Guatemaltecas: The Women's Movement, 1986–2003

Chapter 2. Inside (and) Out: Home, Work, and Organizing

Chapter 2 inside (and) out: home, work, and organizing No se oyen pero escuchan. Están sentadas en la parte de atrás. Cuando por fin alzan la mano, descubren el rostro de una palabra con ojos de liebre asustada que huye de las cocinas de los cuartos y las salas para asomarse —aunque sea por un instante— a un lugar sin paredes pero con alma.1 —carolina escobar sarti, ‘‘las mujeres no se oyen’’ Beginning in the late1970s, Guatemaltecas started to participate in social movements in relatively large numbers for the first time. Social, economic, and political variables had historically divided, isolated, restricted, and subordinated women in Guatemala, making it difficult for them to build a strategically imagined community based on gender. But in the late 1970s, the confluence of a number of domestic and international factors not only opened up new political spaces to women but also encouraged women to think about gender as a basis for identity politics. Guatemaltecas took advantage of these changes, struggling to fashion and expand spaces to best address their multiple needs and desires as individuals, classes, ethnic groups, and, for the first time, as women. To begin to understand the unfolding Guatemalan story, this chapter looks at two founding elements: the strategies and tactics used to build— and the difficulties of doing so—a united political community around gen- 20 guatemaltecas der, and the multiple political implications of changing gender norms.The chapter looks at why the women’s movement developed when it did and in the ways it did; how Guatemaltecas have defined their interests and needs within or outside the women’s movement; in what ways the movement has been inclusive and exclusive; how women’s organizations have negotiated the socioeconomic and political realities of democratization and economic restructuring; and how the state and the movement have interacted. The chapter reveals the actuality of the close relationship between practical and strategic interests, as well as the dialectics between neoliberal reforms and the institutionalization of the women’s movement in Guatemala. antecedents to the guatemalan women’s movement Although the growth of the women’s movement is a fairly recent occurrence in Guatemala, Guatemaltecas—usually individually rather than collectively —have always participated in the nation’s political and economic development: in the formal and informal markets, in class and cultural organizations, and in political struggles. Indigenous and mestiza women were active in the anticolonial struggles of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,2 in the Liberal-Conservative conflicts in the early part of the twentieth century,3 and in the nationalist struggles of the years 1944–1954.4 They have historically supported their families with formal and informal, salaried and unsalaried labor as domestics, agriculturalists , innkeepers, teachers, proprietors of informal comedores (eating establishments ), marketwomen, and clerical workers. Still, women were excluded legally, economically, and as Ana Silvia Monzón asserts, within the national social imagination. Laws restricted women from acting on their own behalf judicially, they could not vote until 1945,5 and a woman needed the permission of her husband to work outside the home. Women were discouraged from entering certain professions, generally received less pay than their male counterparts, and had difficulty getting land titles in their names.6 Symbolic codes sanctioned by the Catholic Church and by civil laws held that men should protect and provide for women, and that women, in turn, should obey and serve men.7 The female body was considered impure and women untrustworthy, necessitating the policing of the female body. Women were excluded ‘‘from public spaces, sacred activities, and rituals such as the traditional dances’’8 and supervised so as not to inside (and) out 21 succumb to sensual pleasures or their ‘‘love of luxuries.’’9 The social construction of femininity thus encouraged concealing middle- and upperclass mestizas behind closed doors. It simultaneously stigmatized indigenous and poor women who had to leave their homes for economic reasons while demasculinizing the men who allowed them to do so. In1885, Helen Josephine Sanborn, a young American woman traveling in Guatemala, wrote: The streets are full of Indian women, but one sees very few of the higher classes, and this was so noticeable that we asked, ‘‘Where are the ladies of Guatemala?’’ and received the answer, ‘‘In their houses.’’ It is contrary to custom and all rules of etiquette for a lady to go on the street...