The girls were never allowed to stay in any one-border town for more than a couple of months. I learned many years later that all of the Boy’s Towns were connected via a network transferring strings of girls from place to place, up and down the river. What I did not know was that an organized crime syndicate supplied girls to all of the red light districts. I suppose this rite of passage was thrust upon every generation of Catholic boys growing up on the border because I have met many and all have similar recollections of Boy’s Town in Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, Villa Acuna, and Ciudad Juarez. We wondered if any of what we had heard was true, and had to see for ourselves. We had all heard stories about Boy’s Town and were curious about the cabaret girls, the “French” movies, and especially the infamous banana and donkey dances. The Matamoros Boy’s Town was located on the outskirts of Matamoros. Every Mexican border town has a mythical red light district called Boy’s Town. We were able to satiate our emerging libidos with occasional jaunts across the border to Boy’s Town. Those of us who were more gregarious dated the VM girls while for the rest of us the thought of girls was a foreign concept until a couple of years later. Joe boys, in general, were smart and adventuresome. All of the Zavaleta boys were notable athletes, and St. Joe, which made things doubly hard for me, he pushed me to excel both on and off the field. I was an athlete, and my uncle was the coach at St. Joe, as we called it, had a long tradition as a gutsy school producing outstanding athletes and sports teams competing Valley-wide with many area public high schools. Other than being distinguished as Brownsville or Matamoros boys, the real distinguishing factor was whether or not you were an athlete. We often had to fight to gain their respect, so fighting was familiar to me, it made me tough.

Although the public-school boys resented us, many were our friends. Four generations of Zavaletas have attended St. The school was renowned for preparing boys for life and citizenship through rigorous scholarship, Catholic doctrine, and athleticism. The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate founded Saint Joseph Academy in 1865. All were upper middle class, and a few of the boys were from Anglo families in Brownsville. The other half were from Mexican American families in Brownsville. About half of the boys were from well to do Mexican families living just across the border in Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Most of us had begun school together as kindergarteners in 1952. There were only 50 boys in our sophomore class, divided into two groups. The all-girls Catholic school was Villa Maria, located about five blocks away. My pals and I were sophomores at Saint Joseph Academy, an all-boys Catholic high school in Brownsville, Texas. The 1962-1963 school year began like any other. This is the story of how they became friends and how she entrusted him with information about Magdalena Solís known as the “High Priestess of Blood,” and the cult of Yerba Buena before the cult’s demise in a shootout with police and before the story of human sacrifice ever appeared in the newspapers. They met in the infamous Matamoros Boy’s town in 1963 just weeks before the downfall of the bloodthirsty cult operating in her village. This is the unlikely but entirely true story of how a 16-year-old Saint Joseph Academy boy met a 16-year-old prostitute-sex-slave from the village of Yerba Buena in southern Tamaulipas, Mexico.

Magdalena solis hernandez brothers