Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
Amelia added that borrowing money had made matters worse and, demonstrating the internalized symbolic violence she had experienced, placed some of the blame on those in need:
There are people who lend money at a high interest, but if we are in need, we pay the interest, right? Sometimes we just make enough money to pay for the interest because the lady [lender] comes by the house and she wants her money. So we work only to pay our debt, to pay the interest because we pay Q.60 a month. We ask her to wait a day or two, but she wants her money right there and then. My husband gives his merchandise on credit, so we get money to pay for the interest. But you know what? It's our fault because we are the ones who borrow this money; the lady doesn't come to our house to offer it to us. So it's no one's fault but our own.
Although the reasons for borrowing money, the consequences, and the self-blaming seemed similar in San Alejo and in the Altiplano, in the Altiplano I heard an additional angle on moneylending. Julia said that when she needs money she asks people whom she trusts, someone “de confianza.” Once she needed money to pay the men who were helping her with the harvest, for her husband was disappeared during the years of violence, and as an only daughter she did not have any men in her family to turn to for help with working the land. She said:
Remember that man that you met at Doña Diana's house? [She is referring to the teacher who used to take his meals in the house in which I lived.] The one who used to work at the city hall? Well, I borrowed from him because he was someone I could trust. He is a man of integrity, trustworthy. Interest? No, he didn't charge me interest for the loan. He said that that's because I am a widow of the violence and a single mother, so this is why he didn't charge me any interest. I used to ask him, how much do you want for the favor, and he would always say, “God says that we need to help the widows,” so he would never charge me.
This does not mean that all widows of the violence were treated with deference; it only highlights some differences, related to the political violence in the Altiplano, between the two contexts.
CONCLUSION
I have laid out a conceptual framework that includes structural, political, symbolic, everyday, and gender and gendered violence to examine the lives of the women I came to know in Guatemala. Three points need to be kept in mind. First, the multiple forms of violence I have presented never occur in isolation, though sometimes one form appears to be more salient. Thus in the chapters that follow they appear intertwined in different spheres of the women's lives. Second, violence is normalized in the women's everyday lives. Only when discussed or pointed to do routine practices (sometimes attributed to tradition) become obvious and disturb the normalized gaze. Indeed, it is the insidiousness of this routinized violence in regions that are perceived as “calm” or “peaceful,” or in practices that are taken as “part of tradition,” to which I call attention. It is through this normalization and misrecognition that dehumanization becomes possible and suffering becomes a part of life. Once violence is unleashed, whether in the form of state violence, domestic abuse, or exploitation, it emerges in different forms and shapes the lives and minds of individuals. In the chapters that follow I examine the women's “private terrors” that encapsulate the multilayered violence I have presented here.
CHAPTER 3
Corporeal Dimensions
of Gender Violence
Woman's Self and Body
Es que yo pienso que para ser felíz, uno tiene que sufrir
primero, y yo no sé como Usted va a interpretar esto, pero
yo estoy bien consciente de que así es. La gente me ha
criticado porque salí embarazada y él está casado con otra;
la gente ha hablado mucho. Pero a lo mejor todavía no he
sufrido lo suficiente como para poder entender la vida.
[I think that in order to be happy, first one has to suffer,
and I don't know how you'll interpret this, but I'm very
conscious that this is how it is. People have criticized me
because I became pregnant and he [the father of the child]
is married to another woman; people have talked a lot. But
maybe I still haven't suffered enough to understand life.]
—Teresa, twenty-one years old
Yo no le puedo decir con exactitud, vaya, por ejemplo, con
números y estadísticas, pero con excepción de quizás uno o
dos casos, yo diría que todas las mujeres en este pueblo son
maltratadas de una u otra forma.
[I really can't tell you exactly, with for example, numbers
and statistics, but with the exception of maybe one or two
cases I would say that every woman in this town is
mistreated in one way or another.]
—Emilia, health care worker
Both gendered and symbolic violence are central to an examination of the embodiment of suffering, not only in the personal, individual dimensions of the physical body, but in its social dimensions as well. In social science theory there have been multiple approaches to the examination of bodily themes and questions surrounding the body, from postmodernist to poststructuralist (see Williams 1999). Green (1998) calls for attention to concrete manifestations of suffering in theorizing about how suffering is embodied, as violence inscribes the body with message and significance.
Heeding Green's call, I focus here on concrete corporeal manifestations of different forms of violence among ladinas in eastern Guatemala, using a sociologically (and anthropologically) informed approach that is substantively grounded. This approach situates corporeal questions within unequal social structures and thus contributes to debates about the relationship between body and society. However, in contrast to examining issues of representation or sexuality, I follow Farmer (2003, 2004) and others (e.g., Martín-Baró 1991a, 1991b, 1991c; Torres-Rivas 1998) to focus on concrete expressions of social suffering, on how multiple forms of violence and macro forces coalesce on the body. Similar to Barbara Sutton's (2010: 2) focus on the body as a way to capture multiple social and material crises in Argentina, my angle here also illuminates how forces beyond individuals’ control “reach…lives and bodies in deeply personal ways.” This examination therefore highlights how “power, history, and gender operate through embodied subjectivity and concrete bodily activity” (Green 1998: 4); how the body connects women to extralocal, even global, realms (Sutton 2004, 2010), and how suffering is normalized in small, routine moments. In Martín-Baró's (1994: 13) conceptualization, this examination exposes the “normal abnormality” that the vulnerable endure.
I first examine the physical expressions of violence as they are manifested in the women's bodies, such as common health ailments that result from emotional distress or from the structural violence that shapes their lives. I underscore the normalization of deeply entrenched gender inequality and domination on the more immediate, physical sphere of body ailments and then discuss how the embodiment of violence is expressed in the control of the body in the social milieu, such as women's socializing and visiting. This approach sheds light on visible and invisible, yet still pervasive, forms of violence manifested in the lives of women. Although direct physical harm is usually accompanied by mental and emotional pain, the latter is sometimes inflicted alone, leaving no physical marks and no possibility for tracking in tables or statistics. As Emilia noted in the quotation above, these forms of violence are equally damaging, as women are just as maltratadas in both cases.
I want to repeat here that even though violence is often concretized in individual acts, my project is to call attention to the structures, cognitive frameworks, internalized dispositions, and ideologies that make these individual acts possible, tolerated, and accepted. Men are of course affected by the same structures that make the women's pain possible. And I do not wish to negate the heterogeneity and complexity of men's