Abstract
Despite United Nations resolutions and national and international campaigns, violence against women continues unabated as a weapon in war, through structural ways and in everyday interactions ensuring men’s dominance and women’s need to endure. In Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala, Cecilia Menjivar presents a framework based on structural, interpersonal, symbolic, and gendered forms of violence against individuals and groups. From an intersectional perspective, it is low-income minorities worldwide who suffer the most because of a generalized deprivation of resources. Their only response is to endure—itself a form of internalized violence, which renders women powerless while simultaneously powerful in their capacity to withstand.
Spanning several years of fieldwork and drawing on revealing in-depth interviews, Menjívar’s study offers an analysis of the various forms of violence to which Ladina women in eastern Guatemala are exposed and subjected on a daily basis. Ladina women are not the most vulnerable population in Guatemala (that distinction is held by the country’s indigenous Mayans). Yet, the quotidian violence includes overt and covert forms that result from gender ideologies and structural dynamics that extend beyond the eastern Guatemala region and the country of Guatemala. The author goes to great lengths to demonstrate that these ideologies are not the product of individual and community characteristics, but normalized behaviors that are generally accepted by all—women, men, the judicial and political system, and a nation that has experienced decades of civil war and, like other postconflict societies, continues to experience elevated levels of violence for decades after. Guatemalan women not only acknowledge this violence but also resign themselves to treatment they often justify.
Cecilia Menjívar’s objective in this book is to “unearth the misrecognized violence that women routinely experience in familiar, commonplace spaces” (p. 4). Menjívar opens the analysis to include a wide range of sources of pain and suffering, including the corporal dimensions of gender violence; how marital unions normalize suffering; the way in which children and motherhood promote the routinization of pain and sacrifice; how inequality is normalized and sustained through women’s work; and the roles of church and religion in the everyday violence and push to endure. Menjívar finds that religion acts as an analgesic that temporarily relieves pain, but does not cure, and questions the potential empowerment or improvement coming from women’s religious involvement. The author avoids simplistic and deterministic relationships associated with individual behavior and instead focuses on the larger systems that produce and reproduce hierarchies based on class, ethnicity, and gender.
Having exposed the links between macro and micro expressions of violence, Menjívar ends the book by paying further attention to the ongoing need of women to force themselves to endure the multisided violence afflicting their lives. Menjívar focuses on the increasing rate of feminicide, which not only refers to the killings of women by men because they are women but also highlights the responsibility of the state that omits, or executes, these killings and otherwise does not prosecute them. There is an average of two women killed per day in Guatemala through feminicide, and some see this as a form of social cleansing. These killings promote a generalized sense of fear, which is yet another compounded form of violence to be endured. This is in spite of the fact that the UN established the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women in 1995.
While only extreme cases of violence victimization get national and international attention, millions of women experience everyday structural, interpersonal, symbolic, and gendered violence that they must endure given the ongoing patriarchal dynamics of relationships and institutional structures. Menjívar’s research on Ladina women in Guatemala and her framework on the micro and macro links of violence is a tremendous contribution that can be replicated, to one level or another, across the globe’s vulnerable populations.