Printing with a Purpose

September 28, 2006

BAJITO ONDA apparel printing and signage is not your run-of-the-mill print shop. And owner Del Hendrixson is no ordinary printer.

After serving a one-year sentence in a Fort Worth, Texas, federal prison for counterfeiting documents for illegal immigrants, Hendrixson found herself on the street.

"Finding a good job is hard when you have a criminal record," she says. However, she managed to find work at a Dallas printing company. But Hendrixson did not get along with her new boss, and it wasn't long before she was fired. Angry, she started her own printing company so she wouldn't have to be around other people.

"At first, it was empowering to create something that made money and rewarding to have clients who accepted me for my work," she says. But Hendrixson still wasn't completely satisfied.

"I got to a point where I was working for money just to blow it," she says. "I felt like my life was empty and I didn't feel like I had socially reintegrated since I had left prison."

All her anger and frustration came to a breaking point one afternoon in 1984 when she contemplated committing a serious crime that would return her to jail. Hendrixson, alone in her darkroom with gun in hand, was planning a shooting at a local post office, a federal crime that would land her back in the federal prison where she had felt a sense of belonging while serving her one-year sentence.

"But then I heard a voice tell me not to, and instead, to reach out to others like myself who felt like they didn't have a purpose and couldn't make it," she says. The voice instructed her to reach out to young people, for whom she had never had much use. But it left her knowing that if she did do this, she would find meaning in life.

So Bajito Onda, meaning the "underground scene" in Spanish, was born. Hendrixson turned her Dallas-based printing business into a non-profit organization, using it as a safe-haven for struggling youth and ex-convicts.

"Ex-cons live here, train here, work here and get involved in social services so they can reintegrate into the community," Hendrixson says of Bajito Onda. "They learn how to use the digital printer, fax and e-mail … the hands-on experience empowers them to open their own shops."

Not only does Hendrixson take in ex-prisoners to staff Bajito Oda shop, she also prints and sells T-shirts that feature prison and gang art. "Prison artists can send their work to us and we make T-shirts with their designs," she says.

All earnings—minus the compensation the prison artists receive—are returned to the foundation. Bajito Onda maintains its facility and outreach programs by selling prison artists' designs on T-shirts, as well as completing custom screen printing and promotional product orders for clients. — SM

See more images at www.bajitoonda.org or www.bajitoonda.com.