Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Esperanza Rodriguez, right, volunteers at the Ysleta Lutheran Mission thrift store. At left is customer Lupe Gutierrez. (Rudy Gutierrez / El Paso Times)

From her new home in Northeast El Paso on Thursday night, Valerie Estrada recalled every barrier in her battle against poverty -- her mother's death, the years spent in foster care, becoming pregnant at an early age and the difficulty finding a stable job.

Across town at the Kennedy Brothers Apartments in the Lower Valley, Esperanza Rodriguez no longer considers life below the poverty line a problem.

After sacrificing to raise her four kids alone on meager wages, she's still poor by federal standards, but is comfortable and content.

The two women are among 200,000 El Pasoans who have struggled with poverty for much of their lives. While they acknowledge that life sometimes is tough, they continue to thrive, and have agreed to share their lives with the El Paso Times for the next five weeks.

Estrada family

Life has not been kind to Estrada, who, at times, worked various jobs to sustain her family, sought refuge in transitional living centers and government-funded housing, and found herself asking for payday loans just to make ends meet.

A single mother of four children until a month ago, Estrada takes pride in her efforts to secure a better life for her family.

"People think that because you are low-income, you are lazy and you really don't do anything," Estrada said. "I've never wanted to be looked at like that and I knew I was better than that, so I worked really hard to change my life."

The process has not been easy.

At 7 years old, Estrada was placed in foster care. At 13, her mother died. For the next few years, she was taken in by various relatives.

While still a teenager, Estrada became pregnant. Later, she had to escape an abusive relationship.

"I've struggled so much," Estrada said. "I would always try to pretend that nothing was wrong. I always tried to keep my composure -- for me and for my kids."

Estrada, who with her income alone falls below the poverty line, said she finally feels more secure with a job she loves, a month-old marriage and a new home that she bought with help from Habitat for Humanity.

Rodriguez family

Rodriguez keeps her two-bedroom apartment immaculately clean.

No dish is left dirty for long. For her garbage, she prefers using a plastic grocery-store bag hung on a doorknob for garbage instead of a large can under her sink. The bag is easier to carry out with her each day, maintaining the cycle of cleanliness.

Her kids say it was always this way.

"We might have been poor back then, but we were always clean," said one of her two daughters, Espy Belmontes.

Now 33, Belmontes is recalling memories of her childhood, when she and her siblings shared hand-me-down clothes and felt envious of other kids who were called into their homes at night because Church's Chicken had arrived. The Rodriguez family ate a lot of rice and beans.

But they always ate. Rodriguez worked as many as three jobs at a time to ensure this, wading the Rio Grande daily while they still lived in Juárez.

She kept working after they moved north of the river and gained legal residency.

Raising the kids alone in Segundo Barrio and then the Kennedy complex, she worked until recent years. Now she volunteers four days a week at a church and lives off the nearly $8,000 in disability she's paid each year.

The income level puts her below the poverty line, but Rodriguez says she has enough.

Even when her kids visit and find her refrigerator lacking, she doesn't ask them to make a trip to the store. They just do it.

"It's beautiful," she said.

This article was published in Week 1 of the El Paso Times Poverty Series.