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| 185 7 When Intervention Is Necessary One of my cousins was so pretty, she was beautiful, and she was really outgoing and active. . . . She was going somewhere in life and I was following her. We were very close. Her man became so controlling, and slowly she began to stop her activities, but she did not want to quit school. Then he decided to maim her so that nobody else would look at her. . . . It was awful. . . . Her face was ruined and she was never the same. Do you know that nobody did anything about this? It was just another day. Marcela, a first-generation Puerto Rican mother of one, provides a window into patriarchal control dynamics that include violence against women becoming normative and serving to diminish the drive and imperil the lives of women, leaving them traumatized. This normalization of gendered violence is prevalent in many societies, and it is ignored through silence (Hall 2000). In much the same way as terrorism, domestic violence inflicts fear and trauma not only on the intended victims but on entire communities.1 In this chapter I will explore how Marcela’s trauma inhibited her social mobility until she was able to access mental health treatment. In the previous chapter, we saw through Marta’s and Paula’s stories how violence affects not only the immediate victim but also members of subsequent generations. Because Marta and Paula did not access mental health treatment, their trauma lingered and hampered their frames, which are their problem-solving frameworks. As a result, Marta and Paula were unable to take advantage of the opportunities provided them by leveraging ties, which help individuals get ahead, or bridges, which are ties that connect people across race, ethnicity, and social class. Marcela’s pattern is similar to Marta’s and Paula’s in that she was stuck in a low-wage position and was unable to leverage her ties or her nascent sense of self-efficacy that is directed toward social mobility, which I call self-propelling agency. In other words, Marcela was out of the Social Flow. But she altered the situation by getting mental 186 | When Intervention Is Necessary health treatment, which allowed her to focus again with her frame and reactivated her self-propelling agency. This chapter explores the role of interventions, which can take many forms, including bridges, institutions, and social policy. Interventions aim to resolve structural deficits that keep populations that are socially positioned for mobility out of the Social Flow and are a vital component of the Social Flow framework; they contribute to the configuration of networks, self-propelling agency, social modeling, and frames, thus producing sufficient conditions for social mobility. As we see in this book, the majority of the immigrant women I studied were socially positioned and socially mobile. But for some, social positioning was not sufficient, and interventions were necessary for social mobility. For Marcela, an institutional bridge was necessary to connect her to mental health services and place her back in the Social Flow. Marcela’s Nascent Self-Propelling Agency In the epigraph to this chapter, Marcela expresses her anguish at her cousin’s experience with domestic violence and explains that the women in her community felt helpless and lacking worth.2 This event made Marcela, a medium-built, average-height, light-skinned woman with long, light brown hair, want to look for ways to get away from her rural community in Puerto Rico, where the “worth of the autocratic paterfamilias hinged most immediately on the larger community’s perception of the respect accorded to [the man] by his wife and her abundant children” (Bourgois 1996a, 415). Marcela focused on education as a way to get away from that community, and she credits her father with having pushed her: “My father always worked hard. He was hard to please, really hard to please.” Marcela’s father also abused her mother severely. It is in these stories as told by the respondents that one sees the complexities involved in human relationships. Marcela’s father was an abuser who caused tremendous pain but also a source of support who encouraged Marcela to work hard in school. As Bourgois (1996b) explains, in rural Puerto Rico some men exercise an oppressive power over their wives and children; they justify this power with the man’s ability to work hard and provide materially for the family. Sexual and gendered violence is pervasive worldwide and present in low-income white communities (Hall 2000), as well as...

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