The following excerpt comes from If You Don’t Want to Be Punched, Don’t Punch Somebody Else: The Lives of Carole Hinojosa, the second book of the Dispatches series, out from McSweeney’s this summer.

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After three decades living unhoused and addicted in Portland, Oregon, Carole Hinojosa now serves the people she used to live amongst. With fearless candor, Carole narrates her past, including the circumstances that led her to separate from her young daughter. Ten years after a court order that changed her life, Carole walks us through her days—her tireless advocacy on behalf of people whose lives she understands intimately as well as her reunion with her beloved daughter.

Carole recorded her dispatches on her phone. The italicized sections originated in conversation with one of her editors recorded at her home in 2018.

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I tried to quit doing drugs when I found out I was pregnant with my daughter. I was trying to go from all this hardcorebullshit to being this normal little mommy. Back then, there were hardly any recovery options. You can decide, I’m going to be a mom, and I’m going to get clean. But back then, you couldn’t find help. And like I said, my mom had made us scared to ask for help.

Once you go down our driveway, you’re in a whole other place and you don’t even remember that right outside your yard is all this craziness.

I think I was just a couple days into tenth grade. I dropped out and got a job in a nursing home. I could’ve been a hooker, a drug-free hooker, and had my kid. But I wasn’t going to expose her to those people. Because when you’ve been a childhood hooker, you see how some people prey on children. I thought I was going to take care of my kid and not do drugs. There was no way it was going to work. That was the only normal I knew.

I gave birth to my daughter at the hospital, at OHSU, and came back to live at my mom’s place. I cleaned it up. A guy came over I’ve known all my life. He was like, Dang, the house is clean now! I didn’t allow people to shoot up in our living room anymore. I was policing the house. Like, if you’re going to do drugs, do them in a closed bedroom somewhere, not where my kid’s sleeping. Someone shot up in the bathroom and left his rig on the floor. When I took my kid into the bathroom to give her a bath, I almost set her foot on it. I was like, No, this isn’t happening here. I walked up to the guy, and right where the wind would move his hair, I stabbed the needle into the wall. I said, You’re lucky that ain’t your eyeball. He was one of my kid’s dad’s friends. And he looked at my kid’s dad and goes, Are you gonna let that…? Because girls weren’t allowed to be like that. And my kid’s dad goes, Dude, that chick will go fucking psycho over her kid. Don’t say nothing to her.

All I knew is I had this baby, and I had to protect her from the drug addicts and the sex offenders that nobody protected me from. So I didn’t sleep a lot. I started doing meth again so I would stay awake. My daughter was two years old, maybe eighteen months old. I don’t really remember. She might even have been younger.

DISPATCH: 7/23/23

Right now, I’m also a live-in sober house manager. I make sure nobody’s getting loaded. We do UAs in my house. I walk around the house seeing if the chores are done. That’s it. And then if I hear things, that the girls are doing stuff that they shouldn’t be, I just call my boss. The women who live here usually come from treatment. Sometimes they come from the street. It depends on who they are referred by, sometimes treatment centers, sometimes Human Services. You have to have a kid to live in our house.

This house is really nice. I’ve never lived somewhere beautiful before. The bathroom has a walk-in shower and soaker tub. I decided today was yardwork day. It’s not something I have to do for my job. I do it because the yard’s so nice. It’s really huge, and there’s a garden.

It’s a sanctuary in the middle of all the chaos of Portland. It’s like, once you go down our driveway, you’re in a whole other place and you don’t even remember that right outside your yard is all this craziness: houselessness, addiction, theft, murder…

The girls in the house are really good about staying clean. Each mom gets their own room, a mom and her kids. Six women. One of them has four kids, one of them has three kids, and everybody else only has one kid. So yeah, we’ve got eleven kids. Most of these women have DHS involved in their custody. So if they relapse, they’re going to lose their kids.

It can get pretty intense around here. There are a lot of disagreements. Every mom is picky about how they want things to be for their kids. And some moms are cleaner than other moms.

The best thing I have going on right now is this morning, I am packing for a business trip. 

Tomorrow I’m flying to Washington, DC, on an all-expense-paid company trip. And I get paid while I’m away. A person with my history gets a business trip? What the heck?

You don’t want to put anything healthy in your body, because you’re slowly trying to kill yourself.

I finally was like, I’m getting out of this situation. My friend got his mom to give me a chance to leave my mom’s house and not do drugs. His mom invited me to live with her at the beach with my daughter until I got my feet on the ground. For some reason, I believed my kid’s dad could keep it together and take care of our daughter while I was moving my stuff to Astoria. When I got there, my friend’s mom goes, Where’s the baby? And I go, Her dad talked me into… And she goes, My heart’s telling me that was a bad move. When I got back to Portland to get my daughter, her dad—him and my cousin—had decided to leave the baby home alone and go rob a house. When they got busted, my cousin told the cops that he couldn’t go to jail, because my baby was home alone. So the cops said, Okay, tell us where the baby is, and we’ll take you to her.

And of course they grabbed my baby and took her into custody.

When I tried to get my kid back from DHS, it was the worst fight of my life. It was ’86 or ’87, she was three or four. To get her back, the state wanted me to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop. I went to court. I was like, Here is all of my documentation. I’m trying to be a good mom.

DISPATCH: 8/8/23

I’ve been recuperating from the business trip to Washington, DC. The trip was the best time. I never flew in a plane before. The flight attendant gave me a little pin with the wings.

I kept asking everyone I work with if they wanted to go on a sightseeing tour, and my boss was like, Let’s all go. She paid for everyone’s tickets, except I’d already bought mine. I was so excited about the whole thing. We went on a bus and saw all the museums and memorials, things that, before, I never would have seen. We kept the windows open, and at one point, it started raining on us, and we were like, It doesn’t bother us, we’re from Oregon.

The Smithsonian! To see the past being treasured like that! We saw the White House dishes and all the first ladies’ inauguration dresses and stuff from Elvis to Prince to Archie Bunker. The coolest thing was the very first RV. RVs have come a long way. It was teeny, and it looked really uncomfortable.

Sam (Carole’s dog) is looking at me. He thinks I’m talking to myself again.

The purpose of the conference in Washington, DC, was to share knowledge in the addiction recovery world. We want to help people believe they can come up from the bottom—which I call Ground Miserable. All the government talks about is: We have all this money to figure out this crisis. It’s really sad that there are so many resources and they’re so hard for us to access. Everybody says they care and want to help. Does anybody really care?

I guess people don’t get how hard it is to get out of homelessness. You can’t ever leave your stuff, because people will steal it. Or the government will come by and take it all to be thrown away. Before you know it, you don’t take care of yourself emotionally, physically. You no longer want to shower, you no longer want to eat. You don’t want to put anything healthy in your body, because you’re slowly trying to kill yourself.

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From If You Don’t Want To Be Punched, Don’t Punch Somebody Else: The Lives of Carole Hinojosa by Carole Hinojosa, edited by Peter Orner and Laura Lampton Scott. Copyright © 2025. Available from McSweeney’s Publishing.