personal is political

It’s been hard for me to write a new post lately because many of the issues I’m wrestling with feel too…sensitive for such a public venue. The past two weeks of my research have been overshadowed at times with much more personal issues, specifically dealing with close female friends who are in abusive relationships. And dealing with violence in my own (temporary) home…

I’ve come to understand Bolivia’s compadrazgo system (establishing godparents for everything from baptism to the cake at a wedding to a graduating, high school class) as a powerful way for people to enganchar or hook others into permanent reciprocal relationships. I’ve been a madrina de bautizo (godmother of baptism) – which is one of the more powerful forms of compagrazgo -- for nearly 4 years now. And shortly after arriving, my host family made me a madrina de rutucha -- a godmother of the first haircut.

Accordingly, my compadres and I refer to each other as co-mother and co-father of my goddaughter and godson (and I’ll be a co-mother for a third time before I leave). Unfortunately, my co-mothers -- and many other women friends -- are in physically, emotionally and psychologically abusive relationships. One morning, I came into the kitchen to fix breakfast and my co-mother burst in, sobbing. She had just been beaten and told to get out, to leave. For the next couple of hours, she unloaded years of emotional abuse, betrayal and infidelity, her pregnancy at 16 and the loss of that baby, her deepening entrapment in a dependent and abusive relationship with her husband, my co-father.

My other co-mother was, at age six, sent to be a household servant (in a city nearly 17 hours away by bus) in exchange for the family providing her with an education. Ironically, the mother of that household convinced her to drop out before she graduated from high school. After feeling like she had escaped to a new life, she now finds herself back working as an empleada or household servant for the same family, from 8am to 8pm, 6 days a week. Her husband is controlling, monitors our phone calls, refuses to allow her to have friends. Her daughter once indicated to me that the abuse is physical as well…at least for the girls.

Family violence is extremely common in Bolivia and none of these stories are shocking. On an average night at my friends’ house, we sit and listen to the violent screams of brawling families. Spousal abuse is rampant. Yet this time around, it seems to be affecting me more than it did in my previous four years in Bolivia. I’ve been struck with how much I’m absorbing and replicating that violence -- in thought, if not in action.

While historically there is relatively little incidence of street violence or violent robberies, signs of violence and retribution increasingly abound. For example, I’m including here some photos of the warnings against possible thieves that are found on nearly every block of El Alto, often accompanied by a dummy hung in effigy, which communicates the warning “this could be you.” Spray-painted across adobe walls are inscriptions such as "Thief, You will be Lynched." Also common, "Thief, you will be burned alive."*

In an act of extraordinary mimesis (replicating the violence I supposedly reject), I have begun coming up with my own list for possible spray-paint jobs. E.g. "Abusive husband, you will be castrated.” The day I found my co-mother weeping in the kitchen, I was shaking with the urge to totally humiliate and dehumanize my co-father (who has been avoiding me for two weeks since he discovered me hugging her in the kitchen. One night, rather than be in the same room with me, he called his wife from the next room ask if there was more food. Now that's a whole 'nother issue. A north-south power issue...). Supposedly I’m a big believer in strategic nonviolence, but I feel so much anger and a desire for retribution against the men in my friends’ lives (and, because they’re my co-fathers, in my own).

These experiences have me thinking a lot about Begoña Aretxaga’s work on mimetic violence among Basque youth; I’m wondering if my own experience of absorbing and replicating such violence might give me an insight into some dimensions of Bolivia’s current political climate. Now I’m extremely hesitant to make such a leap between my own mimesis and an exceedingly complex, postcolonial setting. But I hear from friends “we’re worried that out of rage and a desire for retribution against the perpetrators of centuries of exclusion and oppression we are starting to take-on some of the characteristics of those we say we hate…” So it has me thinking…

Anyway, these are jumbled and very sketchy/preliminary thoughts and feelings…Sorry I keep posting about such, er…heavy topics….just trying to process things…and all my other stuff is too politically-sensitive to post!!! I promise to only post silly photos from now on…

Susanita

* For one interpretation of lynching in Bolivia as both a critique and result of neoliberal policies, see Daniel Goldstein's The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia