And it didn't stop. The brother-in-law who raped her lived in her parents' house for a year and forced her to have sex with him more times than she can remember. Sometimes a neighbor raped her. Sometimes it was her mother's brother. Why they picked her, a little boy struggling with the knowledge that she was really a girl, Kassandra says she doesn't know.
As a teenager, Kassandra was guarded. Still living life outwardly as a boy, she didn't date. "I lived life in fear," she says. "I thought people would be interested in me for who I was or because they liked me, but I started to feel that men would only look to me for something physical. It wasn't difficult for me to fall in love, so I tried to stay guarded."
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Kassandra faced a hard life in El Salvador.
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Looking for solace, she turned to religion. At sixteen she entered an all-male seminary to become a Catholic priest. "I thought it would change my life," she says. "I thought I could be somebody different, that I could forget everything that happened to me." But the seminary was far from a safe haven. "The rapes happened there, too," she says, choking back tears. "It happened constantly. It's just a bunch of men, closed up. People there were confused about their thoughts and their feelings." Her fellow students would threaten to tell the bishop that she was gay if she didn't have sex with them. Sometimes, they just took her by force.
Still, Kassandra loved studying philosophy, theology, Greek and Latin. She didn't mind the rigid schedule — up at 5 a.m. for a day of prayer, study and a few leisurely hours before bed at 11 p.m. — and stayed at the seminary for eight years. But she didn't finish. In her ninth year, when she was 25 years old, the bishop kicked her out because, among other things, he said she was gay. "I felt deceived," she says. "The whole time I was there, I tried to be something different, I tried to change myself." But it didn't work. After leaving the seminary, Kassandra says she knew more than ever that she was a woman in a man's body. "I always dressed like a man," she says, "but very sexy. I wore tight clothes. I'd go to the gym to have a nice body."
With an impressive eight years of higher education on her resumé, she got a job working in a police warehouse in San Salvador and soon moved up to a purchasing position, in which she bought everything the police needed, from supplies for police dogs to guns for officers. There she met a detective, a rough man with a temper who was a former guerrilla. They became friends and began going out to eat together. One night, he told her it was too late for him to travel home. "So he stayed with me at my house," she says. "That's how our relationship started."
They were inconspicuous in public and lovers in private. But increasingly over the ten years they were together, Kassandra caught the brunt of his temper. He shouted and hit her when she disagreed with him. He, too, forced her to have sex. And he wasn't faithful: She left him after finding out that he'd gotten a woman pregnant.
The situation at work was worse. Part of Kassandra's job was to travel to different police stations to ensure they were satisfied with the supplies they'd ordered. Many officers assumed she was gay and, just as in the seminary, threatened to out her if she didn't have sex with them. They also asked for favors — new computers and money — and threatened to hurt her parents.
And it wasn't just the police. In El Salvador, the gangs, especially the violent Mara Salvatrucha, are even more powerful. They, too, went after her; she says they knew she bought guns for the police and wanted her to run arms for them.
Despite the fact that jobs were nearly impossible to come by and quitting meant a return to poverty for herself and her parents, Kassandra left the police job after six years. She tried to set up a retail business in her home, but again the gangs came calling, demanding she give them a cut of her profits. "They don't let you live," she says.
Kassandra figured she had only one option left: to hire a coyote to smuggle her into America, where she could earn money and send it home. Even more important, she saw the United States as a place where she could escape the ritual rape, physical abuse and discrimination that had tormented her since she was a boy.
"It was a place where you could go to become something new," she says of America. "In my country, they say that the United States is like a house of gold."
She left in 2004. The journey took 45 days, and she was caught twice by immigration officials and sent back to El Salvador to start over again. Her original destination was Virginia, where the husband of a friend had offered her a place to stay. But when she got to Colorado, frightened by the prospect of being caught a third time, she decided to stay. The coyotes dropped her off at an apartment in Boulder. She didn't know anyone.
