Comeron sells her homemade headbands to a Perrine Elementary School mother. Photo by Gabriela Campos

Once a literature professor at the University of the Amazon in Brazil, Aldenora Comeron now makes a living selling homemade goods for parents and students out of a suitcase just outside Perrine Elementary School, near Homestead.

Originally from the city of Belém, in the northern state of Pará in Brazil, Comeron, 43, immigrated to Miami 12 years ago, after visiting the United States for the first time.

“I came on vacation and then went back to Brazil,” Comeron said. “Fifteen days later, I decided to come live in Miami for good.”

In 1997, after immigrating to Miami, Comeron was able to buy her own house with the money she had brought from Brazil and the money she was making cleaning houses. But that all soon changed, once she married a Cuban-American one year after arriving in Miami.

“Before getting married, I had my own house and I worked,” Comeron said. “But my husband took everything I had.”

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From the very beginning of their marriage, Comeron suffered from domestic abuse.  Jorge Comeron never physically hit her, but she said he was emotionally abusive and prevented her from working outside their home and doing things she loved.

Things got worse once their two children, Bryan, 9, and Alcimarina, 7, were born.  He started stealing money from Comeron’s personal bank account.
“My husband used to take money out of my account and didn’t pay our mortgage,” she said.

When the family was evicted from their home, her husband took off with the car and the rest of their money.  Comeron said her husband left them with nothing and kept constantly tormenting her on the phone.  She said he once threatened to run her and their children over with a car.

“He left me in the streets with nothing but my children,” she said. “We had to start from scratch, with absolutely nothing.”

In an attempt to avoid paying alimony or child support after Comeron filed for divorce, her husband tried to get Comeron and their children deported back to Brazil by telling the U.S. government that she was living in the United States with false documents.  That is when Comeron learned that the Social Security card and work permit she had paid her husband US$3,000 to get from his lawyer were fake.

After meeting a Brazilian lawyer who took on her case, Comeron was able to obtain residency thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Battered Immigrant Women Protection Act of 2000 and the Violence Against Women Act of 1994.

“Many women suffer silently without knowing that the rule of law is on their side,” Celia Gore, her lawyer, said. “Aldenora was one of these cases, and she was also one of the few cases that I took on pro bono.”

Comeron then was able to move with her children into the Safespace Shelter in South Miami.  The Safespace Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing support and safety for women and children victims of domestic violence. There, they shared a room with four beds and one bathroom with four other families. All of the women and children living there had been victims of domestic violence.

“At Safespace it was 55 mothers, 55 different stories and each one worse than the other,” Comeron said.  “It was really hard living in places like these.”

Comeron recalls staying up every night inside the closet crocheting and watching over her sleeping children in fear that someone would hurt them. She also was constantly a victim of theft inside the shelters, where women and children would steal clothes and the few belongings she still had.

Following their four-month stay in Safespace, the family moved to the In Transition Shelter, where she and the children were able to live more spaciously in their own apartment with government protection for another year and four months.

After creating crochet clothes, accessories and kitchen wear, Comeron spent much of her time selling her homemade goods in front of malls and churches while her children sat patiently next to her.

When she finally made enough money to move her family out of the shelter, her credit record prevented her from renting out an apartment.

“No one wanted to rent me an apartment with two children, and so it was hard since I didn’t have a car or anything because he [her husband] took everything I had,” Comeron said.

Finally, a Brazilian landlord in an apartment complex in Perrine gave the Comeron family a chance and rented her family the apartment where she and the children live today.

Currently, Comeron earns a living and is able to pay rent by selling her homemade goods in flea markets and outside her children’s school, cleaning houses and selling home appliances as a door-to-door sales representative for Carico International and Rainbow Power.

Comeron works every day of the week to support her children, who are both gifted students at Perrine Elementary School.

“She is really creative and works hard,” her son, Bryan, said.

Comeron has no regrets about immigrating to Miami and plans to stay in the United States, so her children can fulfill their dreams of becoming a lawyer and pediatrician.

“It’s time to move forward,” Comeron said enthusiastically. “That’s why we are here, because I know that here we are going to have a better future.”

According to the U.S. government, three to four million women suffer from domestic abuse in the United States each year.

“There is a lack of communication and fear,” Gore said. “The hardest part is trying to convince the women to call 911.”

Comeron agrees.  “Women have to stand up for themselves.”