Striving and surviving the tough life
I was 14 the first time I saw a beheaded body on the front page of a newspaper, 16 when my dad received a call from a man claiming he had held me for ransom and 13-years-old the first time I heard a gunshot outside my home while talking to my grandma on the phone. I grew up in Mexico, Tijuana specifically. I was surrounded by crime while growing up and I know what it does to a community, I see it here in Trenton. Fear takes over and residents become prisoners in their own homes, people run away and leave the city. The difference between me and some of the youth here in the city is that I chose not to engage in it.
Now I’m 22-years-old and will graduate in a year from San Diego State University. Despite growing up in a dangerous city, I succeeded because my parents gave me education and guidance.
I was never a straight A student, I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, I’ve never been an honors student. But I’ve managed to earn what I aimed for. My parents gave me education, but the rest was up to me.
With a year left in college, I chose to come to Trenton from California to learn and write about crime rather than spending time at the beach with my friends. For 10 weeks I heard about and wrote about crime in Trenton and during this time I saw a pattern—the criminals were usually around my age, 20-somethings.
For 10 weeks I worked, as these 20-somethings invested their time in killing and taking away what didn’t belong to them: lives. Regardless of what they were fighting for, I doubt their gain was greater than the loss of the victims’ families.
You’ve probably read my work. I’ve written about a taxi driver who was killed by a fare. I interviewed the mother that donated her 4-year-old’s organs after she died on Father’s Day when a drunk driver hit her car on Route 1. Then I knocked on strangers’ doors asking about the barber who was murdered when going to the store to buy toilet paper.
I was never scared when covering crime, nor was my intention to evoke fear with the news. But it was my job and I had to write about the reality that the residents of this city face.
For 10 weeks my mother cringed on the phone when I told her about the stories I covered that day. I genuinely believe she sees me as a 5-yearold girl chasing after big muscular criminals, but she knows this is my passion so she refrains from asking too much. On Friday I walked out of The Trentonian’s newsroom to continue doing what my parents helped me strive to do, which is succeed in what I love to do.
There is so much opportunity for Trenton’s 20-somethings. There is so much more than hanging out all day on the porch of their homes. There has to be more than wanting to live fast and die young. I know there is, because I’m living proof of it. Yes, I’m just a 22-year-old Mexican girl, but there are other 22-year-old Mexican girls that grew up in the same circumstances I did that are living a polar opposite life than I am. Consider me one of the fortunate ones, but I’m not done striving quite yet.