Jesus in a Mullet

She found a daunting task ahead of her. "The very first day I came in to work they were pulling a five-foot black snake out of the warehouse," Gilbert says. Hendrixson had no place to stay and no money to pay Gilbert a salary. They lived in a wooden shed that sat on the print-shop floor. Gilbert donated her truck to Bajito Onda, and her $35,000 retirement fund from the Maine highway department soon followed.

Things grew tougher when the agencies that had been supplying Bajito Onda's workers decided to pull out. "We had heard of [financial] improprieties," says Dwayne Fisher, the Community Supervision and Corrections official that handled the case. "We checked them out, and they appeared to be legitimate." Hendrixson says the agency hinted that she had been taking money in exchange for signing off on community service hours. "Let me tell you something--every probationer that walked through that door offered money," she says. "Did I take it? No." But she couldn't prove it, and the agency adopted a better-safe-than-sorry policy. As Jim Mills, the interim Dallas director of the agency, puts it, "We've got plenty of places out there that aren't having allegations made against them, so let's send our people to them."

Similarly mystifying for Hendrixson was Bajito Onda's ejection from Hutchins State Jail. She had carefully built up a rapport with a group of 15 hard-core gang members in prison, visiting as often as three times a week. Hendrixson believes that her approach wasn't religious enough to suit the prison chaplain, Greg McAlister. "I have nothing against her personally," McAlister insists. "It was a decision that we felt the program was better for the outside than in. We felt the nature of the program was a preventative program." Coming on the heels of losing the community service workers, the blow was hard to take. "The day they kicked me out of Hutchins, I just stood there and cried," Hendrixson says. "I mean, how bad is that that they don't even want you in prison?"

Vicki Hallman of the TDCJ Parole Division first met Hendrixson at a 2003 meeting of the Community Partnership Council, a network of social service organizations. "The first time I met her I was scared to death of her," says Hallman, a stylish African-American with a habitual air of cheerful confidence. "Anybody who can out-talk me, that's a problem." She recalls her first visit to Bajito Onda: "I went on a day that it was raining," Hallman says. The rain poured through countless leaks in the roof. "She considered me a VIP, and she had one little room where she could put me where I wouldn't get wet, so it was me in there and a dog and her puppies." Nevertheless, Hallman was impressed and began using Bajito Onda as her last resort. "I send her my toughest cases," Hallman says. In one instance, a parolee became a target when he tried to leave his gang. "He had been beaten to a pulp," Hallman says. "He was just concerned about moving from pillar to post so they wouldn't find him. [Del] nursed him back to health."

Even as Bajito Onda struggled in Dallas, Hendrixson found a way to expand abroad. In 2001, Mexican activist Antonio Melin contacted Hendrixson, impressed with the Bajito Onda Web site (www.bajitoonda.org). He soon founded a chapter in Mexico, a connection that led to an invitation for Hendrixson to address a U.N. conference on youth violence in Monterrey last year. Another Web convert, Amidu Mansaray, founded a chapter in the tiny West African nation of The Gambia in 2003. Mansaray has since traveled to human rights conferences across Africa, gaining recognition for Bajito Onda from the African Union. When he came to Dallas for three weeks in 2003 to meet Hendrixson in person at last, he was astonished. "You live worse here than we do in Africa," he told her.

It was Gilbert who found a way to change all that. She scouted out the warehouse facility on Grand Avenue, and a local businessman agreed to loan Bajito Onda enough to move in, a loan to be paid off in future free printing. The wooden hut was replaced by rooms at the Quality Inn, another in-kind trade. But Gilbert is far from satisfied. "When I came here in 2001, Del said we'd have a house in a year. It's been four years, and I'm living in a hotel."

Hendrixson, however, is ecstatic. Her 1,000 pieces are finally coming together. "Everybody thinks I'm getting nowhere, but I'm really getting everywhere," she says.

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The wheels would come off the Bajito Onda lowrider in short order if it weren't for the dedication of Hendrixson's staff. Gilbert has done much to bring order from chaos. Armando Gonzalez, who for four years has done the bulk of Bajito Onda's screen printing, is another stalwart. The compact, cheerful Mexico City native looks younger than his 42 years. He says he tried to keep his own struggling printing business afloat before heading north. "She's actually a sweet woman," Gonzalez says of Hendrixson. "A tough attitude, a strong character, definitely, but a great lady." Though Gonzalez could make more elsewhere, his respect for Hendrixson and the enjoyment of instructing others in his craft have kept him where he is.

The other full-time staffer is Rob Avalos, 23, a wiry Latino with a wispy goatee who studied computer graphics at a local technical college. Last year, he was working construction at D/FW airport, unable to find a job in his preferred field. "I would get the interviews but I would never get the job," he says. When he dropped off his résumé at Bajito Onda's former location, just down the street from his grandparents' house, he expected more of the same. Instead, Hendrixson called and hired him sight unseen. Avalos maintains Bajito Onda's Web site and does much of the design, though he is less comfortable with training others. "Sometimes you really have to explain things word by word," he says. "I try to just keep working."

