When Gloria Barrios made the risky journey across the U.S.-Mexico border in the early 1980s, she had to leave her only child behind. Five-year-old Blanca Luna arrived a few years later with relatives. Thanks to the “amnesty” law of 1986, she and her mother were both able to become U.S. citizens.
She was scheduled to graduate March 10, after which she planned to head home to Pilsen for some family time before being reassigned for more training. On April 27 she’d turn 28.
Accompanied by a military escort, it finally arrived at O’Hare on the afternoon of Thursday, March 13. Manuel Martinez, director of the Sagrado Corazon funeral home in Gage Park, says it came to him already embalmed and dressed in Luna’s air force uniform.
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Figueroa has helped Barrios negotiate the air force’s English-speaking bureaucracy, and she claims the service has offered inconsistent accounts of Blanca’s death. “They said she had a stab wound on her back on the right side, then they said she was stabbed in her neck on the left side. Why are there no police reports, no pictures?”
Barrios “was still pretty much reeling, dumbfounded almost,” says Kirschenman. “An institution her daughter had looked to as a stepping stone of career mobility, a way to get ahead in this society, was clearly not cooperating at all.”
Figueroa finds it impossible to believe that her friend would have killed herself. She says she talked to Luna on the phone almost every day, including the evening before she was found dead. “She loved her job, she loved what she was doing, she loved the military,” says Figueroa. “And she was so excited about coming home in a few days.”
