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Reviewed by:
  • Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala
  • Liliana Goldin
Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala. By Cecilia Menjivar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Pp. xiv, 288. Acknowledgments. Appendix. Notes. References. Index.

Menjivar’s study analyzes the various forms of violence that Ladina women of eastern Guatemala are exposed and subjected to on a daily basis. The violence of the quotidian includes overt and covert forms of violence that result from gender ideologies that extend beyond eastern Guatemala and beyond the country itself. The author emphasizes the fact that these ideologies are not the product of singular characteristics or unique flaws in the actions of individuals and local communities, but are grounded and normalized behaviors that are often accepted by all—women, men, the judicial system and a nation that has experienced and continues to experience elevated levels of violence. From earthquakes to civil war to a widespread system of fear and control, from militaristic and paramilitary actions to household dynamics that preserve and reproduce ingrained cycles of violence, Guatemalan women not only acknowledge but also resign themselves to treatment they often seem to justify.

The study is rich in ethnographic accounts that allow the women to recount the ways in which they experience, accept, or resist the situations in which they find themselves. [End Page 456] These extend from the abuse of a husband who becomes violent when drinking, to the loss of a child, the lack of health care, a legal system that favors men, overall power differentials, and the violence of exclusion and poverty. For students of Guatemala, the accounts sound eerily familiar. While the author acknowledges that the focus is on documenting events and the sources of structural and symbolic violence rather than forms of resistance and women’s agency to counter some of those, missing in the accounts are the numerous stories of women who leave their husbands or their in-laws to put an end to persistent abuse. Indeed, women may have much to lose when moving out of situations of violence and those decisions are not made lightly. But Menjivar recognizes that the experiences of women are diverse, as are women’s ways of dealing with them, even when they are considered a “normal” part of a woman’s life.

While the study is focused on ladinas of Eastern Guatemala, the author also conducted some research in the Maya highlands and often compares and cites commonalities between the two. She does so to highlight the fact that some parts of the worlds of ladina and Maya women are shared and indicates that she hopes to avoid the ladino vs. indigenous construct to show that Maya and ladina women experience much of the patriarchal ideologies of gender, even across class and ethnicity. Here the reader would have benefitted from some more methodological detail with respect to these comparisons, as it is difficult to assert the extent of Menjivar’s work in the highland region.

The author considers the structural economic and political conditions that generate violence and the less visible, more internalized and insidious forms that include humiliation, racism, and sexism as well as other ideologies of domination and control that result in internalized dispositions (Bourdieu, 1984; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2004). Furthermore, hegemonic ideologies translate into women’s own feelings of inadequacy and inferiority (p. 43). In its documentation of the institutionalization and normalization of gendered violence at domestic and state levels, this book makes an important contribution: it offers insights into a less-studied area of Guatemala and highlights the pervasive presence of gendered ideologies of control in women’s lives.

Liliana Goldin
New York University
New York, New York
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