Esperanza

June 15, 2010

Today I discovered that my Spanish teacher Marta is quite possibly one of the most amazing women that I have ever met. We managed to get off on some tangent or other in our literature class (it happens a lot – we’ve found that it is an effective tactic to keep from reading about some boring literature theme) that eventually lead to her talking about her personal life for at least an hour. She grew up in a house that reeked of “machismo,” the oldest child, with three younger brothers. By the time she was 12, she realized that she was treated different than they, obliged to do housework AND work in her father’s carpentry shop. She called her father out on it, beginning an argument that lasted until she left the house 7 or 8 years later. When Marta told him that she wanted to study literature in college, her father said “No, you’ll do something useful. Be a secretary.” She complied, because at that time and in this culture, there isn’t much else to do. At this point, I’m not exactly sure what else happened in her life. She finished secretarial school, was a secretary for awhile in the governor’s office (I believe), and then decided that she had done what her father wanted her to do, and now it was time for her to do what she wanted to do. So she went back to school to specialize in literature, and it was there that she met her husband – a Mennonite from Georgia who taught U.S. history in a school for children of ambassadors and diplomats and such. They are now married and have two boys, 6 and 9. In her house, there is not a trace of machismo – her husband cooks and helps care for their children.

Marta’s story is the polar opposite of most Guatemalan women’s. Young girls are raised in strongly masochistic households, are taught the status quo from their similarly dominated (and quite possibly abused) mothers. They haven’t a trace of self-esteem or sense of worth. Eventually, they find a guy who has money, a nice car, nice clothes, who may be a total douche, but hey, he’s got money and that’s all that matters. They think that he’s a nice guy, wouldn’t abuse her like her father did her mother, and for awhile, that might be true. But then he might hit her once. Once is permissible, she thinks. He was angry, it was my fault, he didn’t mean it, he’ll never do it again, he was sorry afterwards, he said that he loved me, the excuses are endless. But it happens again. And again. And again. And eventually, without a thread of self-respect left, she becomes her mother, raising her daughter in a similar atmosphere as she was raised, submitting to her husband’s abuse, ill-educated, completely devoid of hope. Thousands of women are killed each year in “passion-related murders.” Murdered by their own husbands, in other words. The cycle of violence, hopelessness, and machismo is very nearly endless. Women like Marta, who are able to break out, are few and far between.