Gender-based violence and self-expression in coastal Colombia
Jane is a Peace Corps Volunteer currently serving in a pueblo in the department of Atlántico, Colombia.
In the States, we little more than hesitate before calling the cops on a neighbor playing music too loud for our taste. Yelling is rude and makes people feel uncomfortable. Here on the Colombian coast, volume is not synonymous with anger, but happiness. The decibel at which you play your music indicates how fun of a time you’re having; yelling at your neighbors conveys how glad you are to see them.
In my rural pueblo community, as in many here on the Atlantic coast, many women are amas de casa, or housewives that take care of daily chores such as preparing three meals a day from scratch and cleaning the house (which, by the way, is constantly exposed to heat, bugs, humidity, and rain.) One of my favorite parts about knowing these women has been watching them interact with their children. We’ll call it tough love, but you could also call their preferred parenting style nit-picky or overbearing.
During my first three months in Colombia, I lived with a host family in my training town where I took Spanish and technical classes. My host mom constantly raised her voice at David, her rambunctious five-year-old son. It was jarring to live with at first, considering American parents often reserve those high decibels for extra-angry situations or to strike the fear of a higher power into their children. Alternatively, Yesica did so with love. The yelling was always related to David’s safety or his inability to keep on enough weight so you couldn’t count his ribs.
During the rest of my time on the coast, I’ve known and worked with amas de casa that, similarly to Yesica, don’t hesitate to express their needs, or speak up when someone has done them wrong. I am always impressed with their confidence and self-assured sense of authority, as it’s the last thing I expected to find in such a heavily machista culture.
I, in turn, say please and thank you, always use my manners, and back off when someone seems bothered by my intrusion. I find myself wishing the amas de casa could transfer their secret costeña superpowers to me through some kind of a radioactive spider bite.
What truly baffles me about this phenomenon, however, is the duality it creates. The same women who show their love in high-pitched, irritated tones raise sons and daughters. Around the time their voices begin to change, the sons grow less dependent on their mothers. They receive more opportunities in school, and face far fewer societal expectations than their sisters about how to dress and behave. Raised by mothers who yell out of love, they give back the same level of intensity — now in deeper, more authoritative tones. Domestic violence is common.
Daughters, however, are raised penosas, with a universal level of meekness society expects from young girls. Their voices don’t take on the same authoritative qualities as they grow, but their bodies draw the attention of the boys whose do. Young men derive their cockiness from nature; women from nurture. The amas de casa find power in their roles as wives, homemakers, caretakers of the family; raising their voices is a way to assert control over their domain. Their husbands find power in everything else. Their daughters tell me they don’t find power anywhere.
As much as I’d like to believe that young girls eventually receive their costeña superpowers through radioactive spider bites, it’s a much more painful process than that.
There’s a permeating dogma imbedded in the culture here that putting up with a husband is integral to forming a strong feminine identity. “Mejor mal acompañada que soltera,” or so the local saying goes. “Better to keep poor company than be single.” With it, you’re entitled to loud emotions. Without it, you’re not entitled to anything. Complaining or leaving is considered weak. Bruises are a right of passage, and household domain the prize.
One of the people who understood me best when I first moved to my pueblo was an outsider like me. Just four years older, she was Colombian, but moved to the coast after falling in love and getting pregnant shortly after. She was the most entrepreneurial individual I had ever met, gracefully combining backbreaking physical labor with genius marketing campaigns. Once, I participated, somewhat voluntarily, in a photoshoot to model her makeup services. (No, they did not use my photo in any ad materials.) Another time, we spent 30 minutes making slow-motion videos of me flipping my hair after she cut and styled it according to a Pinterest photo.
We both left my pueblo on vacation during Semana Santa. When I returned, my current host mom informed me Sara had left with her son to visit her hometown in another part of the country and wouldn’t be coming back. “El muchacho le pegaba” she said. “He was hitting her.” While my host mom lamented over our future lack of properly-groomed fingernails, I reflected on my deep sadness at the knowledge that she was gone. Then, I smiled to myself at the thought that she had the courage to leave.
My host mom, too, lives alone as a result of the breakup of her marriage to a man who hit her, her only son’s father. It took nearly nine months of living with her to hear that story, and she only mentioned it in passing when telling me the news about Sara. Her son, in fact, was good friends with Sara’s ex-partner and had been visiting us in the pueblo the month before. Unsurprisingly, he spent several weeks harassing me to visit a pay-by-the-hour motel with him on the outskirts of town.
Of course there are bountiful, beautiful exceptions to this rule. The psychologist at the school where I work told me one day that the mother of a student had come in to see her. After her husband left the pueblo to find work in Bogotá, she lived alone with her kids for quite some time. The separation was supposed to be temporary, but the confidence she gained from it was not. The woman divorced her husband after discovering she could do things better on her own.
In another very small, very isolated vereda, or rural outpost, of my town, I met Natalia, a university student studying communications in the city. Her mother was the president of the local neighborhood association, although she recently had to give up her post after she moved their family of five to a nearby suburb so Natalia could finish her degree. She had just one required English course left, and it was offered at night. The family misses their rural home, but they made the sacrifice to live somewhere else so that Natty has a safer commute. It will be worth it when she becomes the first person in her family to obtain a higher education.
Still, I can’t help but stagnate on this story of a high school senior in one of my entrepreneurship classes. She’s the youngest of several children, and her mother forces her to pay room and board for living in her home. She’s sixteen years old. Our school psychologist helps fund her fledgling woven bracelet business, but when she doesn’t have enough money to pay, she uses her own body for profit. The mototaxistas sitting outside that safe haven of education ask for it every day.
Pay your penance and you will be rewarded: it’s a deeply-rooted narrative here perpetuated by a cycle of violence and generations of women who cling to the pride of having made it this far. It’s not everyone and it’s not everywhere; I find this scenario to be particularly present in very rural, very low-resource settings. The exceptions are just that — exceptions, and young women often need access to wealth, opportunity, or both to subvert this vicious cycle.
As a consequence, being a strong woman often means to endure a partner, even if he hits, and even if he drinks. It means to have children before you’re ready and to tend their needs under scarce resources. If you’re lucky, you’ll be surrounded by supportive women who can help you get through it. If you’re really lucky, you’ll be raised under the auspice that your right to self-expression isn’t a token to be bargained for in the first place.
