonia and her sister, Blanca, were told to “just run across the street.” They were supposed to look for a tree, and then crawl through the hole in the barbed wire fence next to the tree.
But it was dark, and they had trouble finding the spot where an opening had been cut in the fence.
Finally they found the hole and scrambled through. The barbed wire cut their skin and clothes, and pulled hard at their hair. But another member of the smuggler party found them and told them they were safe.
Maria, one of the smugglers, took Raquelita through the border. To make sure the child did not fuss, Maria gave Raquelita sleep medication. The birth certificate Maria produced for Raquelita was actually that of a Puerto Rican child.
Maria loaded Sonia and Blanca into her car. Sonia remembers wondering where they were going and when they would see their mother and siblings. At one point Maria stopped to make a phone call. She came back with a sack full of snack food and this good news: Everyone was safe in Los Angeles and waiting to see them.
As they drove into Los Angeles, Sonia remembers marveling at the skyscrapers and the maze of freeways set off against the bright blue sky.
America
Soon enough, they were all piling into her grandmother’s MacArthur Park apartment near downtown Los Angeles.
“Six of us,” Sonia said. “Plus two aunts and, of course, my grandmother.”
The cramped conditions seemed even more so because Rebeca was a prize-winning Avon cosmetics saleswoman. The whole apartment smelled like a fancy perfume shop. Boxes of Avon products were everywhere.
“Filled to the brim,” Sonia said.
Sonia and her siblings were used to living in tight quarters. What they were not used to was living with their grandmother and aunts. On Sunday afternoon, Aida went off to work as a live-in caretaker for a once-famous ballerina in Hollywood. Sonia and all the other kids were told to keep quiet so the apartment manager would not know how many people were living there. On Friday evenings, Aida would return.
Hoping to relieve some of the pressure, a Mexican family from church arranged for Sonia and Raquelita to stay with them. That did not go well, either.
“Mexican food, it was so different from what we ate in El Salvador,” Sonia said. “It was unsustainable. After two weeks we went back to my grandmother’s. And Raquelita cried nonstop.”
The bus ride to Limerick Elementary School in Canoga Park took 45 minutes. For Sonia Priscila, “L.A. in late September felt very cold.”
The school had no ESL (English-as-a-Second-Language) program. Sonia felt out of place.
“I remember being accused of stealing a dollar,” she said in a tone that suggested the allegation still hurt.
Still, she said, “I thought it was amazing being in a school where you got crayons, you got lunch.” And finally, “they took some of us aside and taught us English with flashcards.”
At Thanksgiving time, Delbert — the man from Belize — showed up for a visit with his wife. She was tall, almost impossibly elegant and she spoke with an operatic voice. Her name was Muriel.
“We thought she must be some kind of queen,” said Sonia.
Muriel gave Sonia Priscila a long, appraising look.
“Girl,” Muriel said, “I saw you and the first thing that I thought was your hair is as flat as a pancake.”
The next thing Sonia and the other kids knew, Delbert and Muriel were offering to care for three of them for a while.
“This was supposed to be a temporary situation, but we ended up staying two-and-a-half years,” Sonia said.
So, in the space of a few short months, they had left their home in El Salvador, migrated through Guatemala and Mexico, crossed the U.S. border illegally and moved into the crowded apartment of a grandmother they barely knew. Now, suddenly, they were living with a Black couple in South Central Los Angeles and attending an African American church.
Delbert spoke English with the proper British accent of his native Belize (formerly British Honduras). He was a joker who allowed the children to address him by his first name. Muriel, originally from Louisiana, instructed the children to call her Mrs. Bennett.
“She commanded respect,” Sonia remembered.
But soon enough, they settled into the kind of family that Sonia had never allowed herself to imagine being a part of.
“They did everything they could to give us a childhood,” she said. “They took us to theme parks and to the movies. It got to be so much fun.”
At Normandy Avenue School, Sonia Priscila still had a hard time fitting in. She threw herself into her studies, sitting in a corner and working independently since there were no ESL classes. She was especially determined to master English.
“I really wanted to be the little girl who shined, just like back home,” she said.
For Sonia Priscila’s sixth-grade graduation, Mrs. Bennett bought her a new dress and platform shoes. She even allowed her to “put some color in my cheeks.”
At her next academic stop, Foshay Junior High School (now the James A. Foshay Learning Center), Sonia finally got the ESL classes she had been yearning for. She also got a speedy introduction to teenage gangs, which were proliferating around her.
In resisting the pressure to join a gang, Sonia Priscila had two secret weapons. The first was Mrs. Bennett and her church, where Sonia Priscila was schooled in the benefits of following a straight-and-narrow path. The other was Sonia Priscila’s mad crush on the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, which sold millions of albums in the 1980s and is still performing today. They also acted in TV films as well as several big-screen movies. Whenever one of the boys aged out — typically when puberty caused his voice to change — he was discreetly replaced by a new Menudo member. Over the course of the band’s existence, it cycled through 50 or so members.
Sonia Priscila was oblivious to such trivialities. She was so smitten that the kids at school nicknamed her and her friends “The Menudo Girls.” The school kids intended this label as an insult, but Sonia Priscila wore it as a badge of honor.
As devout as Mrs. Bennett was, she was less strict than Sonia Prisicla’s family. Around the house, they all danced to the music of Michael Jackson. Imagine the horror Sonia’s father might have expressed had he known his daughter was living with a woman — Mrs. Bennett — who later went on to travel in Europe and Asia to perform with the Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers.
It was poetry that finally helped Sonia Priscila conquer the sounds of spoken English. The single work that inspired her to triumph over all pronunciation obstacles was a poem — Rudyard Kipling’s “If” — that she discovered in the school library:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise
Other subjects were more challenging. For instance, “eighth grade U.S. history. That was hard.”
