Although it happened more than 60 years ago, Antonio Salazar-Hobson remembers every detail of his kidnapping. He says that if he closes his eyes, he is instantly taken back to that hot Sunday afternoon in 1960 when he was a four-year-old boy standing with his brothers and sisters in the red dust of his back yard on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona.
Nearby, at the bottom of a short passageway connecting the back yard to the road out of town, a car is idling.
A white man is leaning out of the window, calling Salazar-Hobson’s name. He is very afraid of this man and the woman sitting next to him in the passenger seat. His older brother and sister are also afraid. They have been told by their parents, who are out working in the fields, that they must not let Salazar-Hobson go anywhere with the couple in the car. He can hear the fear in their voices as they call out: “Thank you very much, but Antonio can’t come for ice-cream.”
Then, suddenly, the man is out of the car and moving at astonishing speed towards them. As the children stand frozen with terror, he swoops down on Salazar-Hobson, lifting him up and carrying him away. He throws him into the backseat and the car accelerates away, leaving his brothers and sisters screaming in the dust. In just a few hours, the car will have crossed over the border into California. It will be another 24 years before Salazar-Hobson sees his family again.
What happens to Salazar-Hobson in the time between his kidnapping and his return to his family is so horrifying that it is almost impossible to comprehend. After being snatched from his back yard, he is taken into a nightmarish landscape of sex trafficking, violence and exploitation, where the rest of his early life is spent in an endless loop of fear, pain and loneliness.
Yet Salazar-Hobson’s story is so much more than the evil that was done to him. Rather than being broken by what he experienced, he instead rose from the ashes of his stolen childhood to accomplish extraordinary academic feats and become one of the US’s most successful labour rights attorneys, representing vulnerable and powerless communities, and dedicating his life to justice and compassion. “I chose not to be obliterated by the abuse and trauma I was forced to endure,” he says. “Instead of being swallowed by the darkness, I survived by walking towards the light.”
Salazar-Hobson was the 11th of 14 children born to Chicano migrant worker parents: Mexican farm workers who scraped a living from the fruit, vegetable and cotton fields of Arizona. Salazar-Hobson remembers it as a hard, brutal life of unremitting poverty and work. His earliest memories are sitting in the back of station wagons at the side of enormous fruit fields in the tremendous heat of summer, listening out for the buzz of the aeroplanes that would fly in low over the bent backs of the workers, raining down pesticides that would strip the colour from their skin and prematurely end the lives of so many in his community.
His father was a terrifying figure in all their lives, a brutal misogynist who beat them all but had reservoirs of violence to expend on his mother.
“My mother, Petra, was a gentle, gracious, intuitive soul who suffered 50 years of beatings at the hands of my father, but she had so much love for us all,” he says. “I was born mute. I didn’t speak for the first three years of my life, but my mother made me her special child, she adored me and smothered me with love.”
In the years that would come, when things were at their worst and he was utterly alone, at the mercy of merciless adults, he says his determination to see her again was the only reason he made it through. “Getting back to her was my only reason to survive,” he says. “She taught me kindness and she taught me to love myself. I took that love and held on tight to it, and it held me together after I was taken from her.”
When Salazar-Hobson was four, a couple moved in to a house 100 yards from their family home. John and Sarah Hobson were the first white people that the Salazars had ever met. Both fluent Spanish speakers, the Hobsons befriended the family. “They bought all us kids new shoes, the first new shoes we’d ever had. They paid for baptisms for the babies, invited us over to watch cartoons on TV, and Sarah baked us cookies,” he says. “They were white, so we never considered that they could be bad people.”
After five months, the Hobsons moved again, just out of town, and soon invited Salazar-Hobson to stay with them for the weekend. Almost as soon as he arrived at their house, Salazar-Hobson says he was raped. A few weeks later, he was sent to stay with them again; this time they invited three other men to come and abuse him.
“I was still almost entirely mute, which is why I think they picked me,” he says. “After that first time at their house, I stopped speaking completely. I started to lose weight, I was in a deep state of shock and shame.” The third time he was sent to stay with the Hobsons, he was subjected to a horrific attack by a group of men and this time, when he arrived home, his parents finally realised that there was something deeply wrong. “And they said: ‘You will never go to that house again,’ so after a few weeks the Hobsons came to our house and took me for themselves.”
In the moments after his kidnapping, Salazar-Hobson remembers sitting in the back of the car with his small legs sticking out in front of him, looking at the new shoes his kidnappers had bought for him a few months before. “I remember riding in that car with John and Sarah Hobson not saying a word to me and I just knew how terrible it was going to be,” he says.
The following five years were ones of horror. He says he was drugged and trafficked for sex by the Hobsons, sent to spend entire summers on a ranch used by paedophiles. “By the third summer, it was the lowest point, there had been a particularly horrific attack and I decided to kill myself, because I felt that this would be the only way I would make it back to my family, but my attempt failed,” he says. “And after that, I was sent back to the Hobsons, but they didn’t dare to send me there again.”
