Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
context of multilayered violence shapes the lives of those who live in it and to understand the manifold ramifications of fear and terror in a society during “peacetime.”
RESEARCH NOTES AND REFLECTIONS
This project started out as part of a larger comparative study of maternal and child health in Maya and ladino communities in Guatemala. From the initial stages, in late 1994, I started visiting and conducting fieldwork and in-depth interviews in a predominantly Maya town in the Guatemalan Altiplano and in an overwhelmingly ladino one in the eastern part of the country. My fieldwork consisted of relatively short visits that extended over five years, ending formally in 2000. In the initial stages of fieldwork, I conducted thirty in-depth interviews with ladinas in San Alejo and twenty-eight interviews with Maya women in the Altiplano. After asking the women for permission, I recorded all the initial interviews and at least one, but usually more, follow-up interviews. I found that carrying my tape recorder, even if I did not always record all conversations, was useful for establishing my presence as a researcher, and it allowed the women to signal whether a topic that came up was or was not to be part of the study. One woman in the Altiplano did not want to be tape-recorded but agreed to the interview. Two women in San Alejo asked me to turn off the tape recorder while we conversed about issues they did not want me to record (and thus are not part of this book).
I followed up my initial interviews with visits to the same women on average once a year in both towns. I went to their homes, walked in the streets where we would converse, attended church and temples, and spent time in the places where they conducted their daily lives. I lived in a room I rented in a house in the center of both towns, and in the Altiplano I developed a good friendship with the owner of the house.13 The owner of this house rented rooms to people who came from Guatemala City to work in the town, such as a Maya dentist, a physician, and a justice of the peace, so I had the opportunity to have regular conversations with them. She also served lunch and dinner at her house as part of her business. One of the regulars was a well-respected Maya schoolteacher who lived in a large house in the center of town. He was a bachelor and preferred to take his meals at this woman's house. My conversations with him helped me to understand many aspects of life in Guatemala, including the effects of the political violence and the 1976 earthquake, among other topics. In addition, I met with officials in both towns, with council members (including the mayor of San Alejo), priests, pastors, neighbors, teachers, coworkers, nurses at the health posts, and physicians, often more than once. In San Alejo I had the opportunity to converse several times with an older, respected man from a well-to-do family who provided me with a great deal of information. In the text I refer to him as the self-appointed historian of San Alejo. This man and two nurses and a physician at the health post became good sounding boards for my thoughts and reflections about life in San Alejo in general.
An important aspect of the initial stages of my fieldwork, which I retained for the duration of the study, was alternating my research stints between the two towns.14 I would stay one week in San Alejo, go to the Altiplano for one week, return to San Alejo for another week, and so on. This back-and-forth approach was key to helping me develop some of the most important points in this project. It allowed me to compare, contrast, reflect, and rethink what I heard from the ladinas in light of what the Maya women, who lived in the epicenter of direct, political violence, were telling me. I was not looking for the same or even similar kinds of violence in the ladinas’ lives, or seeking to compare “rates” of violence, but the accounts of the Maya women helped me to retrieve the violence in the narratives of the ladinas.15 Given their importance in the development of my argument and my overall framework, comparisons with the women in the Altiplano are mentioned throughout the book.
To ensure that the focus of this book would be the town in Oriente and to avoid the impression that this is a fully comparative study that devotes equal time and treatment to women in both contexts, I decided to give a specific (fictitious) name to the eastern town (San Alejo) and use the general name of the highland region, Altiplano, for the town that is not as salient in my analysis but that affords me a key comparative lens. I am fully aware that ladinas also live in the Altiplano and that Mayas also live in Oriente and that it is complicated to equate geographic regions with social groups so neatly. My references to the fieldwork in the Altiplano should serve as a reminder of the essential place of that region in how I approached the study of violence in Oriente. Just as the rich literature about the Altiplano has influenced my thinking about violence in Guatemala, my own observations there shaped my reflections on violence in women's lives in Oriente.
I follow the same logic in giving pseudonyms to my study participants; I assigned a fictitious name to each of the women I interviewed (and with whom I remained in contact throughout my study in both towns) to protect their confidentiality. But I did not give a name to others in their families (e.g., mothers, daughters, husbands, sons), unless I also interviewed them.16 As in a photograph, this strategy helped me to include key figures in the women's lives in the analytic picture while keeping the focus on my study participants. And I use only first names for the women. Thus I do not use the customary honorific doña, which I did use throughout my fieldwork, regardless of the women's age or social position. In the field, but only when the women requested it, I later used only the more informal first names, as it sometimes became a bit awkward to continue to use the formal salutation in our conversations.
I was careful to include women from different socioeconomic backgrounds in San Alejo (and to some degree in the Altiplano, too). This approach allowed me an invaluable vantage point to examine how the combined effects of social class and gender inequalities operated in the women's lives, as well as to grasp the workings of orthodox gender ideologies that cut across social class. Thus both the comparisons by ethnicity between San Alejo and the Altiplano and the comparisons by class in San Alejo were key to helping me sharpen my analytic vision and the arguments I present here.
Why, several colleagues and friends have asked, if I collected data on the Altiplano did I not write about violence in the lives of women there. They gave compelling reasons for doing so, including the fact that the undisputed atrocities against the Maya deserve the attention of many more scholars. Others said that the Guatemalan Oriente is a place that does not offer much in terms of analysis. “It's boring over there,” a Guatemalan colleague said with a touch of disappointment when I told her where I was going to do fieldwork. However, she added something that planted a seed of curiosity in my head: “It's crazy out there. No laws there, only la ley del muy macho [the law of the very macho]. Be careful, OK? It's our Wild West out there.” “Yes, the Guatemalan Wild West is in the east,” she added with a chuckle. Another colleague explained that the Maya had an amazingly rich culture and that I should study their traditions instead.17 “Besides,” a friend noted, “it's too hot and dusty in Oriente.” These perceptions about the Guatemalan Oriente sometimes have a base in reality. For instance, Moran-Taylor (2008: 80) describes the region in Oriente where she did fieldwork as hot, dry, and characterized by large estates, cattle ranches, and machista values. At the same time, images of Guatemala's Oriente as the polar opposite of the highlands might serve to perpetuate the indigenous-ladino bipolarity and to accept the differences between the two groups as natural and immutable and not as socially constructed (see Tarracena Arriola et al. 2002: 38). Arguments that Guatemala's political violence occurred in the Altiplano while the violence of “common” crime occurred in Oriente build on this geographic bipolarity to construct an image of these types of violence as different and independent of each other, obscuring the deep links that exist between the two. In the end, perhaps because only a couple of colleagues seemed encouraging about my fieldwork in eastern Guatemala, I decided to focus my energy on learning more about women's lives there.18 Thus my work sometimes conforms to the often stereotypical notions of Oriente as chaotic and violent; but it also challenges these images by pointing to the complexity and diversity of social life in this understudied region. And though my focus is the lives of the ladinas, my work also illuminates important aspects of how Maya women live with and experience old and new forms of violence in their everyday lives.
The town of San Alejo has a largely homogeneous ladino population, but the southeastern department of Jalapa where it is located has sizable minorities of K'iche’ and Pokomam Maya, among other Maya groups. My fieldwork in the Altiplano took place in the western department of