Vital as their support is, much of the load still falls on Hendrixson's shoulders. What she hopes for most is to find someone to succeed her as a manager so she can concentrate on outreach programs and Bajito Onda's presence abroad. Yet there is a real question whether she could bring herself to relinquish the reins.

"Del has what is known as 'founder's syndrome,'" Gary Ivory says. "She feels she has to be involved in every aspect of the business. Founder's syndrome is a common ailment at start-up nonprofits, which often are created by one person with a compelling vision. Most of Bajito Onda exists only inside Hendrixson's head. "I wish she would put more structure in her program," Hallman says. "I think you use Del to sell it, but you need somebody else to draw it up."

Recently, Hendrixson thought she had at last found the right person, a quiet African-American volunteer named Theo. Hendrixson met Theo on August 14, a Sunday, and by August 16 she is convinced she has found her successor. "It's almost like we have the same brain," Hendrixson gushes. "His brain talks to my brain. It's like my brain has a friend. I'm serious--my brain is lonely having all this stuff in it, and it can't really relate with other people."

Hendrixson doesn't press Theo too hard on his background once she has established the vital fact that he, too, has had trouble with the law. "He successfully completed his probation," Hendrixson says. "So he kind of qualifies. He kind of fits in with what we're doing." For the remainder of the week, Theo's obvious competence has Hendrixson delighted--but on the following Monday, he is nowhere to be found. She doesn't hear from him again for a week.

Hendrixson sends Theo packing when he eventually reappears. "I'm very demanding," she says. "I invest in you, I expect you to invest in you. I can't invest in an empty hole in the ground." Yet her capacity for investment seems limitless. "I think Del's idea is, 'I save your life, you stay here and work with me and we'll keep this place going,'" Hallman says. "But these aren't people that can help Del. These are people like Del."

Jessie "Chuco" Chavez is one of those people. On one steamy evening last month, the 32-year-old Chavez sits in his front yard, visiting with Hendrixson. He is in obvious pain, but his instincts won't let him relax. At any sign of movement beyond the chain-link fence surrounding the yard of his family's small Oak Cliff house, Chavez tenses in his wheelchair, his eyes probing the darkness. "Sorry, man--paranoid," he says after one such interruption.

Chavez has good reason to be paranoid. His legs have been paralyzed since a bullet lodged in his spine when he was 17, just one of nine different times he says he's been shot. Chavez never let his disability hinder him in his duties as a gang leader, however, either in prison or on the outside. "He'll go after them right out of his chair," Hendrixson says in a respectful tone. Now though, Chavez's body is betraying him. During a recent hospital visit for a nagging infection in his thigh, Chavez fell from his chair and broke bones in both his weakened legs. Occasional tremors, either from fever or pain, course through his body.

Chavez and Hendrixson have a friendship that at times seems more of a mutual admiration society. Chavez is impressed that Hendrixson seeks out company that would give most middle-aged white ladies nightmares. Hendrixson, in turn, is awed by Chavez's grim determination to earn respect from the world at any price.

Chavez heads to his trailer behind the house to get a piece of his artwork for Hendrix to copy. It is a breathtaking, brooding ink drawing of the Stations of the Cross that he did in prison. Before rolling back to the door, Chavez points to a small cross propped in a dish. "See that?" Closer inspection shows that the cross is actually a thorned, gray metal "T" with an overlaid "S," a blood-red stone in a claw-like setting at the center. "Texas Syndicate," Chavez says--a much-feared prison gang. "That means I'm a general. Guys that know, they're shitting their pants when they see that."

Out front again, Chavez talks about his brother Johnny, one of 19 siblings in the family. Hendrixson has mentioned Johnny before: He was known as the "Thrill Killer" and was executed by lethal injection on April 22, 2003, as his family members watched. After apologizing for his crimes, Johnny smiled and winked at his brother and then lay back, closing his eyes. "OK, Warden, take me to heaven," he said. But as the automatic plungers fell, he lifted his head again and asked, "Is this thing working?"

"We thought he was going to beat death," Chavez says. They were wrong--but Chavez swears that all those present saw his brother's spirit rising to heaven shortly afterward, arms crossed in death and wearing a beatific grin. "The guard grabbed me on the shoulder," he says, "and said, 'We just killed somebody from God.'"

It was Chavez's love of art that led him into Hendrixson's shop in 2000, but it was years before he would trust her, and even longer before he would return her hug. Chavez remembers her first attempt: "I was like, 'Don't hug me, lady. I don't hug nobody.'" Since then he has appeared with Hendrixson on TV and at gang conferences. "Somebody should have told me a long time ago," Chavez says. "They should have said, 'You've got some talent there, you could do something different.' If someone had told me that when I was a kid, I wouldn't be in this chair now." Does that mean he is no longer a gang member? "No," he says, amused at the question. "We're a family."

Nevertheless, Hendrixson counts Chavez as a success story, as she does any gang member who will open up and talk honestly to her. It is this unquestioning acceptance that makes Hendrixson and Bajito Onda utterly unique. "Del isn't as judgmental" of her clients as other service providers, Ivory says. "When they've bombed out of everything else, a lot of people don't want to touch them."

