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1 Introduction
- NYU Press
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1 l l 1 Introduction Theoretical and Methodological Approach Angela, Claudia, Julia, Luisa, Laura, Martha, Rosa, Manuela, Ana, Susana, Clara, Silvana, Rosario, Mónica, Samuel, Yolanda, Patricia, Ramona, and Leticia were all immigrants. With or without immigration documents, they had all left their native lands to help their families survive . In love, and in pain, they had all endured intimate partner violence in the United States. Courageously and fearfully, they had all tried to break free from their abusive relationships and sought help. Some found their way out. Others did not. In this book, I explore the disparate fates of Latina battered immigrants in their search for nonviolence, autonomy, and citizenship by uncovering and defying entrenched discriminatory principles and practices still at work in this country from a feminist of color perspective.1 Latina, black, postcolonial, and critical race feminisms have been particularly acute in their contribution to the struggle to end violence against women. As the battered women’s movement developed, and violence against women was redefined first as a social problem (as opposed to an acceptable private matter)2 and later as a human rights violation, feminists of color underscored the need to shift from universalizing to differentiated accounts.3 While it is true that all women can be victimized on a gender basis (as “white” liberal and radical feminists initially claimed in order to legitimize the need to end violence against women and make it a policy priority), intersecting racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, immigration status, and sexual, religious, and political orientations also come into play in terms of the kinds of violence perpetrated , and the resources available to overcome abusive conditions.4 2 x Introduction For instance, immigrant women’s vulnerability is based not only on their gender but also on nationality, race, ethnicity, language, religion, documented or undocumented immigration status, threatened legal status, situational isolation from family and community, cross-national frames of cultural and legal reference (including ideologies, laws, and practices in regard to gender equality and sexuality), and socioeconomic status.5 Latina, black, postcolonial, and critical race feminisms have focused on the specific constraints that limit minority battered women, with the aim of elaborating strategies, programs, policies, and laws that better reflect their experiences and improve their particular situations—as opposed to those of the “universal” battered woman, which in fact were modeled after white, middle- or upper-class heterosexual housewives.6 Similarly, feminists of color have stressed the need to provincialize mainstream and Western accounts of violence against women by taking into account the specific cultural and social contexts of the community where the women live or used to live, contrary to understanding oppression from a hegemonic standpoint,7 which perpetuates “new forms of colonialism” and is “out of touch with the realities experienced at the grass-roots level.”8 With the goal of meeting the particular needs of the most disadvantaged, feminists of color have adopted a methodology committed to building knowledge from below, that is, in collaboration with the people about whom the research is being developed, because “without them, the myriad individual and collective histories that simultaneously run parallel to official accounts of historic events and are their sequel, almost inevitably get submerged ”9 and become invisible.10 In this spirit, I developed activist research11 at a local nonprofit organization in Texas to learn about the experiences of Latina battered immigrants in their quest for U.S. citizenship through the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA). Advocates, activists, and scholars alike have considered these laws as successful achievements for women’s and immigrants’ rights movements.12 In principle, VAWA and VTVPA legitimize battered immigrants in their particular victimization and provide them with services conducive to breaking free from abusive relationships and becoming legally and economically autonomous U.S. citizens. However, through my research I found that formal and informal barriers that filter immigrants either as worthy to become legitimate citizens of the United States or as illegitimate subjects remain in place. Intersecting gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, and class inequalities not only permeate the current legislation [54.85.255.74] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:58 GMT) Introduction x 3 but also tend to be reproduced by nonprofit workers. This results in the exclusion of the most underprivileged immigrants (those Latina immigrants who are women of color, extremely poor, with few years of formal education, undocumented, in relationships with residents or other undocumented immigrants, originally from Mexico, homosexual, and/ or...