For the first few years that Mother Antonia lived in El Pueblito, her “cell” was located over a raw sewer drain, and the stench was so unbearable she slept with a surgical mask over her face. Her days were often eighteen hours long, spent feeding, giving medicine to, and talking with criminals, guards, wives, children, and the dying. Thousands suffered horribly in the prison’s system. For example, during evening roll calls, guards would mark inmates as present only for a charge of fifty cents. If prisoners couldn’t pay the bribe, they were considered absent and thus lost one day served toward their prison sentences. Everything cost money in El Pueblito—clothes, food, blankets, toilet paper, even showers—and without it, inmates were left to fend for themselves. As a result, Mother Antonia’s work was often as simple as making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to give to the hungry or handing out the miniature hotel shampoos and soaps that friends sent to her in bagfuls.

At other times, however, her work was unimaginably painful. Once, for three days and nights, she cried and banged on the door of an interrogation room where she could hear the screams of a prisoner being tortured. She would enter El Pueblito during riots, begging inmates to drop their weapons and then negotiate deals with riot squads and police on the outside. She was, as she has said, “an instrument of peace in this war zone. Wherever there is torture or there is hate, it is a war zone.” Occasionally, prisoners who died, whether from stab or gunshot wounds, beatings, or disease, were left unclaimed by family in the prison morgue. After nine days, Mother Antonia would take the body in a coffin, flag down a passing truck, and ask to be driven to the cemetery in Tijuana. There she would pay a few dollars for a simple grave site and cry for them, writing on a wooden cross “We Love You.” She not only earned the adoration of the inmates by doing these sorts of things, but she also earned the trust and respect of the prison guards. They were often suffering as well, whether from depression or poverty, alcoholism, or methamphetamine addiction.

Drugs were a constant problem in El Pueblito. In fact, it’s said that marijuana was cheaper on the streets of Little Town than anywhere else in Mexico, and it’s estimated that as many as fifty percent of the prisoners were on heroin or other drugs. At night, soccer balls stuffed with cocaine would fly over the prison walls along with smuggled guns and food. Then in the summer of 2002, fifteen hundred armed police entered La Mesa at the command of the Mexican government and bulldozed Little Town to the ground. Children who lived there with their mothers or fathers were put in orphanages. Wives were put on the street and prisoners were put in “proper” cells. At the time, the prison held sixty-seven hundred inmates, two thousand more than its maximum capacity. Despite these efforts to clean up La Mesa, however, four years later it still retains something of its Black Legend status: a place where two justice systems exist, one for the poor and one for the rich, where women and men prostitute themselves in order to survive, and where drug and arms trafficking is still rampant.

When trying to explain why she has stayed in this living hell on earth for nearly thirty years, Mother Antonia relates an unforgettable dream she once had, years before she ever knew about or visited La Mesa. In the dream, she was at Calvary (the location of Christ’s crucifixion) and a Roman guard approached her, telling her that she was going to be crucified. Terrified and filled with dread, she prayed that God would take her away so she would not have to suffer. However, the Roman guard approached her again and said, “You don’t have to pray. There’s a man here and he wants to take your place.” She saw a man standing in a white robe, and when he looked at her, she understood that he was going to die for her and that she wouldn’t owe him anything in return. But then the Roman guard said, “He needs you to stand by him.” She began to cry, protesting that she hated violence and couldn’t bear to watch someone being crucified. The guard said, “Woman, he’s there in your place.” As Mother Antonia explained, “Suddenly, I loved more than I feared. I ran behind him and knelt down and took his face in my hands. But he didn’t have a face any longer—it was blank where his face should have been. I said, ‘I’m afraid, but I’m more afraid to leave you. I’m never going to leave you, no matter what they do to me.’ I waited for the blow of the hammer, and then I woke up.” Over the years in the prison infirmary, Mother Antonia would often hold the face of a dying inmate and think, “Look, Lord, I’m with you again. . . . I’m never going to leave you.”

At the age of eighty, Mother Antonia suffers from a number of serious ailments and has to sleep with an oxygen tank next to her bed. On nights when she is especially exhausted, she wears a long nightgown to sleep just in case the guards have to retrieve her body in the morning; they’ve never seen her out of her habit. Nevertheless, her work continues. She pays for the release of prisoners who are convicted of nonviolent crimes and helps them find jobs and apartments so they can support themselves. She still arranges for hundreds of visits by dentists and oral surgeons to fix prisoners’ teeth in an effort to give them some measure of self-esteem. She prays for the souls of infamous murderers she has counseled so that they will repent in their hearts, and she visits their victims’ families in the hope that they will discover the release of forgiveness. This tireless work on behalf of the suffering, this practice of self-sacrifice is, she says, the very thing that has given her freedom. “I don’t just work for them; I am one of them. I live the way they live. Once you’re on the inside, it’s so different. Somehow prison was the place where I finally experienced the freedom to be myself, to really be myself. I think prison freed me.”

Even in death, Mother Antonia wants to be with the poor and the suffering, the people to whom she feels “thankful” for giving her the opportunity to serve God. Indeed, Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan write in The Prison Angel that she hopes to be buried in one of the mass graves at the same cemetery in Tijuana where she has brought so many of her beloved sons. “I wish to be buried with the poor,” she told me, “because in my heart I’m one of them. And I know that the poor people in Tijuana or wherever they are, if I’m there, they’ll say, ‘Mother’s buried here.’”

What makes someone capable of such self-sacrifice? How does a person come to love more than they are afraid, even of death? Mother Antonia gave me something of an answer to these questions when I asked her where her bravery came from. “I’m not brave,” she said emphatically. “Brave were the gladiators. But the Christians in Rome who died for what they believed in, they were courageous. Maybe that’s the gift I have—I’m courageous. But you know, Jiminy Cricket spoke the truth! ‘Let your conscience be your guide!’ My conviction comes from my conscience. And my conscience is my relationship with God.”