Hendrixson, however, refuses to discriminate. "I had a skinhead live with me for 14 months," she says. "That guy hasn't changed. He's still a monster. He'll call me up and he'll say, 'Fuck you, you old whore,' and I'm like, 'Hey, what's up?'" Hendrixson's willingness to accept all comers has earned her a loyal adherent in Vicki Hallman. "I don't stutter when I say this: I'm around a lot of people, even in the churches, that talk a good talk but don't really do much," Hallman says. "I have yet to ask Del to help somebody with something--where she received no benefit whatsoever--where she has not risen to the occasion. For that I will always admire and respect her."

Hendrixson's goodwill is genuine, but so is her fascination with the criminal mind. "I work with a guy who committed a despicable crime--probably one of the worst crimes I've ever heard of," Hendrixson says, and pulls out an August 4 letter from Ramon Salcido. Salcido is on death row in California's San Quentin for the murder of six family members, including two of his three daughters. Hendrixson has made dozens of copies of the letter, in which Salcido offers his "sincere love, respect and prayers to all supporters of Bajito Onda..."

Days later, Salcido is allowed a rare phone call--and uses it to contact Hendrixson. "I asked him if he'd seen Scott Peterson," Hendrixson says. "I mean, what do you ask a guy on death row?" Yet she is thrilled that Salcido called. "It may cost me $25 for a phone call," Hendrixson says. "I don't care if it costs $150--I know what it means to him."

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Perhaps the most important new ally Hendrixson has acquired is Ivory, a tall, polished graduate of Austin College and Princeton divinity school. He gained national fame for his work with Fort Worth youth gangs in the '90s, pioneering the practice of having mentors actually move in with at-risk youth. He is also a veteran nonprofit administrator and a virtuoso at grant writing. Ivory has lent his expertise to various other causes in his spare time, but he sees a rare opportunity in Bajito Onda.

"Every program wants to do referrals, but Del does it all right here under one roof," Ivory says. "[Other programs] don't really serve the poorest of the poor, the hardest to reach. She does that."

Ivory has taken on the daunting task of getting Bajito Onda out of Hendrixson's head and onto paper. Before meeting Ivory, Hendrixson says, "I was like a mainframe without a keyboard." Ivory and Hendrixson have spent many late nights working to put her informal mentoring and training methods into presentable form. The next step will be to submit grant proposals to prospective donors.

During one late-night session, Hendrixson all but boasts about the funding opportunities she has missed out on. "I know a lot of people at the Meadows Foundation and they say, 'Del, apply for funding,'" Hendrixson says. "'We want to give you money.'" Ivory shakes his head as he listens. Hendrixson continues: "Just two months ago I had State Farm ask me to apply for money. 'Apply, and we will give you money,' they said." Ivory looks slightly ill.

"I try to share with Del that she has a great philosophy, but having a philosophy and having a methodology are two totally different things," Ivory says. "On a case-by-case basis, she's done a good job. What I'm trying to do is help her scale that up."

On another front, things look even more promising. The TDCJ Director of Rehabilitation and Reentry Programs, Madeline Ortiz, contacted Hendrixson out of the blue late last month, apparently prompted by a reporter's inquiries. The department was willing to reconsider Hendrixson's ouster from Hutchins, Ortiz informed her. Hendrixson met with Ortiz and other prison officials on September 13.

"I apologized and said I just don't understand the policies," Hendrixson says. "I want to do things by the book, but I don't know the book, so if you'll teach me I'll work with you." She gave the visitors a tour of her facility, and they left Hendrixson with a promise of wholehearted cooperation. "They were ecstatic. They loved it. I gave them all a T-shirt," Hendrixson enthuses. "I was, like, in prison program utopia."

More than 8,400 state prisoners were released to Dallas County in fiscal year 2004. "There's a reality that needs to be recognized: If they're convicted in Dallas, they come back to Dallas," Hallman says. "They're not going somewhere else. They're not going to an island somewhere."

In fact, nearly one-third of prisoners released in Texas are back behind bars within three years. It is that prospect that haunts Hendrixson as she considers the fate of her best friend during her own prison days, Elizabeth Chagra. Chagra was famously convicted of paying Charles Harrelson, father of actor Woody Harrelson, to assassinate a federal judge in 1979. The judge was to have presided over Chagra's husband's drug trial.

"We promised each other that if we got out we would devote ourselves to helping others," Hendrixson says. Chagra, serving a 19-year sentence, was diagnosed with cancer in prison. "She never got out. She died in there." As Hendrixson tells the story, the tone of her voice conveys the implicit message that drives her: Bajito Onda is the only thing that has kept her from sharing Chagra's fate.

"Del will swallow you up," Hallman says. "She wants you to live and breathe Bajito Onda because she does--and that will scare some people off." That same intensity is what makes Hendrixson effective and what allows Bajito Onda to survive, because of and in spite of her. As Hendrixson puts it, describing the way she works with convicts, "I'm pretty awesome if I do say so myself." And she does, without hesitation.