Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
Thus the most immediate threat in postwar Guatemala in the eyes of Guatemalan women and men is common crime, and today there is gang-related crime everywhere, from the capital to the countryside (see Manz 2004). Guatemala's homicide rate is one of the highest in the hemisphere, and it has escalated annually. In 2001 there were 3,230 homicides; in 2005, 5,338 (Procuraduría de Derechos Humanos [PDH], in Sanford 2008: 24). If the rate continues to increase, Sanford (2008) notes, there will be more deaths in the first twenty-five “postwar” years than in all the thirty-six years of “wartime.” In an unsettling situation (also observed in other postconflict societies), street youth in Guatemala, the criminalized young women and men often referred to as maras (gangs) because their origins have been traced to a gang bearing that name, are often blamed for the high levels of crime. Public officials and the media offer these gangs as “explanations” for interpersonal violence and crime and make it seem necessary to “eliminate the maras,” as a man in San Alejo once told me. Guatemala is not alone in this predicament. In his examination of the “limpieza” (cleansing) in Colombia, Michael Taussig (2005) notes the ease with which the seemingly random violence in postconflict societies is attributed to delinquent youth. My point here is that blaming poor young women and men for the postwar violence isolates the issue, a strategy that depoliticizes it (see Godoy-Paiz 2008) and muddles attempts to explain and understand it.
On a return visit three years after I first went to the Altiplano, I happened to see an extraordinary image: two girls, in their traditional traje, writing graffiti on a wall and then walking into a local arcade to play video games with their friends. In my conversations with people in town, I mentioned what I saw, and the talk quickly turned to crime. I was told that all the crime committed these days was the work of the maras, integrated by teenage boys and girls whose “parents don't know what the kids are doing.” People were concerned because they used to hear about these activities in the capital but not in their town. Perhaps because of the military attacks this town suffered during the years of the violence, some of the town's residents were quick to link the militarization of life to the emergence of the maras. For example, Lita, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of three, observed, “Thanks to God, my husband didn't want to stay in the army any longer. Maybe he could have had a higher rank by now. But he wouldn't have been content with that and would have become a thief, because the more you have, the more you want. And the longer you stay in the army, the worse a person becomes. You learn how to pressure people to do what you want.”
Paralleling Lita's assessment, the emergence of the maras in Guatemala, as well as in the rest of Central America, has been linked to the militarization of life during the years of political violence.13 However, even if poverty and a recent political conflict are mentioned as factors behind the emergence and expansion of gangs in Central America (and of the violence we see today), it is interesting that it is the countries with a recent history of state violence (not just political conflict) that targeted their own people, such as Guatemala, El Salvador, and, to some degree, Honduras, where this seems to be the case. On the other hand, in Nicaragua, where there are similar conditions of poverty and recent political conflict but where the state was not involved in terrorizing its own citizens (in that conflict, the “Contra War,” the government fought external aggression), youth gangs have not proliferated, and those that exist do not seem to be as violent as those in the other Central American countries.
Though I did not ask directly about violence in their lives, San Alejo women brought it up in our conversations, often in its direct, physical form, even when we were talking about aspects of their lives that seemed remote from the topic of violence. Sometimes they would mention instances of common crime that their friends and families had experienced; sometimes they would talk about how “easy it is to die” in their town. Yet at other times they would talk about additional sources of fear and suffering. It was surprising to me how easily and often this issue came up. In fact, the topic of direct violence made such an impression on me that in a field note entry in 1995 I wrote, “Almost everyone in this town seems to have had a relative killed. Everyone seems to own and use guns. Is it supposed to be this way here [in San Alejo]?” What I was trying to reconcile was that this was the region of Guatemala considered relatively peaceful, far from the Altiplano, where overt, direct forms of political violence were more likely to take place. Isabel mentioned that her brother had been shot and was recuperating. The incident reminded her of the time, two years earlier, when her uncle was shot and killed not far from where her brother had just been shot. She also mentioned a series of robberies and assaults on people close to her. She attributed such acts, like others did, to drunkenness, jealousy, and revenge. Similarly, when Teresa and I were talking about her family, she said, “These days my uncle is recuperating from a gunshot wound. Oh, he had a few drinks, you know how it is, then got his gun and shot himself in the leg.” And Estrella, with a shrug of the shoulders, said, “There are always people being killed around here. Sometimes you walk around and see a crowd of people, and most of the time it's going to be someone killed in the street. Normally it's a bolo [drunk].” Isabel seemed a bit relieved when she said, “These days, it's only my brother”; no one else in her family had been assaulted recently. And Mirna was worried about a brother-in-law who drank too much; in the end, she said, anyone could be killed: “No one is safe. Such is life, one is here today and gone tomorrow, right?” Perhaps what seemed more startling to me was the element of ordinariness in the women's accounts. As Scheper-Hughes (1997: 483) notes, “The routinization of everyday violence against the poor leads them to accept their own violent deaths and those of their children as predictable, natural, cruel, but all too usual.”
The topic of direct physical violence came up even when speaking with Lucrecia about the town's fiesta. We were having a lively conversation in the living room of her house about the music, the queens, the three days of festivities, the bailes (dances), when suddenly she said:
Oh yes, for the fiestas siempre hay muertos [there are always dead people]. People drink too much. Oh God, there is always a matazón [widespread killings] during the fiestas. They kill each other. Well, this time, I don't know, I think there were only three or four dead. Not too many this year. In other years there are more, sometimes eight or nine. There will be at least some dead people during the fiestas. It's what happens during a fiesta, right?
During my last visits to San Alejo in 1999 and 2000, I heard gunshots almost every night. One evening a man brandishing a gun, chasing another man, ran past our street, and I was told to stay inside. I was left shaken, but my reaction made everyone laugh and tease me because I had made a big deal out of a guy running around with a gun. This experience and others corroborated the women's normalized descriptions of direct violence in their town. Again, this was postwar, “non-conflict,” eastern Guatemala.
SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE INTERNALIZATION OF INEQUALITY
Symbolic violence, according to Bourdieu (2004), refers to the internalized humiliations and legitimations of inequality and hierarchy that range from sexism and racism to intimate expressions of class power. As Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant (2004: 273) put it, “It is the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity.” And, according to Bourgois (2004b), this violence is exercised through cognition and misrecognition, with the unwitting consent of the dominated. In this conceptualization, “the dominated apply categories constructed from the point of view of the dominant to the relations of domination, thus making it appear as natural. This can lead to systematic self-depreciation, even self-denigration” (Bourdieu 2004: 339). A key point in Bourdieu's conceptualization that captures a fundamental aspect of the case I examine here is that the everyday, normalized familiarity with violence renders it invisible, power structures are misrecognized, and the mechanisms through which it is exerted do not lie in conscious knowing.14 According to Bourdieu:
Symbolic violence is exercised only through an act of knowledge and practical recognition which takes place below the level of consciousness and will and which gives all its manifestations—injunctions, suggestions, seduction, threats, reproaches, orders, or calls to order—their “hypnotic power.” But a relation of domination that functions only through the complicity of dispositions depends profoundly, for its perpetuation or transformation, on the perpetuation or transformation of the structures of which those dispositions are the product. (2004: