A lot that has been happening in my life lately has forced me to think more deeply about certain social issues, about this culture and society. It´s incredible to me, however, how no matter how intimate, personal, and specific the events that have occurred in my life here are, they are always about culture and society and the way that it raises and shapes people and creates a people, a culture, a way of thinking. Unfortunately, recent events have been a negative reflection of this culture and society and have left me in a sad awe of the world I am living in and certain sociological realities. Living in Latin American has certainly only emphasized and taught me more about my field of Sociology and it´s upmost importance in analyzing societal issues and hopefully finding solutions.
Many of us have already heard of machismo, a sociological phenomenon located in Latin America and Latino culture. But of course, machismo is not Latin but simply a Spanish word to describe their experience and understanding of patriarchal violence and culture. Some of us who have heard or read articles on the ¨machista¨ may ask, ¨Does it really exist in the way we read about it?¨. Now that I have lived in Latin America for 7 months, my questions are, ¨How does it exist and what are the similarities and differences with the unlabeled machismo or patriarchy that exists in the United States and the one that I am experiencing and observing here?¨.
My understanding and observation of machismo here in a small town in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador have been both wide and diverse. Many of the problems we see in the U.S. exist here also, except only that it seems more pronounced here. I was of course shocked and taken aback by how clearly defined and strict the role of the woman inside the home is.. It pained my heart to see how hard my first mother in my first family worked. Just like in the United States, women here suffer from the ¨second shift¨ in that most women here have a full time job and share economic responsibilities with the husband but still do the same amount of work in the home. Never like I had seen in the United States, women here are the only ones allowed to wash dishes, do laundry, touch a broom, cook and clean the house. To the extent that a man does not pick up his plate and put it in the sink but leaves anything he touches where he touched it. They say that if a man does laundry here, he is homosexual and thus in the light of the negative view upon homosexuality here (a huge threat to the machismo concept in itself) I have never seen a man touch a piece of clothing.
I see women here work harder than I dreamt possible. After class, sometimes I speak with the older women in my class and we talk about their lives and how busy they are. They complain to me about how tired they are. Getting up at 5 or 530 in the morning to do laundry, clean the house, and get the children ready for school. Making breakfast and making lunch before they leave to work. Working and coming back home for lunch only to finish preparing it and serve it to all the members of the family. Cleaning the mess of lunch and returning to work. Only to then come to my English class afterwards or take University courses or participate in teacher conferences in order to continue to advance their own education and goals…to return home at 6 or 7 only to prepare the merienda for the family and finish cleaning and taking care of the children and their homework. Of course, we see this in the United States but I feel like in the States we have increasingly been able to create a sense of gray in the dichotomy between the labor and role of men and women in the home. Here, things feel more strictly black and white with less room to negotiate the situation.
To me, something even more difficult to swallow has been the power I have seen men hold here like I have never seen before. One of my good Ecuadorian girl friends here during Carnaval took charge of organizing the choreographed dance for our performance in the parade. She was extremely excited and thrilled to take charge of this for her love of dance and her love of the class. But soon, after 3 days of her hard work and organizing, my 20 year old friend with a 3 year old son calls me and tells me that her husband will not allow her to participate. She in tears and pure frustration from the fights of the day with him had no idea why he would not allow her to. And as we conversed, she was quick to tell me that I couldn´t understand because men are different here than in the United States and that this is just the way things are. She told me, a woman marries here and gives up her rights and has to listen to what her husband wants and her husband has the right to dictate her life. I told her that yes, I understood that men and marriages here are different from what I understood in my life back home but no matter how the societal views are different, it was important for her to communicate with her husband and for him to know that this was important to her.
One afternoon, I went with my Ecuadorian mother to the campo behind my house where people live in small, hand-made houses with their animals where they take care of and live off the land. Many indigenous people live here behind my house. We were recruiting for a neighborhood literary class as pretty much everyone who lives out in the campo (which is an enormous part of Ecuador!) do not know how to read or write. And what I didn´t understand at the time, is that they cannot even write their names. We ran into a woman cultivating her corn in an expansive field who we spoke with about the class and she was very interested but told us we had to ask her husband. We asked where he was and she pointed up. So we climbed up this field only to arrive to a bitter, controlling, angry man. The man evidently had some disabilities and could not hear that well while his wife was extremely with it and intelligent. Angrily, he refused to allow her to go to the class. My Ecuadorian mother insisted for awhile, asking why and telling him about the benefits but he only seemed to get more resistant. Then, the sister of the wife and the husband began to fight so we decided to leave before doing harm. The sister of the wife later found us walking out there and told us that her sister´s husband hits her all the time and if she were to go he would most definitely beat her…that day, I left the campo not enamored with the nature and connection between the people and the land but depressed and angered by a situation so shocking and foreign to my heart.
Just this past weekend, I found out through a friend that one of my 15 year old, high school students is having many problems in her home. My friend went to her house on Friday to practice for one of my oral quizzes and arrived to the house to find her crying and her mom injured from being hit by her husband and my student´s father. They had been arguing because the mother wanted to continue to work and the father did not want to allow her to work, accusing her of having another lover. My friend told me that Sammy, my student, is also hit by her father when the mother is not home. We talked a long time about possible solutions but the mother is too afraid of even greater violence if she files a report with the police and cannot leave the house because she does not have enough money. This situation weighs heavy on my heart and I ponder out windows what can possibly be done to help my student and this woman…I am going to try to have them go to a Woman´s Right organization here in Guaranda but obviously these matters are more complicated than we would like them to be…
In an Ecuadorian magazine I was recently reading, they sited that 8 out of 10 Ecuadorian women are in a violent relationship and suffer from physical, economic, and psychological abuse. 80 percent is a shockingly high number to me. But, when I ask Ecuadorians about this statistic, they all already know. ¨Que pena,¨ they say. Those 2 out of 10 relationships that are not violent are hoping that it will slowly change…but how I ask? But how?