But back to the dizzying intricacies of Sonia Priscila’s family structure. Maybe four months after Sonia and her two siblings moved in with the Bennetts, their mother informed them that she had gotten married. Her new husband was eight years her junior, and soon her sister Blanca reported that he was “an abusive alcoholic.”
Sonia got tired of phone calls from Rebeca, her grandmother, berating her mother’s taste in men. After having a child with her new husband, her mother insisted that he was a changed man. She moved Sonia and her siblings in to live with her, her husband and the new baby. Sonia Priscila enrolled in yet another school, Sun Valley Junior High (now called Sun Valley Magnet School).
“We managed to stay with them about nine months, then we had to escape,” Sonia said, “including mother.”
Sonia Priscila moved in with her older sisters from her father’s first marriage, Marta and Sara. She was 15 years old when she joined Sara trimming garments in an L.A. clothing factory to help earn money for their expenses. When the family was reunited, the six siblings and their mother finally living as a family, she registered for classes at L.A.’s Fairfax High School.
So now there were seven of them packed into a studio apartment in “glamorous” Hollywood. Mice scampered through the small space. Nearby Melrose Avenue was filled with punksters. On her walk to take the bus to school each weekday, Sonia Priscila passed Paramount Studios.
Just as she was finishing 11th grade at Fairfax High, Sonia’s stepfather showed up with his toddler son, and Aida said she could not bear living apart from her last child. The father also stayed.
Sonia Priscila told her mother: “You have made your decisions. I have made mine. I am staying with my sisters Marta and Sara.”
Sonia Priscila worked so hard as a senior at her new school, Lincoln High School, that she was named Student of the Month. One perk of this achievement was that she got to meet a student from El Salvador who was attending California State University, Northridge. You could do this, too, the older girl told Sonia Priscila.
“Remember,” Sonia cautions at this point in her story, “I don’t have any papers.”
But her new mentor told her: “Look, there is this court case that allows undocumented students to go to college and be eligible for state financial aid.”
Sonia Priscila was not convinced.
“For me, ‘Latina’ and ‘university student,’ they don’t match,” she said.
But why not? Sonia Priscila visited Cal State, Northridge, for a Latino youth conference. A theater performance she saw that day “completely changed my life.” The play, presented by a Chicano theater group on campus called Teatro Aztlán, featured a Nicaraguan woman crying over her dead son while bemoaning U.S. involvement in Central America. The head of the theater group urged Sonia Priscila to join if she enrolled at Northridge.
In taking that huge cultural and educational leap, Sonia Priscila had little to no family support. Her mother told Sonia Priscila she was afraid she would turn into a communist, because “that’s what they do at universities.” Thinking back to her younger sister Ana, who had left the house at 17 and had two kids before she was 20, Sonia Priscila’s sister Marta worried that Sonia Priscila would get pregnant — as if that was what happened to girls who lived away from home.
Sonia Priscila ignored them both. Instead, she relied on the encouragement of her unmarried sister Sara, while also holding on to something Mrs. Bennett had instilled in her: “God put you here for a purpose, and he is going to walk with you.”
Right away, when she arrived on campus, she joined the Teatro Aztlán. One of her jobs in high school had been working in a travel agency, so she signed up for French classes.
“I thought I could own a travel agency,” she explained.
A literature professor from Venezuela, Dr. Elias Ramos, became her mentor. Sonia Priscila was stunned to discover that studying Spanish was even “a thing you could do in college.”
By 1988, Sonia Priscila was no longer undocumented. Through the Amnesty program — officially, the Immigration Reform and Control Act, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 — she was able to become a permanent U.S. resident. To celebrate, Sonia Priscila and her sister Sara took a trip to Hawaii, the first time they had felt safe leaving California and traveling by plane.
At Northridge, Sonia Priscila worked in outreach and recruitment during which she visited L.A.-area middle schools to inspire young people to pursue a college education. This position gave her an insider’s view into the workings of the university system. She applied for any scholarship she could find, usually successfully. She earned straight A’s during her first semester.
The scholarships, her persistence and her growing fluency in French enabled her to spend a year at Aix-en-Provence University (now Aix-Marseille University) in southern France.
It took her six years to earn her degree at Northridge in Spanish and French.
“Priscila, girl,” Mrs. Bennet told her, using the middle name the family knew her by, “if any of you kids could do it, I knew it was you.”
Her plan at that time was to teach French and Spanish to high school students. When one of her professors suggested she pursue further studies in romance languages, she reconsidered and submitted applications to 15 graduate schools. The University of California, Berkeley, came back with an offer of a four-year, full scholarship that would bypass a master’s degree, leading straight to a Ph.D. in romance languages and literature.
In the end, juggling part-time jobs and a challenging thesis topic, she spent eight years at Berkeley. Along with her doctorate, she also left campus with a Moroccan-born Muslim husband. They have two boys, 21-year-old Faris and 16-year-old Amir.
When it came time to apply for university teaching jobs, Sonia sent applications to a number of schools. A small institution named Linfield College (now known as Linfield University) in McMinnville, Oregon, invited her to come to campus to interview and teach for a day.
“That evening, they offered me the job,” she said.
Today Sonia Priscila Ticas is a tenured, full professor at Linfield. She mentors first-generation students, advising them to read as much as they can, “empower yourself through information” and “gain a sense of pride in rediscovering our roots and family histories.”
For immigrants, she says, “these are extreme times” — but “you can’t lose hope.”
Her own experience has taught her that hard work, determination and persistence can pay off. A little poetry from time to time doesn’t hurt, either.