Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
societies that used terror and brutality as a means to control communities and in which civilians, rather than soldiers, were the tactical targets, violence was normalized and became part of life. In these instances, the psychological scarring left by the conflict is not easily erased by peace accords, especially when the structures behind the terror were left intact.
For instance, Steenkamp (2009) describes reports of Iraqi children incorporating in their games make-believe hijackings and decapitations and concludes that the children have internalized these forms of violence to which they have been exposed since the U.S.-led invasion. Focusing on “postconflict” Guatemala, Diane M. Nelson (2009) argues that the way the war was waged affected the very frames of knowing and being and that therefore it continues to shape how those who lived through the conflict make sense of the violence and loss today. Given the long-term consequences of political violence on the very self, some scholars even question the use of the term postwar or postconflict. In her examination of memory in postdictatorship Chile, Macarena Gómez-Barris (2009) distinguishes between the terms aftermath, which refers to the economic and political legacy of political violence, and afterlife to capture the continued symbolic and material effects of the violence on people's lives and their social and psychic identities. Based on her comparative work on Cambodia and Guatemala, and in a call for a more inclusive lens beyond the political sphere in examinations of postwar violence, Sabine Kurtenbach (2008) argues that given the instability and fragility of these societies, a more apt descriptive term is war-torn. Indeed, the idea of a postwar era in a society that has been engulfed in violence for decades poses definitional challenges and questions efforts to separate conflict from postconflict violence. For instance, the crime waves observed in “postwar” societies in El Salvador, Haiti, South Africa, and Guatemala are often framed as “common crimes” or even “ordinary crimes” in a depoliticized manner that ignores structural links (Snodgrass Godoy 2006; Steenkamp 2009). As Benson, Fischer, and Thomas (2008: 39) note, “The very notion of a postwar era can have the effect of deflecting attention from the existence of subtler forms of violence and persistent linkages of violence to politics and the state [original emphasis].”
My fieldwork in Guatemala straddled the last years of the conflict and the first years of the postconflict era, though tellingly, for the women I came to know, this transition did not materialize in much change. A woman in eastern Guatemala told me that “the situation” was bad but that not everyone ran the same risks, for “sólo el que anda metido en algo, puede temer que algo malo le pase, ¿verdad?” (only those who are involved in something can be afraid that something bad can happen to them, right?), using the same frame to interpret political crime at the time of the conflict to make sense of the new crime wave.
Therefore, even if the case I analyze in depth is perhaps not generalizable to other contexts, some of my observations apply to experiences of violence in other so-called postwar societies. There are several examples of efforts throughout the world to examine the issue of gender-based violence, including a national conference held in Windhoek, Namibia, in June 2007 and the U.N.-sponsored international dialogue to prevent gender-based violence held in Kampala, Uganda, in September 2003. My contribution, together with observations from other contexts, invites a rethinking of the concept of violence (and peace) based on an amplified lens as key to grasping the ramifications of visible and invisible forms of violence in the lives of women around the world today.
THE STUDY OF LADINOS IN GUATEMALA
According to the Guatemalan anthropologist Claudia Dary Fuentes (1994: 55), ladinos are a “sociocultural group characterized, at a very general level, by speaking Spanish as a mother tongue, by wearing Western clothes and shoes, and by practicing an array of customs of Spanish origin that are historically intertwined and syncretized with indigenous ones. Every time one refers to ladinos it is in relation to indigenous, like a negation of the indigenous.” Furthermore, she notes, it has been assumed that ladinos are a homogeneous group, and she refers to ladinos as “the most forgotten group in Guatemalan history and anthropology” (1994: 55). The term ladino itself has been used to categorize different social groups at various points in time, and thus the term has not meant the same thing throughout Guatemalan history. But in the end, Dary Fuentes notes, the term includes social groups with different cultures and histories whose common denominator is the language they speak.5
Although the focus of this book is not on issues of identity construction or racial relations in Guatemala (both towns in which I did fieldwork were quite homogeneous and thus offered few to no opportunities to observe direct interactions between indigenous Mayas and ladinos), I find it useful to briefly discuss questions about ladino identity because they have occupied center stage for scholars of Guatemala both in the country and outside, and it is ladinas on whom I focus here. The very definition of ladino, as well as the significance of this group for the study of race and ethnic relations in Guatemala, has a long and complicated history.6
Nelson (1998: 102) observes that “the word ladino… decomposes under the pressure of analysis into myriad terms that mark class, distinction, color, and history.” Others, such as Robert Carmack (2001), have argued that there is a social group between indigenous and ladinos that we might call mestizos,7 while still others (Guzmán Böckler 1975; Guzmán Böckler and Herbert 1972) have argued that ladinos are an invented group, that ladinos seek to flee both from the Indian and from themselves and thus are both nationals and foreigners in their own country, a view that highlights the ladinos’ historical “‘in-between’ position” (Guzmán Böckler 1975). Ladinos are discriminated against by the elite, but they in turn discriminate against Indians, Carlos Guzmán Böckler (1975) argues, which leads them to seek a closer position with the white elite and greater distance from Indians. Others do not agree with the intermediary position of ladinos in the social hierarchy of Guatemala. Arturo Tarracena Arriola (1997, and Tarracena et al. 2002) traces the historical emergence of ladinos as a social group and as a dominant class and argues that ladinos’ historical role is not confined to that of mediators between the owners of coffee plantations and the indigenous workers because ladinos themselves were plantation owners. In the view of Tarracena Arriola et al. (2002: 411), the assimilation process of ladinos and the whitening of nonindigenous groups in the late nineteenth century cemented the indigenous-ladino bipolarity, which was then formalized and supported by the statistical strategy of dividing the population into ladinos and indigenous and became the basis of Guatemala's national project (416).8 More recently, Charles Hale (2006) has examined how ladinos experience their racial ambivalence at a time when Guatemala has undergone enormous change and Mayas have made important advances for their collective rights.
Important in the debate about ladino identity and social position is how they view themselves vis-à-vis the Mayas (or Indians) and how they act on these views in the context of Guatemala's ethno-racial hierarchy. Marta Elena Casaús Arzú's (1998, 2007) survey of the views that the oligarchy, where individuals self-identified as whites, ladinos, criollos, or mestizos, have with respect to marital relations, marriage, work, and so on, with Indians provides an in-depth look into how the ruling class's different groups construct one another and what they do to sustain socially constructed divisions. Hale's (2006) study provides a key reminder of the heterogeneity of positions and views among ladinos. Analyses such as these have challenged dichotomies and constructed bipolarities and represent important road maps for examining ladinas’ lives.9 In line with these approaches and paralleling Dary Fuentes's (1994) observations, my focus on the ladinas in this study can also serve to correct the homogenizing tendencies seen in discussions about ladinos as a social group in Guatemala.
The deeply rooted racial divisions in Guatemala have led scholars to examine the divisions between ladinos and indigenous in terms of a caste or a semicaste system (Colby and van den Berghe 1969; Tumin 1952), in which the indigenous remain at the bottom. Whereas I cannot disagree with these observations, I would like to note important forms of ladino social differentiation that add complexity to the picture. For instance, whereas the overwhelming majority of ladinos are poor, it is the elite among this group who have dominated government, commerce, manufacturing, and the political and economic life of the country.10 And even though ladinos were targets of political violence in the 1970s, when the government was targeting labor union members, students, teachers, and anyone who dared to