Content Warning: These Chapter Summaries and Analyses reference several difficult and upsetting issues including sex trafficking, drug trafficking, rape, murder, kidnapping, and self-harm.

Ladydi Garcia Martinez, the narrator and protagonist of Prayers for the Stolen, describes her life growing up in the rural mountain village of Chulavista in Guerrero, Mexico. She lives with her mother, Rita, a kleptomaniac and cleaner for a rich family in the nearby city of Acapulco. Ladydi’s father, who was a waiter in the same city, emigrated to the United States, where he remained permanently after returning to visit them only a few times. Ladydi explains that the drug traffickers who dominate the area kidnap local girls and hold them hostage to rape them and traffic them to other men. As such, to protect Ladydi, when she was born, her mother told everyone that she was a boy and dressed her accordingly. When she got older, she tried to conceal the child’s beauty and “rubbed a yellow or black marker over the white enamel” on her teeth to make them “look rotten” (4). The entire town follows this practice, announcing every birth as a boy and trying to make the girls less attractive by such tactics as rubbing chili powder on their skin to make it red—as Ladydi’s friend Paula’s mother does—and keeping their hair short.