HIV's Hidden Victims

Both were there. Pena sighed with relief.

Before leaving, she asked the teacher about the next field trip.

"I'd be glad to go," Pena said.

She worries about what teachers and other parents will think if they find out she is HIV-positive. Will she be able to stay as involved as a school volunteer? Will her children's friends still be able to come to the house?

"In our culture, this is like a taboo disease," she said. "Even if you have it, you don't talk about it."

On a Thursday morning after the new year began, Pena and several other women crammed into a small meeting room in Hollywood.

Greeting one another in Spanish, they helped themselves to a potluck lunch of tortillas, beans, rice and fried chicken.

"\o7Bienvenidos\f7," said Yolanda Salinas, the HIV-positive group leader. "I'm glad to see all of you."

The support group is the only place Pena feels totally comfortable talking about her diagnosis. When she is here, she says, she feels at home, not so isolated.

"You don't have to hide there, because everybody is the same," Pena said. "Nobody is going to judge you."

All of the women have HIV or AIDS. Most are Mexican or Central American immigrants, some without papers. Several are single mothers, many infected by husbands or live-in boyfriends.

The weekly meetings are part pep talk, part social club, part gripe session.

"Our men are macho," said one woman, who, like the other participants, did not want her name published.

"They want their clothes ironed, their food prepared," another woman said, "while they go with other women -- or men."

"Because of that, we're here," a third woman said. "They accuse us of being prostitutes or having affairs.... They are the same ones who brought the illness into the house."

The support group is sometimes sobering. Recently, one of the women died of complications from AIDS. She had a son the same age as Christopher.

But the group has also given Pena courage. On this day, she jumped into the discussion, saying that women shouldn't put up with unfaithful -- or abusive -- men.

"You have to speak up," she told the women. "You can't stay quiet because of fear."