News Articles, 1998
  News Articles, Main Page

For Salvadoran, U.S. Life Is Both Blessing, Curse

By Sylvia Moreno

Monday, August 31, 1998; Page A11

Getting to the United States was the easy part of Martina Portillo's journey. The hard part has been living here.

Since coming to Washington in 1988, she has bounced from one low-paying housekeeping or office-cleaning job to the next. She has not seen a daughter she left back in El Salvador or her mother. When her father died three years ago, she was unable to attend the funeral.

Portillo, 37, worked her way up to a $6.15 hourly cleaning job -- three hours at one building in the afternoon and five hours at another at night -- but with no benefits and, for several years, no vacation pay.

In June, the cleaning company fired her when she called in after a day shift to say she was too sick to work that night. She gets housecleaning jobs through a relative, but that work is spotty and pays less.

Portillo, who illegally crossed the border from Mexico and is seeking political asylum, has suffered physical and emotional abuse from some of her boyfriends here. She and her U.S.-born daughter, Yeni, now 9, were homeless for eight months after one man brought back a wife from El Salvador and kicked them out.

Life here, says this short woman with large brown eyes, has been la bendicion, a blessing, and la perdicion, a curse. "It has been really hard: a young child, the snow, being a single mother. Even if you have a job, you can't get ahead because of the rent."

Five years ago, Portillo moved into her own two-bedroom Columbia Heights apartment in Northwest Washington. She has a new companion and a boarder who help pay the $500 rent. Her living room is filled with religious icons and pictures of her other daughter, Andrea, now 19, the daughter's baby, Carlita, and other family members she hasn't seen in almost 10 years.

She is unskilled, uneducated and unable to speak English. But here, she said, she has a better chance of supporting herself and Yeni -- and helping her mother and Andrea. "My mother is a widow," Portillo explains in Spanish. "With the little that I make, I send her $100, sometimes $75 a month." Back in El Salvador, "I wouldn't have 10 pesos to give her."

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