Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
progression that starts out with pregnancy, continues with childbirth and the care of children, and ends with child deaths. Each aspect traces the links between the individuals’ actions and perceptions and the structures of violence that shape lives. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss aspects of life outside the home, such as work, church, and religion. I do not mean to draw a strict division between what is private and what is public in women's lives; as we know well, productive and reproductive spheres are not so clearly demarcated. Indeed, it is in this light that I include two chapters on what some may see as public spheres but are not presented as such in my analysis. The private is very much part of life beyond the home and vice versa, and these chapters help to dissolve the perceived strict demarcations. Examining life in the areas of work and church and religion, away from the intimacy of the home, allows us to see how violence is embedded in structures and social relations and actively normalized beyond the home. Chapter 6 deals with meanings that women (and others in the family) attach to women's work outside the home and the opportunities that such work presents for sociability, but it also shows the workplace as a site that highlights the insecurity of life and sources of suffering. Chapter 7 discusses the place of religion and the church in the women's lives, presenting information not only on how the women perceive this area of life but also on how religious spaces end up normalizing the reality of their suffering, providing succor but through doing so maintaining structures the way they are. In chapter 8 I place my observations about violence in Guatemala in a broader context, linking them to more open, recognizable forms, such as the current wave of feminicide in the country.
CHAPTER 2
A Framework
for Examining Violence
People say that before the fighting we had peace. But what
do you call peace? The war begins at the psychological level,
in the plantations, where every day we were dying a little
bit, every day we were consuming ourselves.
—Guatemalan peasant, quoted in Daniel Wilkinson,
Silence on the Mountain
Es que la vida de una mujer es dura, Usted. Los hijos sirven
de consuelo. A veces uno dice, “Ay Diosito, no me olvides,
por favor ten piedad!” Pero es que así es la vida de uno, no?
[A woman's life is tough. Children are the consolation.
Sometimes one says, “Oh, my little God, don't forget me,
please have mercy!” But that's our life, no?]
—Woman in San Alejo
The first epigraph above points to the usefulness of opening up the analytic lens to examine instances of violence beyond those embodied in physical pain and injury, and the second brings up reflections on everyday violence in the world of the women I came to know. Both express the enduring reality of violence that crosses multiple spaces and spheres of life, and they elucidate the two aspects of violence I wish to examine in this book: the multifaceted character of violence and its expression in the quotidian lives of ladina women that contributes to its normalization.1 Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum's (2009: 4) conceptualization of “normalized” as “legitimized ideologically such that domination, dependency, and inequality are not only tolerated but accepted” is useful here to convey what I mean by the normalization of violence. Although a neat compartmentalization of the multiple sources of suffering is rarely found in practice, here I disaggregate them for the purpose of presenting my analytic framework. Taken individually, the structural, symbolic, or gender forms of violence can be so general as to be visible anywhere, and they can be interpreted differently (e.g., structural violence can be taken as poverty); and each can arise in any number of situations. However, taking these forms of violence as a whole, in this context and from the angle I propose, allows us to see that they are mutually constituted. Paraphrasing James Gilligan (1996), the question of whether to disentangle the different forms to see which one is more dangerous is moot, as they are all related to one another. The approach I lay out also permits me to unveil a context of violence that shapes the lives of women in gender-specific ways and in a manner that exposes deep power inequalities. This approach reveals the systematic patterns of disadvantage that are neither natural nor necessary (cf. Kent 2006); or in Gilligan's (1996: 196) words, “not acts of God.”
In establishing the links between violence at the interpersonal level with that which originates in broader structures, I seek analytic distance from individual-focused explanations or those that focus on “tradition” to elucidate the roots of violence in structures of power, away from personal circumstances.2 Farmer (2003, 2004) warns against conflating poverty and cultural difference, for example; in his view, the linkage of assaults on human dignity to the cultural institutions of a particular society constitutes an abuse of cultural concepts. He (2004) then cautions that such an approach is especially insidious because cultural difference as a form of essentialism is used to explain suffering and assaults on dignity. Thus although it is important to interpret particular situations as forms of violence, it is equally significant to trace links to broader structures, lest we inflict even more harm on the vulnerable.
There are three considerations regarding my discussion of violence. First, the political economy of violence does not affect everyone in the same manner; violence weighs differently for those in dissimilar social positions. Women and men from different social classes and ethnic and racial backgrounds face dissimilar forms of violence and may experience the same violence in different ways. Thus class violence parallels sexual and ethnic violence, and these are often conflated in real life (Forster 1999: 59). Second, following the scholars on whose work I have built this framework, I argue that violence is not always an event, a palpable outcome that can be observed, reported, and measured. From the angle
I propose, violence constitutes a process, one that is embedded in the everyday lives of those who experience it. Third, as Torres-Rivas (1998: 48) observes, not all societies recognize the same things as violent, either in their origins or in their effects. Torres-Rivas's observation can be extended to researchers, for scholars often make use of different theoretical repertoires and frameworks to examine the same cases and thus do not assess them in the same manner. In Rashomonesque fashion, the same situation may be interpreted in a different light according to the lens used to examine it. In the rest of this chapter, I present one lens, one in which violence emerges as fundamental.3 I present each of the components and end with a discussion of how they intertwine to affect life in a gender-specific fashion. As Martín-Baró (1991b: 334) noted, considering forms of social violence other than the political-military helps us to “arrive at a picture that is more complex but also more distressing.” My portrayal of the lives of Guatemalan ladinas in this book, therefore, is not sanitized and should not be taken as culturally accusatory or as a careless characterization of an overly objectivized world.
STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE
Torres-Rivas (1998: 49) notes that structural violence (or structural repression) “is rooted in the uncertainty of everyday life caused by the insecurity of wages or income, a chronic deficit in food, dress, housing, and health care, and uncertainty about the future which is translated into hunger and delinquency, and a barely conscious feeling of failure…. It is often referred to as structural violence because it is reproduced in the context of the market, in exploitative labor relations, when income is precarious and it is concealed as underemployment, or is the result of educational segmentation and of multiple inequalities that block access to success.” And for Farmer (2003: 40), “the term is apt because such suffering is ‘structured’ by historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces that conspire…to constrain agency.”
An important feature of structural violence, Kent (2006: 55) observes, is that “it is not visible