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A week later, I was smuggled into the United States through Texas to Orlando, Florida. It was then the men told me that my employment would consist of having sex with men for money. I had never had sex before, and I had never imagined selling my body. And so my nightmare began. Because I was a virgin, the men decided to initiate me by raping me again and again, to teach me how to have sex. Over the next three months, I was taken to a different trailer every fifteen days. Every night I had to sleep in the same bed in which I had been forced to service customers all day.

I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I wasn’t allowed to go outside without a guard. Many of the bosses had guns. I was constantly afraid. One of the bosses carried me off to a hotel one night, where he raped me. I could do nothing to stop him.

Because I was so young, I was always in demand with the customers. It was awful. Although the men were supposed to wear condoms, some didn’t, so eventually I became pregnant and was forced to have an abortion. They sent me back to the brothel almost immediately.

I cannot forget what has happened. I can’t put it behind me. I find it nearly impossible to trust people. I still feel shame. I was a decent girl in Mexico. I used to go to church with my family. I only wish none of this had ever happened.

Joyce (United States, 2002)
Was doing migrant work since I was nine or ten. Went to school with Mormons. Only black in the school. Picking tomatoes, cucumbers, string beans. Wages still the same, and now I’m forty-three years old. It ain’t went up no more than about ten, fifteen cents.

Lake Wells, near Orlando, is where I was mainly working. With my husband. Worked many years on the camp. And they be beating on you and pistol-whuppin’ you. Leaky showers, the water be cold. Half-fed people, unlivable camps. Ain’t no sheets on the bed. The mattress don’t be fit to sleep on. The food is slop. Some of the time it be cold. For lunch, they bring you a little sandwich, sauce, and baloney. It already melted in the sun. It make your blood pressure high. Treated like a dog. They used to spit in the food. Once, the Bonds girl wrung out a tampon into the food.

Got you way down a clay dirt road; mosquitoes eat you up. You so far back out there in the woods you can’t walk to town. Never got paid a cent. You go to bed at nine or ten o’clock. Sun up to sun down. They have you working in the rain at 5 a.m. Sometimes till 9 p.m. with the truck lights on picking sweet potatoes in North Carolina. Locked up each night in a compound with barbed wire, guarded by dogs. They’d make a count of everyone before bedtime, and they’d be walking with a rifle outside the hall when people slept. All the men stayed in the bullpit. Wind blows and turns over the trailer.

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