I am a 27year old Latina/Filipina mother of three. I grew up with my two brothers in the Tenderloin or anywhere we could stay and the only way to survive was bring on welfare, which didn’t pay enough for 3 young children, so my mother found money in prostitution. No one wanted to help her by watching us, so she did what she had to do to keep us alive.

She was a very very loving and good mother and I respect her for going through what she went through. She did have a lot of different guys around us, but she always made sure we were protected. She would get beat up by her boyfriend in front of us, because of us or just because he felt like it, like many other women. It was sad and hard to see.  She finally lost us to the system because she worked as a prostitute. My younger brother and I went to a foster home in Sacramento with a Black father and a white mother. They were nice, but they didn’t want my older brother, so he had to stay in a boys home where there were lots of boys who were lost or who weren’t wanted. Our foster parents brought us to see him every so often.

My mother fought damn near to her death to get us back, when she finally did, she lost us right away to our father. Soon after being with our father, my mother got killed in the Mission by a violent man. We never really got to say good bye on earth, but she is and always will be with us in spirit. We never found out who really did it.