Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
symbolic violence in the form of feelings of inadequacy, mutual recrimination, and exploitation of fellow victims diverts attention away from those responsible (e.g., the state and classes in power) for the conditions of violence in the first place (see Bourgois 2004a, 2004b). This theoretical angle allows us to capture how multiple inequalities, power structures, and denigrating social relations become internalized dispositions (Bourdieu's “habitus” [1984]) that organize practices and are unquestioned, misrecognized, accepted, and ultimately reproduced in everyday life. Bourdieu's key conceptualizatization, as it focuses on gender violence, constitutes my main framework for examining the different aspects of life of the women in San Alejo.
Symbolic violence is exerted in multiple forms of stratification, social exclusion, and oppression in Guatemala; as such, it is constitutive of other forms. I began to reflect on the insidiousness of structural violence and its links to the hidden injuries of symbolic violence when a female street vendor outside the city hall in San Alejo shooed away a barefoot blond boy (his blond hair was the result of extreme malnutrition) wearing a tattered Harvard Alumni T-shirt of undescribable color, because she thought he was bothering me when he asked me for food. He took a couple of steps back and looked afraid. The expression on my face led the woman to explain her actions and she assured me that it was okay to shoo him away, saying, “Ay, estos patojos son peor que animales, son como moscas, Usted” (Ah, these kids are worse than animals; they are like flies). At first I wondered why this woman, who did not look much better off than the patojo in question and had probably experienced hunger herself, could not feel compassion for him. As I thought about the incident I realized that it had more to do with the context of multifaceted violence in which both she and the boy lived than with the woman's lack of compassion. I had mistakingly interpreted this act. In a fashion similar to the initial reaction of Scheper-Hughes (1992) to the seeming indifference of the mothers to their infants’ deaths and life chances in Bom Jesus do Alto, I was not initially aware of the inadequacy of my reading. To link this moment to the ravages of violence in the lives of this woman and this child required shifting from a focus on the individual interaction to the structures that give rise to and facilitate these forms of violent relations, and it parallels other examinations of dehumanization and objectification, such as Douglas Massey's (2007) discussion of the dehumanization of undocumented immigrants in the United States that opens up the way for inhumane treatment.
The women I met in the Altiplano had countless stories, many dealing with racism, about their experiences of symbolic violence in its overt forms. For instance, Lita's teenage daughter spoke about her life as a worker in Guatemala City, where ladinos often stare at her, scold her (regañan), and speak roughly to her, calling her india, just because she is a “natural” (the term Maya often use to refer to themselves).
Equally important to note is how such expressions of violence are internalized by the dominated and how the self is wounded under these conditions. Ivette, a thirty-year-old ladina in San Alejo, was married to a Maya man from the town in the Altiplano where I did research. Ivette wore fashionable clothes, always had her nails manicured, and had dyed her hair blond. We were talking about what life was like for her, as a ladina, in the Altiplano, and she said:
Well, I live well here. Everyone speaks Kaqchikel around here and all the women wear traje. But my husband says that that's why he married me; he didn't want a woman with traje. In fact, he never had a girlfriend who wore traje. Yes, on purpose, he didn't want una de traje [a woman who wore traje, meaning a Maya]. And he doesn't want me to dress our daughter with traje. My sisters-in-law tell him to, but my husband doesn't like it; he thinks it's not in good taste.
The stories I heard in the Altiplano were disturbing and provided me with a small window onto how racism in Guatemala is experienced. In the Oriente I heard stories that show the other side of racism and support those I heard in the Altiplano. Comments in San Alejo usually came in the form of an outright racist statement about the Maya, or in the form of a joke (see Nelson 1999), or in a naturalized, normalized assertion (I return to this in chapter 7). On one occasion I was chatting with a couple of women in San Alejo on the steps of one of their homes, and the life and accomplishments of Rigoberta Menchú came up. With surprise, one of them explained what she thought about the Nobel Prize winner: “Right, she is not dumb. Because, you know, one thinks that the Indians are dumb, well, that's what one believes, right? But you'd be surprised. Many are not. Look at La Rigo [Rigoberta], que chispuda salió [how smart she turned out].”
However, in San Alejo I was stunned by stories of another form of symbolic violence that is also naturalized and misrecognized. I often heard the ladinas talk about their perceived inadequacies, their understanding of being “naturally” unequal to men, and how “as women” they knew “their place.” Such expressions were so common that one hardly noticed them. These powerful and insidious forms of symbolic violence encapsulate Bourdieu and Wacquant's (2004: 272) conceptualization that, “being born in a social world, we accept a whole range of postulates, axioms, which go without saying and require no inculcating…. Of all the forms of ‘hidden persuasion,’ the most implacable is the one exerted, quite simply, by the order of things” (original emphasis). I discuss this form of violence under gender violence below, because for Bourdieu and Wacquant (2004) gender domination is the paradigmatic form of symbolic violence.
GENDER AND GENDERED VIOLENCE
I examine the different forms of gender violence that assault women's lives in San Alejo by borrowing from Lawrence Hammar (1999), from a Guatemalan team of social scientists who conducted a thorough study of gender and gendered violence in Guatemala (UNICEF-UNIFEM-OPS/OMS-FNUAP 1993), and from Bourdieu's work on gender violence. According to Hammar's (1999: 91) conceptualization, gender differences in a gender-imbalanced political economy that disadvantage women represent gender violence, whereas acts of violence, including physical, psychological, and linguistic violence, constitute gendered violence. The Guatemalan team differentiates public from domestic violence and notes that the two cannot be isolated from each another; they define violence as “intentional maltreatment of a physical, sexual, or emotional nature, which leads to an environment of fear, miscommunication and silence” (UNICEF-UNIFEM-OPS/OMS-FNUAP 1993: 22). The team notes that all forms of violence are the product of unequal power relations; among these the greatest inequality is that between men and women. And, according to Bourdieu and Wacquant (2004: 273), “the male order is so deeply grounded as to need no justification[,]…leading to [a] construct [of relations] from the standpoint of the dominant, i.e., as natural.” They argue further: “The case of gender domination shows better than any other that symbolic violence accomplishes itself through an act of cognition and of misrecognition that lies beyond—or beneath—the controls of consciousness and will, in the obscurities of the schemata of habitus that are at once gendered and gendering” (original emphasis). Similarly, as Laurel Bossen (1983) observed in her research on Guatemala, an added dimension of systems of gender stratification is the development of ideologies that reinforce and rationalize sexual differentiation and inequality.15
Gender and gendered violence and public and domestic violence work in conjunction, and the interlocking of gender violence and gendered violence increasingly hurts women, as new arenas in which gender is a significant axis of stratification multiply. Guatemala's Gender Development Index is 0.63, which places it 119th of 175 ranked countries, below the 0.71 overall rate for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNDP 2003). Education at different levels is unequal by gender, and access to land is equally lopsided. Already 40 percent of rural families do not have access to land, and within this hierarchy women have a much lower rate of direct ownership. A survey found that only 28 percent of 99,000 female agriculturalists in Guatemala had permanent salaried employment; the rest were employed temporarily (Escoto et al. 1993). Disparities by ethnicity further exacerbate gender inequality, as indigenous Maya women fare far worse than ladinas in human development indicators.
The study by the Guatemalan team mentioned above presents a number of insights that show the institutionalization of gender hierarchies and violence, as authorities in the medical and judicial fields frame their actions and decisions in the same “social order of things” that shapes gender and gendered violence. The team interviewed sixteen professionals,