Cecilia Menjívar 
Enduring Violence 
Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala

Drawing on revealing, in-depth interviews, Cecilia Menjívar investigates the role that violence plays in the lives of Ladina women in eastern Guatemala, a little-visited and little-studied region. While much has been written on the subject of political violence in Guatemala, Menjívar turns to a different form of suffering—the violence embedded in institutions and in everyday life so familiar and routine that it is often not recognized as such. Rather than painting Guatemala (or even Latin America) as having a cultural propensity for normalizing and accepting violence, Menjívar aims to develop an approach to examining structures of violence—profound inequality, exploitation and poverty, and gender ideologies that position women in vulnerable situations— grounded in women’s experiences. In this way, her study provides a glimpse into the root causes of the increasing wave of feminicide in Guatemala, as well as in other Latin American countries, and offers observations relevant for understanding violence against women around the world today.

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Acknowledgments


1. Approaching Violence in Eastern Guatemala

2. A Framework for Examining Violence

3. Corporeal Dimensions of Gender Violence: Woman’s Self and Body

4. Marital Unions and the Normalization of Suffering

5. Children, Motherhood, and the Routinization of Pain and Sacrifice

6. Women’s Work: Normalizing and Sustaining Gender Inequality

7. Church, Religion, and Enduring Everyday Violence

8. Enduring Violence


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Sobre el autor

Cecilia Menjívar is Professor and Dorothy L. Meier Social Equities Chair in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. She is the author of Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America (UC Press), among other books. Menjivar won the Julian Samora Distinguished Career Award from the Latino/a Sociology section of the American Sociological Association.