“She is deaf and mute. Her family speaks only Trique, an obscure pre-Columbian language that is foreign even to other Mexicans. She communicates with her family in gestures no one else understands.
Illiterate and silent, Juliana lives in isolation made even more profound by her circumstances – traveling with her sister and father in an anonymous stream of undocumented immigrant farmworkers who tend fields across the West.
On a cold day last November, the tiny 24-year-old climbed a rusty chain link fence into a neighbor’s filthy dog pen in Livingston, Calif. Alone, she gave birth to a baby girl.
Then she stuffed several wads of paper tissue in the infant’s mouth.
California authorities arrested her on a charge of felony child endangerment.
‘I would look at her sitting there in court and wonder what was going through her mind,’ said prosecutor Larry Morse II. ‘We can only suppose as to know she understands.’
