Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
in the highlands, as the conflict expanded, was overwhelmingly focused on the indigenous Maya, a situation that prompted researchers, many from the north, to focus their attention on Maya indigenous communities.11
Scholarly work and involvement in Guatemalan indigenous communities has shaped how Guatemala has been understood and presented outside Guatemala (Blacklock and Crosby 2004). The concentration on the indigenous Maya has resulted in a lopsided production of knowledge, with hundreds of volumes dedicated to the study of the Mayas, covering almost every township in the Guatemalan Altiplano and many of the twenty-one indigenous Maya groups but only a handful of books about the “other half” of the population, ladinos (Hale 2006). Overlaid on the dichotomized view of Maya and indigenous, there are also bipolarities in images about eastern and western Guatemala. Michelle Moran-Taylor (2008) notes that although these two regions often are contrasted due to the differences they exhibit in ethnicities, landscape, and land tenure systems, researchers rarely focus on ladinos (in eastern Guatemala) because they lack the exoticism of the Altiplano. Ladinos, however, have not been completely erased from scholarship on Guatemala (beyond the study of racial and ethnic relations); they were the subject of research in classical historical and anthropological studies of Guatemala, several of which focused on comparing and contrasting the customs, social organization, and lifestyles of Mayas and ladinos (cf. Goldín 1987; Maynard 1975 [1963]), as well as the systematic social inequalities and hierarchical relations between and among Mayas and ladinos (Adams 1964; Bossen 1983, 1984; Reina 1973; Tax 1942). But in current scholarship on Guatemala there is an undisputed focus on the Maya. Hale's (2006) recent work stands as an exception in contemporary examinations.
Following in the tradition of recent scholarship on Guatemala, women in the Guatemalan Altiplano, mostly Maya, have been the subject of research (e.g., Carey 2006; Ehlers 2000), though a considerable portion of this work has not engaged with issues of violence. Only a few scholars interested in unearthing the brutality of state terror have focused on its gendered expressions among Maya women (see Green 1999; Zur 1998). However, research on Maya women in the Altiplano has highlighted important gender inequalities and its consequences for their lives (see Ehlers 2000). My own work on the lives of ladinas in Oriente is substantively informed by this research and in many ways complements the work that has been conducted in the Altiplano.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEME
At this point it is helpful to give a brief account of how I arrived at the study of violence in women's lives. I must clarify, for instance, that I did not set out to do research on violence in Guatemala, as has been the case for many other scholars who have documented it in their writings. In fact, during my first several visits and interviews, beginning in late 1994, I did not ask the women in the town in Oriente I call “San Alejo” any questions about manifestations or expressions of violence in their lives. It was not my aim to look for violence; instead, the women pointed it out to me. It was their own narratives and my close listening to what they were telling me that eventually led me to an examination of violence in their lives.
I was participating in a project whose objective was to study how women's informal networks help them deal with pregnancy-related health care and with their children's illnesses, both in Maya and in ladino towns. I had been interested in immigrant informal networks and how individuals perceive their participation in them; joining a project in Guatemala offered me an opportunity to do a comparative study of networks in the home country with networks among immigrants from the same communities in the United States (I also did fieldwork among Guatemalan women in Los Angeles as part of this project). Thus my main task was to conduct in-depth interviews with Mayas and ladinas about the role of their informal ties in relation to medical treatments, which I did. But in an inductive fashion, the topic of violence evolved from my fieldwork. I had expected, to a degree, that the Maya women in the Altiplano would bring up the topic of violence (in particular, in its political forms) and its impact on their lives.12 I had not anticipated, however, that the ladinas would also bring up violence (in its other manifestations) in our conversations. The ladinas would mention events and situations that were similar to those I had expected to find in the Altiplano, such as deaths and similar forms of direct violence. But their narratives also shed light on the suffering that comes from social exclusion and extreme poverty, as well as the injuries that come from gender inequality. Perhaps after spending a long enough time in Guatemala, violence in its multiple forms becomes a topic that is hard to ignore, not only as expressed through words in conversations, but also as seen palpably through observation of life in general. The ladinas would bring up topics that evinced suffering, fear, and pain in different spheres of their lives in a matter-of-fact way, as they would tell me, “Así es por aquí” (It's the way it is around here). Like pulling a thread, I followed their lead to eventually identify violence in their lives and to unearth multiple connections to weave the different parts into a story of violence that was specific to Oriente.
As I pored over sets of field notes and interview transcripts from the first visits to San Alejo, looking for patterns of usage of informal ties, I noticed at first that the women were preoccupied with the insecurity of life, with what I thought were issues of poverty and its consequences. Their words, however, conveyed much more than that. I also noticed that it was not only poor women who seemed anxious, as if they were in a permanent state of anxiety; women with more resources and relatively wealthy women in town also spoke in similar terms about the afflictions, humiliations, and indignities they experienced as women. I then started to take note of the words the women were using to describe their lives, words of urgency that conveyed much more than a general preoccupation with everyday events. One striking word that in itself may not be associated with violence as it is commonly understood but that came up repeatedly in the women's narratives was aguantar, “to endure,” conjugated in various forms and referring to a wide variety of situations. For instance, women would say, “¿Y qué puedo hacer? Nomás aguantar me queda” (And what can I do? The only thing left for me to do is to endure), or “Aguanto, ¿y para dónde?” (I must endure, what else can I do?). This verb conveyed an underlying, steady suffering in the women's lives but also resignation and acceptance; it also implied that everyone went through it, and thus it was nothing out of the ordinary. In subsequent visits I limited myself to listening more attentively to these topics as they came up during conversations, probing a little but not digging too much so as not to obtain responses that would simply confirm what I expected. I was not sure of my initial observations and needed to pay closer attention. In my last visits I did bring up the topic in very general terms with people who worked at a health post, with a pastor, and with other individuals in town, as well as with colleagues in Guatemala City. In typical fashion in qualitative research, therefore, key insights that would veer the course of my investigation in a different direction came from the women's own observations about their conditions, from conversations with many more people than the women I formally interviewed, and from reflections about life in general during discussions in encounters with others during the time I spent in the field. As such, it took me a long time to arrive at this examination of violence. To convey the women's own understandings, I use endure in the title of this book to mean an enduring, lasting condition but also in the sense of aguantar (to endure, to tolerate), as the women used it.
In one of my last visits to Guatemala, during dinner in Guatemala City with a Guatemalan physician friend, we discussed the topic of violence. Comparing life in Guatemala and El Salvador, where I had just visited, I mentioned that somehow I felt more insecure and wary in Guatemala than in El Salvador, when both countries were in “postwar” transitions and had similar rates of violence and common crime. She told me that many people felt that way and assured me it was irrelevant that I was a native of (and more familiar with) El Salvador and perhaps less familiar with Guatemala. “It's that Guatemala is violent,” she added with a smile. “That's the truth, what can I tell you!” She went on to explain the many aspects in which she considered her country violent, a list that went far beyond robberies, kidnappings, or killings. We had a good discussion of the fear that not only comes from direct physical violence but also is embedded in institutions and practices. After listening to similar assessments from others, going back to San Alejo to corroborate my thoughts, and taking the time for reflection, I started to search the literature for a framework that would allow me to grasp the multisided violence I observed in the lives of ladinas in eastern Guatemala. The framework I have put together