Orphaned by murder, two sisters meet their past

Orphaned by murder, two sisters meet their past
Boston women find family in El Salvador
By Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff  |  August 28, 2005
LAS FLORES, El Salvador -- Imelda Auron replayed her memories of that summer night thousands of times. Her older brother's hand over her mouth. A sister shot twice trying to flee the gunmen. Her parents dead on the dirt floor. It was 1980. She was just 4. But the images were knife-sharp.
A few years later, Imelda and her sister, Maria Cebollero, were scrubbed clean and sent to new parents in the United States. Imelda, 7, was adopted by a Hyde Park woman. Maria, 3, went to a couple in Long Island. The girls were given different names, severed from everything they knew, lost to everyone who knew them.
Twenty-one years after they left El Salvador, Imelda was mostly happy, but felt a nagging unease: Not fully American, she did not identify with Salvadorans either.
''That's how I've felt for my whole life," she said. ''Like an outcast."
Now a Jamaica Plain preschool teacher, she longed to know if her memories were true, or whether she had embroidered what little she knew about her family.
Maria didn't have the comfort of even vague memories. Shuttled between group homes and foster families since she was 12, she ended up in Dorchester and now works as a dancer in strip clubs. All her life in America, she had longed for something to moor her.
''I would be alone somewhere and just want a real mother's hug," Maria said. ''I would pray to God to send my mother's spirit down to me so I could see her face."
Questions bedeviled the sisters, who had been in touch since they were children: Why were their parents murdered? Who was left of their family? They grew up not knowing basic things: What job did their father do? How did their mother smile?
Then, this summer, answers were suddenly within reach.
Imelda, planning to volunteer in El Salvador in July, dashed off an e-mail to La Asociacion Pro-Busqueda de Ninas y Ninos Desaparecidos, an agency in San Salvador that searches for children adopted during the country's 12-year civil war. When a reply came June 13 she could barely believe it. Pro-Busqueda had found the sisters' family. The reunion was set for July 2.
As the trip got closer, e-mails from the agency brought their Salvadoran family into focus. There were two surviving brothers and a sister, 14 nieces and nephews. The family was very poor, living in a village just north of San Salvador in a dangerous area overrun with gangs. Their family had questions, too: Had their sisters found each other? Were they vegetarians, like other Americans?
In the days leading up to the meeting, Imelda, 29, and Maria, 25, were excited and nervous. They wondered how their family would look. They worried about living up to their expectations.
''It's huge," Imelda said before she left Boston. ''My mind is boggled with so many thoughts. I feel like this is going to complete me. But what happens next