Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
Silber (2004) notes, when women are economically vulnerable, they also become vulnerable to men's sexual violence and exploitation and are seen as culpable for their own conditions, which in turn limits their ability to seek redress for their predicament. Although my project is to make multiple sources of suffering visible in the women's lives, I do not mean to present only this aspect of their lives or to argue that everything in the women's lives is violent. I would not be doing justice to the complexity of their lives if I presented them as being spent in abject subordination or insurmountable social pathology and spirals of violence. As well, my focus on gender domination and violence should not foreclose the potential for gendered agency and survival. Thus I also highlight, in each sphere of life I examine, the women's spaces of sociability and the collective dimensions of their experiences. I do so by focusing on the presence of other women in their lives—family members, friends, coreligionists, and coworkers, among others—that allows them the potential to create oppositional spaces and responses to their conditions. At the same time, I do not mean to portray the presence of others in the women's lives in a black-and-white manner, as nothing more than sources of support devoid of complex dynamics and contradictions. These social relations also occur in a broader context of violence.
Although there are now many organized responses to the violence in the lives of women, I mention only a few of them in the conclusion in a discussion of the efforts of national and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and women's groups. Thus, without ignoring these efforts or implying that women are victims, I focus on how violence is experienced and normalized in everyday life, because none of the women I met were involved in or aware of these broader efforts. The very nature of the forms of violence I examine often escapes the attention of these groups, as they are the “violent consequences of social power” (Kleinman 2000: 228).
I must note that although the violence that the women experience is often concretized in specific acts often attributed to the men in their families, the men's acts per se are not the focus of my discussion. I seek to locate analytically the forms of violence in the women's lives outside of individuals. Focusing on men as “perpetrators” or on their individual acts isolated from a broader context would lead to a facile and misguided analysis that would serve to legitimize and disguise the deeper roots of violence. As Paula Godoy-Paiz (2008: 42) notes, “Through framing violence toward women as merely interpersonal, the laws depoliticize gender-based violence.” Indeed, the individuals whose actions instantiate the violence I examine here are far from its main causes. My examination unveils the intertwined nature of power inequalities that shape daily life—in Kleinman's words (2000: 228), “the violent consequences of social power…[,] not surprisingly, less likely to be labeled ‘violence.’” But as George Kent (2006: 55) observes, “The common thread in all these forms of violence is the fulfillment of one party's purposes at the expense of others. Violence entails the use of power.”
In many ways this book explores how a geography of marginalization is lived in certain areas of the periphery, by some of the most disadvantaged social groups and by some of the most vulnerable individuals. I seek to understand social processes in relation to the conditions in which women live, work, love, and create. Social relations are not mechanistic reactions to those conditions, nor are they free floating and independent of them. They need to be understood within larger processes of social production and reproduction, as dynamic processes, not monolithic “characteristics” of a group or of individuals. As understood from this viewpoint, an examination of social relations in an overall context of violence allows us to grasp the consequences of living in multiple hierarchies of power and how these operate jointly.
Though direct causal relationships between sources of violence and suffering are difficult to establish, especially when dealing with forms of violence that are not always recognized as such, there were palpable effects of living in a context in which multiple forms of violence came together to shape the lives of women in the Guatemalan Oriente. I will use an instance in one of my informants’ narratives to illustrate what I am trying to bring attention to. Hortencia was thirty-four years old when I first met her, had never attended school but had learned to read and write in an adult literacy program, was earning an income as a street food vendor, and was a widow who had had five children (one of whom had died in infancy). She paid Q.50 (about U.S.$10 in 1995) a month for the rent of a small adobe house, plus electricity. Her small house with very low ceilings was sparsely furnished: two beds, a small armoire, one chair, and one table in the main room. Hortencia wanted to share how she had been able to buy some of the furniture in the house:
There was a time that I didn't even have a bed, but thanks to God, the things that you see here, I owe them to the Bomberos Voluntarios [firefighters]. A year ago they had a raffle, and my little boy wanted to buy a ticket. I had just sold Q.2 of tostadas at the park, and I told him that the Q.2 was all I had. He really wanted the ticket, so I said, well, go ahead, and cooperate with the firefighters. And imagine my surprise when they announced that my little boy had won the first prize! It was a refrigerator! I thought they were pulling my leg, I even cried. I asked my neighbor, and she had heard it on the radio, so it was true. At that time I lived in a house where I didn't have [potable] water or electricity and my boy had won a refrigerator! I was shaking when I went to get the prize; I couldn't even walk. So my cousin had to accompany me. They were so nice that they even brought it to my house. They took pictures and everything. They also said, “Look, señora, if you have the need to buy other things, just sell the refrigerator and buy whatever you need. Here is all the paperwork.” So I did, I sold the refrigerator. I bought the bed, armoire, and television set. I wanted to get that for my kids because they used to go watch cartoons from the windows of houses, and people sometimes would shoo them, you know how people are with poor patojos [kids]; they treat them worse than animals. Now in this house they can watch whatever they want, and [with the armoire] I have a place to put my clothes.
Hortencia's words, without any references to direct, physical violence or to harm inflicted by a bullet, capture the embodiment of the multisided violence in the form of poverty and lack of access to decent wages and social services, as well as the mistreatment and humiliations that the poor endure, all of which are part of the everyday experiences in the lives of the ladinas I came to know in Oriente. The violence exposed in Hortencia's words intertwines with more direct forms, such as those inflicted through insults and sometimes physical injuries. Hortencia's story, I learned, was not at all atypical.
A key point in my examination is that the different manifestations of violence are mutually constitutive. Thus the injustices that a despotic regime breeds and that are manifested in overt political conflict are manifested in the micro-processes of life, in addition to being linked to the structural violence existing in the form of profound inequalities in access to well-paid work and social services. At the same time, these inequalities feed into and shape different expressions of everyday and symbolic violence, including social exclusion, humiliation, contempt, self-depreciation, and mistreatment, and make up the very frames that individuals use to guide their actions and understand the world around them. They coalesce with gender and gendered forms of violence to create a context that gives rise to, but also naturalizes, suffering in the lives of women. It is in such a context of “social violence” (Kleinman 2000: 226) that the killings of women, the phenomenon of feminicide, can take place. Thus in order to understand this wave of crimes against women in Guatemala today, I argue, one needs to understand (and recognize) the multiple strands of normalized violence that shape their lives. By focusing attention on different forms of violence in several areas of women's everyday lives, my analysis can contribute to identifying sources of suffering that are so entrenched in the social milieu as to appear part of tradition. Misrecognition, Nancy Fraser (2007) notes, is fundamental to gender inequality.
THE STUDY OF VIOLENCE
Violence has been studied from different disciplinary angles and in different areas of life. At a very general level, most studies typically have centered on the physical, visible aspects of violence, such as injuries inflicted on an unwilling victim by force, although violence that leads to psychological injuries also has been examined. A focus on physical, corporeal injuries no doubt comes from the ease of recording actions that can be counted, categorized, and tabulated. Indeed, in a recent treatise on violence, Randall Collins (2008) notes that the way sociologists have understood and studied violence has been guided