Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
(townships), but the town in which I did fieldwork was overwhelmingly Kaqchikel Maya. The towns were roughly equal in terms of population size, and agricultural production was the main form of employment. Indeed, they were selected for inclusion in the larger study based on their comparability. Since details of the women's lives are key to making my points, I did not alter their stories, unless they compromised the women's confidentiality. Instead, I give fewer details about the towns themselves, to make them (I trust) unrecognizable and therefore provide whatever protection I can to my study participants’ privacy. As it is customarily expected in research that involves in-depth interviews, field observations, and long-term interaction with study participants, I offer a brief account of how I think I was perceived and my position vis-à-vis my interlocutors. No doubt, my study participants’ perceptions of me provided the contour for the nature and content of our conversations and my work.
The project in which I participated initially was housed in Guatemala at the Instituto de Nutrición de Centro América y Panamá (Central America and Panama Institute for Nutrition, INCAP). In the towns where I did the research for this project, my first visits were to the authorities (mayors and public officials) to ask for their permission to conduct fieldwork. I then met with the employees at the health post, since the project's objective was to look for women with children at home to see what they did when they or their children were ill. From that point, I started to contact individual women, whom I approached as part of the project. Although I explained that I was there to study what mothers did when they or their children were ill, some people knew me as someone who was interested in children (even as I would correct misperceptions). But in San Alejo I conveyed an additional image: because I concentrated on speaking with women and spoke with men only in the presence of women and because I also talked with pastors and priests and attended religious services, I came to be perceived as a “religious” worker. A woman told me that this was the case because I always walked around accompanied by my assistant, a Guatemalan, dressed “decently” (no pants, no jewelry, no makeup, long skirt) and was not interested in approaching men. Although I always corrected this impression, it persisted for some time.
Language and ethnicity also work in interesting ways. In the Altiplano, because I do not speak Kaqchikel, I was able to speak only with the women who could communicate in Spanish. My native fluency in Spanish obviously would not offset my lack of knowledge of Kaqchikel in the Altiplano, but in San Alejo it led to an interesting dynamic. There people would immediately detect that though I was a native speaker, I was not from the region. They would politely ask me if I was “Central American” or, more often, “de por aquí” (from around here), though a few correctly guessed my Salvadoran origin at first try. In my initial visits a couple of women told me that I should not, at least at first, be too open about my Salvadoran origin.19 “Salvadoran women,” one woman noted, “with my respect to you, because you are decent, do not have very good reputations around here.” “You see,” the woman who ran the health post explained, “this is embarrassing for me to tell you, but I have to. There have been many [female] compatriots of yours who have passed through here [on their way North] who have not behaved properly. Some have gotten involved with men, married men and like that, you know, and everybody now thinks that all Salvadoran women are prostitutes. It pains me to tell you, but don't feel bad. As the saying goes, ‘De todo hay en la viña del Señor’ [In God's vineyard one can find good and bad].” She went on to explain that two Salvadoran sex workers who were supposedly infected with AIDS had just passed through. “Even on the radio they were announcing that two Salvadoran prostitutes were going around infecting men with AIDS. So just try not to speak like a Salvadoran,” she warned, “at least not at first.”
Thus what I had thought would be my language advantage, at least initially, proved a challenge for me. As I got to know people and they got to know me, I began to disclose my origins little by little. To my surprise, however, I discovered that most had already figured out where I was from, quite easily actually, but had also decided that I had “no bad intentions” and that I was “respectable” and “decent” because no one ever saw me “behaving improperly” with men. This, of course, has to do with gendered expectations about how women should behave and also with how gendered ideologies restrict women's freedom of movement in social spaces.
I suppose I was an outsider/insider in San Alejo. I was perceived as an outsider because of my national origin, sometimes prompting people to explain certain things to me in detail, such as wedding customs or certain ways to cook a dish, or to tell me a joke about Salvadorans (women would invariably stop men from sharing jokes about Salvadoran women with me; “No, not to her,” they would say). But I was viewed as an insider because of my ethnicity. I was identified as a ladina, perhaps as one of them, and the result of this identification could be noticed in some of the subtleties in the conversations we had but also sometimes more overtly. In fact, two women told me that because I “looked” Guatemalan and at times even “sounded” like one when I inadvertently spoke with a similar accent or used a Guatemalan colloquialism in my speech, I would probably be expected to behave in certain ways, like someone “from here, not from other [places], like a gringa; one knows that they behave more, like, more open, more libertine.”20 Dorinne Kondo (1990) noted similar experiences while doing fieldwork in Tokyo.
In the Altiplano, where I was seen as another outsider, people seemed more familiar with researchers and other types of foreign visitors, such as the Americans and Europeans who worked in the textile cooperatives or church missions or researchers doing work similar to what I was doing. I became close with two families, especially with Flor, a well-known woman who also worked at the health post, and her extended family. When my husband came to visit me, they had a small gathering and took the opportunity to feed us, joke, laugh, tease me, and even dress me in their traje (traditional clothing) for a photo with their entire family. When I had visitors I always took them to meet these families as a sign of respect but also so that these families could get a glimpse of who I was and meet my loved ones as well. In the end, I trust that in both towns I was able to converse easily with the women and others in a respectful, open manner.
ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
In chapter 2 I present my conceptual framework for studying violence and begin to introduce study participants as I lay out each component of the framework so as to illustrate the different forms of violence and the normalization of each form. This is the only chapter of the book in which I discuss each of the different forms of violence that I examine separately, and I do so only for analytic clarity. Starting with chapter 3 and continuing through chapter 7, I present different spheres of the women's everyday lives in which the diverse forms of violence coalesce and are normalized. But it is important to note that in real life these occur simultaneously. In order to dissect each sphere of life analytically, I unfurl each linearly in the chapters ahead. And I do so according to a certain order.
Chapter 3 begins with a consideration of the closest, most intimate sphere, the body. I examine how women experience in their bodies the violence that comes from structural inequalities and unequal access to health care and other resources, as well as from the gender ideologies that constrain their lives. This account includes various forms of illnesses and the ways in which the women deal with them. Chapter 3 also presents an examination of the social control of the body, exemplified in the strict control of women's movement that comes from orthodox gender ideologies. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with immediate aspects of the women's home lives, such as marriage and children. Chapter 4 presents a semichronological sequence of marriage, beginning with courtship, and includes an examination of alcoholism, infidelity, and interpersonal abuse, a tripartite source of violence that has become so bound up with constructs of maleness that it is seen as natural (Hume 2008). Chapter