PROVIDENCE — The beating left the teenage girl badly bruised. Her nose had swelled to twice its normal size and her beaten arms throbbed. It was the price she had to pay to join MS-13, a violent international gang with a chapter in Providence.

The girl, who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution, was 14 at the time and a student at Hope High School. She was upset that six teenage gang members — four boys, including her boyfriend, and two girls — attacked her with little warning in a city park. They told her that if she was going to date a gang member and “chill” with MS-13, then she had to go through the initiation, referred to as a “jump in.”

The attack lasted 13 seconds, as in MS-13, and it left the girl angry. Her face and arms were bruised and discolored for her quinceañera, a Latino celebration to commemorate her 15th birthday.

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The girl is now a 21-year-old woman and the mother of a young boy. She recently met with a Journal reporter to talk about her troubled teenage years and how she got involved with a notorious gang with as many as 10,000 members in Mexico, Central America and across the nation.

MS-13 stands for Mara Salvatrucha and most of its gang members are from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. For the purposes of this story we will refer to the former gang member as Luisa.

She is an attentive mother with an easy smile. There is one trace linking her to the life she left behind: Three dots tattooed on her arm, a popular symbol for gang bangers, that stands for: “My Crazy Life.”

Luisa was born in Guatemala City, the largest city in Guatemala, and as a child, she moved with her family to New York City. Shortly before she entered high school, the family relocated to Providence.

It was a difficult time. She was entering adolescence in a new urban high school where she didn’t have any friends. She started dating a Guatemalan boy who was in the MS-13 gang.

There was nothing glamorous about her life. She drank, smoked and hung out in public parks. From time to time, the gang members would “jump in” new members. She remembered seeing the newcomers suffer broken noses and get their teeth knocked out.

Back around 2000, Luisa said there were about 20 young men and women in the Providence MS-13. She said the gang members’ ages ranged from 12 to 30. Within two years, she said, the gang’s membership had climbed to about 100.

She said the gang members were involved in cocaine trafficking, car theft and street robberies in the neighborhoods off Branch Avenue in the city’s North End.

Detective Sgt. Mike Wheeler, who heads the Providence Police Gang Unit, got to know Luisa when she was running the streets with MS-13. She was a tough, “hard-core” girl who wore a blue bandanna, low-slung jeans and a white sleeveless T-shirt. Her parents pleaded with him to get her out of the gang, but he had doubts that she would be willing to change her lifestyle.

Wheeler didn’t give up. He always found time to speak to Luisa and give her a dose of stern advice. He told her that if she remained with the gang one of three things would happen: she would end up dead, pregnant or in prison.

She ended up with the second option: She got pregnant.

Luisa, still upset with the brutal beating from the jump in, broke off with her boyfriend and started seeing a member of an MS-13 rival, the Original Crip Gang. She also was troubled when she learned about MS-13’s initiation of another girl. One night, a large group of gang members lined up before the young woman. She had to have sex, one after another, with the 13 men she selected.

Luisa said the MS-13 gang members were not happy with her decision to leave the gang. At one point, during her pregnancy, a group of gang members tried to attack her with baseball bats. She said she escaped in a car.

In recent months, she said, she has heard that the MS-13 gang has recruited more members in Providence. She sees more young people, 12- to 14-year-old boys and girls, proclaiming their allegiance to the gang.

Today, Luisa said she is busy raising her son and has no time to hang with a gang. She watches her back, but she doesn’t live in fear of the world she left behind. She sees the children joining MS-13 and shakes her head. She doesn’t want to see them experience the life she left behind.