Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
“exerted systematically, that is, indirectly by everyone who belongs to a certain social order” (Farmer 2004: 307). Indeed, in Johan Galtung's (1969) classic work, the differentiating aspect between direct and structural violence is that in the second there is no identifiable actor who does the harming, so that “violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances” (171). For him, direct violence comes from harmful acts of individuals that leave physical scars, whereas structural violence is not observable and is the result of a process. Thus, in contrast to direct, physical violence, structural violence causes people to suffer harm indirectly, often through a slow and steady process. But it is easier to see direct violence (Kent 2006); and when violence is a by-product of our social and economic structure, and it is invisible, it is hard to care about it (Gilligan 1996). As Galtung (1990) observed, for some people, malnutrition and lack of access to goods and services do not amount to violence because they do not result in killings, but for the weakest in society, such shortfalls amount to a slow death. An examination of the ills that afflict the poor from this vantage point highlights how a political economy of inequality under neoliberal capitalism promotes social suffering. As Miguel Ángel Vite Pérez (2005) observes, when trying to understand how individuals become unemployed one must focus on how neoliberal economic regimes have led to labor instability, to the commodification of public services, and to a precarious situation that engenders poverty rather than focus just on someone's inability to keep a job.
Structural violence as expressed in unemployment, layoffs, unequal access to goods and services, and exploitation has an impact on a range of social relations in multiple forms, including those that lead to the formation of social capital, a point I developed in fieldwork among Salvadoran immigrants in San Francisco (Menjívar 2000). Kleinman (2000: 238) argues, “Through violence in social experience, as mediated by cultural representations,…the ordinary lives of individuals are also shaped, and all too often twisted, bent, even broken.” And as Bourdieu (1998: 40) noted, “The structural violence exerted by financial markets, in the form of layoffs, loss of security, etc., is matched sooner or later in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, a whole host of minor and major everyday acts of violence.” The broader political economy does not cause violence directly, but one must understand the extent to which it conditions structures within which people suffer and end up inflicting harm on one another and distorting social relations (see also Bourgois 2004a).4
While it is crucial to acknowledge the devastating effects of neoliberal structural adjustment policies initiated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Latin America that have resulted in sharp and unprecedented levels of poverty (see Auyero 2000; Auyero and Swistun 2009), it must be noted that what the region is experiencing is the cumulative effects of disadvantage in a much longer historical process. Economic vulnerability is a part of this process rather than a condition or state, and this process is cumulative, dynamic, and relational (see Auyero 2000). Thus Guatemalans’ current living conditions are hardly the result of a few decades of neoliberal reforms.
Latin America historically has exhibited a high degree of income inequality relative to other regions; it has the most unbalanced distribution of resources of all regions in the world (Hoffman and Centeno 2003).5 And Guatemala has consistently ranked among the most unequal, even by Latin American standards. The richest 10 percent of Guatemalans earn 43.5 percent of the country's total income, whereas the poorest 30 percent earn 3.8 percent (World Bank 2006). In 1998 Guatemala's Gini Index was 55.8, five years later it was 58, and in 2002 it was 55.1, which indicates that inequality rates remained stable over time. As an aggregate measure of inequality, the Gini Index does not detect levels of absolute poverty. For instance, between 1990 and 2001, 16 percent of Guatemalans lived on less than $1 per day and approximately 37.4 percent on less than $2 per day (UNDP 2003), meaning that about half of Guatemalans live under $2 a day. Guatemala also holds the dubious distinction of having one of the two most exploitative and coercive rural class structures in Central America (the other one is El Salvador), with high rural poverty and inequality and high levels of unequal landownership (Brockett 1991: 62–70). Whereas 3 percent of landholdings control 65 percent of the agricultural surface, close to 90 percent of the landholdings are too small for peasant subsistence (Manz 2004: 16). Such disparities vary by ethnicity and location. Thus 58 percent of Guatemalans nationally lived in poverty in 1989, while 72 percent did so in rural areas, a proportion that dropped to 56 percent nationally in 2002 but rose to 75 percent in rural areas the same year (World Bank 2006). And although the majority of ladinos are poor and lack access to basic services, the Maya are even poorer and disproportionately disadvantaged. And in spite of development programs aimed at reducing the poverty gap, inequality has increased in Guatemala.6
Structural violence also comes in the form of a sweatshop economy that exacerbates gendered vulnerabilities. In a careful examination of the effects of sweatshop (maquila) employment in Guatemala, María José Paz Antolín and Amaia Pérez Orozco (2001) discuss the psychological violence that takes place in the maquila, with serious consequences for the workers, including loss of self-esteem. According to the authors, this situation creates a belief among the women that it is their fault that they do not have more education, and thus they blame themselves for their precarious situation. Indeed, the women with whom I spoke in San Alejo were well aware of the benefits that education can bring, but due to the need for their labor in their families many had been forced to abandon school early or not to attend at all. However, they pointed to themselves or their families as culpable for their lack of education and diminished potential for success in life. The average years of schooling for adults in Guatemala is three and a half years, even though the duration of compulsory education is eleven years, and the literacy rate for men in 2002 was 75 percent and for women 63 percent (World Bank 2006). Education and level of poverty are related; by the Guatemalan government's own estimates, more than 95 percent of the poor have had no secondary education, and 44 percent have never attended school at all (Manz 2004: 16–17).7
Nine of the thirty women I interviewed in San Alejo had never attended school. Some had learned how to sign their names or to read simple words, a couple had attended adult literacy classes, and another nine had only attended elementary school. They cited their parents, other relatives, or themselves as the reason they had not acquired more schooling. It is only by tracing the links to the profoundly unequal access to education and resources that one can turn attention to the root of this lack of opportunities. Hortencia, the mother of five whom I mentioned in chapter 1, explained why she never attended school:
Because my papa was a mujeriego [womanizer] and a drunk and my mama suffered a lot with him so they never sent me to school. I had to help her. I learned in the alfabetización [literacy classes] how to read and write, and now I have even written letters to the United States for other people who don't know how to write [she smiles and her eyes light up]! The other day my compadre [lit., “co-father”; co-parent] came by so I could help him calculate how old he is because he needed to go get his cédula [ID card]. Ay, the shame of having to learn how to read and write as an adult…one feels bad, ashamed. I was very embarrassed, but in time I learned.
While Hortencia saw her father as responsible for her illiteracy, one must recognize that access to education in rural Guatemala when she was growing up was a privilege, not a right, especially for poor women. Not everyone could attend school, and since the town had only a primary school, many who did attend stopped at the sixth grade; only the few with more means traveled to the city to continue beyond the sixth grade. Thus blocked educational opportunities and illiteracy are expressions of the structural violence that assaults the lives of the poor. However, some women of more means noted that the poor (or the children of the poor) do not attend school because they are “lured” to work, not forced to work, as women from poor backgrounds explained. Lucía, a teacher, said:
The children work too much. People cultivate tomatoes in this area, and the kids go to harvest them and then don't go to school. Instead they go to a literacy course in the afternoons. You see lots of patojos, young ones, congregated outside those centers [for literacy classes]. Instead of wanting an education, they want to earn money. Oh yes, they are poor and need money, but they don't want the education. No, really, believe me,