On a recent Monday afternoon, Solinda Parraga, 42, stood in the rain at the southeast 16th Street BART Plaza, with a couple of broken umbrellas keeping her and the food she sells more or less dry in the driving rain.
A recent arrival to the United States, Parraga works seven days a week with the hope of leaving behind ghosts from her past.
“It’s been really difficult surviving in this country, because that’s what I do: Survive,” said Parraga quietly in Spanish. “Sometimes I just make enough to pay rent, bills and nothing else.”
Parraga, who is about 5-foot-4 and has bleached red hair, left her native city of Huancaya in central Peru on December 21, 2023. After 15 years of being a victim of physical and verbal abuse from her husband, Parraga said she knew it was time to leave.
“He was a drunk. He beat me almost daily,” said Parraga while she looked down and crossed her arms, hugging herself. “He’d drag me around, and it’d all happen in front of my children. I thought I was doing the right thing by staying with their dad.”
It helped that her best friend, who had migrated to the United States a year earlier, invited Parraga to join her in Utah.
Parraga flew from Lima to Mexico City, and then to Mexicali, from where she crossed into Arizona and handed herself over to immigration authorities. Her asylum hearing will take place in December.
What followed her arrival in Arizona, however, were seven days in a detention center before she was transported to Texas. Throughout all this time, and to this day, her best friend never picked up the phone.
“She told me to come join her, and that she would host me. I remember she emphasized there were plenty of jobs in Utah,” said Parraga, who left her two kids with her parents and promised to find work to send money back home.
“I felt like she abandoned me,” Parraga said.
But in Texas, Parraga experienced what she describes as one of the kindest moments in her time in the United States. A stranger at the airport — where she had been taken by immigration agents — bought her a ticket to San Francisco after he saw her crying and asking for help.
The man, she said, advised her to settle in San Francisco, given the city’s welcoming policies for new immigrants.
After a rough start that included sleeping outdoors on 24th Street for a couple of nights and in a car for a month, she met another street vendor who offered her son’s car for night refuge.
Parraga then found a part-time job cleaning hotel rooms, and eventually landed a small room to live in through a friend. The apartment is near the 16th Street BART Plaza, the corner she eventually picked to start her own business.
Every day of the week, Parraga sets up a stand at the corner of 16th and Mission streets and, from 10 a.m to 8 p.m., she sells mangoes, melons, watermelons, oranges and pineapples packed in plastic containers. There’s a smaller cart to her left with more fruit and aguas frescas, and a hot dog cart to her right with a younger woman helping serve.
The sales, Parraga said, vary on a daily basis and by the weather. Sometimes she makes enough just to get by, but other times she can take a day off and send money home.
When asked about the recent police activity at the plazas, Parraga said she welcomes it.
“You see things you’ve never seen at this plaza,” she said. Lately, neighbors have said drug use is heavier and more visible, the result of folks being pushed out of the Tenderloin from police operations. “I feel good when the police are around.”
As for President Trump’s immigration policies, Parraga said she fears what might happen come her asylum hearing in December. The threat of violence, she said, lingers.
“I don’t wanna go back to Peru just yet,” she said. “I fear my ex-husband may find me anywhere I go.”
Thanks for reporting .
As long as she is her legally and wants to co tribute , we welcome her.
I trust she has a business permit /license ,
The city should support her as a small business owner.
Not sure of city code but would think the city should have a designated area for small vendors to rent and use.
The city cannot have a vendor on every public passageway or corner .
Just like trying to run a homeless shelter, drug treatment center or mental health clinic on every block . The homeless and addicts should be located in sites away from populated neighborhoods and not allowed to block and be a nuisance to those neighborhoods . They contribute nothing .
Taxpayers should not be supporting addicts and persons not willing to work.
At least this woman is trying to support herself and working .
Good for her.
Life is hard. She’s made herself a refugee. Being in bad marriage is not deserving of political asylum. Geez I would should have been so lucky to go live in Switzerland after leaving an abusive relationship.
Fleeing a bad marriage does NOT make her a refugee. It’s not political persecution. She could have simply gone to another city in her own country.
Deport her. Thousands of more deserving people await legal entry visas.
Fleeing a bad marriage and wanting a better life for her children is more than enough reason to strike out and take extraordinary risks by coming to the US.
It was never easy for any immigrant to get here, and I don’t recall a living Democrat or Republican in Washington ever admit that this country’s immigration process was not or is not broken.
This woman who struggles to survive with the rare help of kind strangers may not have had the luxury to apply for citizenship by crossing every t and dotting every i, although it appears she did her very best to do so. Our fascist president has offered citizenship to anyone who can come here with a million dollars! (He who complained of a Democratic Party conspiracy to juice elections in its favor!)
In a world where capital and goods travel freely across borders— and will yet do so, in spite of Trump’s stupid and reactionary tariffs gamed to enrich an ever smaller criminal minority— all people deserve the basic human right of being able to live and work wherever they choose.
So long as we live in a world composed of nation states, and so long as we hold genuine beliefs in liberty and other enlightenment values enshrined in our Constitution, we must help this woman and others like her!
That may be but she is not a refugee!
Fleeing a bad marriage does not warrant a refugee status! What a joke to even report on this.
Well, here’s her name and hometown on the internet for all to see. Guess she’s not THAT afraid of her husband finding her.