Crying Out For Help

Jocelyn Gray, left, talks with Ana Martinez about a friend: "She was having trouble with her parents," Jocelyn says. "She asked me, 'Why should they care? I don't even care about myself.'" (Lois Raimondo - The Washington Post)

"Crossing the border," Zayas says, "can be hazardous to Latinas' health. Until we understand the cultural conflict, we will not be able to prevent this."

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Jocelyn Garay's parents, who fled the war in El Salvador in the early 1980s, always demanded a lot of their bubbly, dark-haired daughter: that she excel in school, help out with housework, be attentive to her younger sister and attend church. Her father, who, true to Hispanic custom, considered himself the boss of the family, had a hard time understanding why she wanted to do anything else. He considered some common teen social activities to be unnecessary, even dangerous. She says he forbade her from going to sleepovers at her friends' houses until she was 18. He said no when she asked to try out for the cheerleading team. He opposed dance lessons and put her in taekwondo instead, wanting her to learn to defend herself in what seemed to him (though not to his daughter, who was born here) a strange land.

The high school senior in Northern Virginia says has never tried to kill herself. But she has thought about it.

Washington psychologist Lillian Comas-Diaz, who counsels immigrants, says parents often don't understand that for many adolescents here, social success inspires motivation and academic success.

What parents do know is that by moving to the United States they left behind the relatives, friends and neighbors who would have watched out for their daughter. They may be more rigid than they would have been back home -- and meanwhile their daughter is hearing from her non-Latino friends, "Think about yourself and what you want. Forget your parents."

The daughter, then, tries to be dutiful at home and to fit in at school, what Comas-Diaz calls being "of the divided heart."

The phrase describes Jocelyn in middle school and early high school. She spent much of that time being angry both at her father for having what she considered unrealistically high academic expectations and at herself for failing to meet them.

She joined a Hispanic gang in seventh grade and alienated her white friends. In the spring of ninth grade, her father finally let go of his opposition to cheerleading and she made the team, only to be chastised by her Hispanic friends as being "whitewashed."

"I don't want to live anymore," she remembers telling her younger sister. "If I'm not comfortable at home or school, what's the point?"

"Don't do it," she recalls her sister saying. "Please, don't leave me alone."