By this point Salazar-Hobson was nearly 10 and “basically I’d aged out; I was too old to be of sexual interest to the Hobsons or any of their people,” he says. Yet now he was living with them, ostensibly as their adopted son, still with no way of getting back to his mother. “They were terrified of the police and had this very warped, deluded sense of responsibility towards me,” he says. “They had convinced themselves that they had saved me from a life of being a poor farm worker. They told me that if I told anyone they weren’t my adopted parents I’d be institutionalised and disappear into the care system, and never have a hope of finding my family again.”
By the time he was 12, they were living in a small room in a cheap roadside motel, with the couple descending into drink and violence. “I just realised I had to get through the next five years until I was old enough to leave,” he says. The Hobsons barely spoke or acknowledged him at all. “I came from a family of 14 children and now I was always alone,” he says. “But I just kept repeating the same thing to myself: I will endure whatever it takes to get back to my people. And I knew that education was my only route out.”
He was enrolled at the local school and immediately excelled. By high school, he was one of the top performing students in the district. “I was just compulsively, obsessively, always trying to be the best,” he says. “All those years I was mute, I’d developed this extraordinary memory; I can remember every detail of my life, so I just channelled that into my academic work.” Every night, he would go to the motel’s laundry room and study for hours under a lightbulb suspended over the washers and dryers.
When he was 13, Salazar-Hobson walked out into the agricultural fields near the motel and started looking for work. “I knew that the life I was living was a lie. The Hobsons had stolen me away, but I had the need to be back among my own community and my own language and I needed to learn how to work,” he says.
Two years later, when he was 15 and supporting himself through high school by working for minimum wage while also volunteering at the local union office, he had a chance meeting with the famed migrant rights activist Cesar Chavez that would alter the course of his life for ever. Chavez told Salazar-Hobson to go away and get his education and then to come back and work with him as a labour rights attorney, fighting for justice for migrant workers abused and exploited by the system.
“When he said this to me, I just knew that this was what I was put on this earth to do. He gave me this second dream, this other potential future, because all I had ever lived for was finding my family again,” says Salazar-Hobson. “I had no male figure in my life, but then I met this incredibly beautiful, compassionate, powerful man who saw something in me that I could believe in and I knew instantly that I would be loyal to his vision of me for ever.”
So this is what Salazar-Hobson did. He studied and worked hard, becoming fully immersed in Chavez’s battle for rights for Mexican farm workers. After high school, the Hobsons “just left me on the side of the road”, he says. But by then, he had won a prestigious scholarship to attend UC Santa Cruz and then went on to Stanford as a Danforth scholar.
After graduating from Stanford, he continued to law school where he met his wife (they have now been together for more than 45 years and have two grownup children). His name was registered on his professional paperwork as “Hobson”; he later added “Salazar” as changing his name completely would mean having to re-qualify. When he was 28, his new in-laws lent him money to hire a private detective to find his family.
“That moment of going to meet my mother, it’s difficult to describe how that felt,” he says. “Before we met, I just felt like I needed to prove myself to her, show her that I hadn’t forgotten who I was or become someone who had abandoned his people, and that I’d lived my whole life in anticipation of the moment we would be reunited.”
He worried intensely that she wouldn’t want him back. “But when I first saw her, she looked into my eyes and saw that I was her son and I told her that I had missed her so desperately and if it hadn’t been for her I could not have made it. And I thanked her for her love and told her that I’d thought about her every day. And when we first embraced, it was like I was a little boy in her arms again.”
Salazar-Hobson’s mother told him that, after he’d been kidnapped, the search to find him had consumed her life. He found out that the police had done nothing to help the family – the Hobsons were never prosecuted. “She understood, of course, that this was because we were poor Latinos and therefore I was disposable. They wouldn’t move a muscle to track down a white couple.” He also learned how his father, who died 20 years after his kidnapping, blamed his siblings for him being taken: his brother, who was only nine, was sent away to a Catholic boarding school and his sister to a convent, where they remained for the rest of their childhoods.
Salazar-Hobson spent the next years rebuilding his relationship with his mother and his siblings. “You know, regaining that family in adulthood, we’re not perfect but we’re an immensely loving family and to have that in my life has been the biggest blessing I’ve received.”
He has manifested Chavez’s dream and become one of the US’s most successful and prolific federal labour rights attorneys. He has taken on multibillion-dollar corporations, represented First Nation people and LGBTQ+ farm worker communities, and won every case. “I’m used to people underestimating me, this poor Chicano boy going up against rooms full of corporate lawyers in suits, but I always prevail,” he says.
The past few years have been brutal for the family. His mother died, made ill by the pesticides she had been exposed to for so many years, and Salazar-Hobson lost four of his siblings to Covid. “I have spent my life fighting oppression and injustice but what happened to my family and my community during Covid was that they were discarded, they were disposable and they were wilfully neglected,” he says. “Hundreds died. And seeing this has made me even more militant in my quest for justice.”
He now plans to dedicate the rest of his life to the anti-trafficking movement. “It is my hope that somehow my story can be of service to the community of survivors of sexual assault and trafficking; what happened to me can show other kids that they don’t have to be ashamed, that they can rise up to become whoever they want to be. I want to show them that I refused to be broken and, in the end, I did what I always vowed to do: I made it home.”
• Antonio, We Know You: A Memoir is out now.
