"In the Land of God and Man" A Latin
Woman´s Journey.
Plume Books
ISBN 0-452-28030-3
1998
"In the Land of God and Man"
A Latin Woman´s Journey.
I The Invitation
"I like you when you're silent: It's as if you are not
there."
Me gustas cuando callas porque estas como ausente
-Pablo Neruda, Poema xv
A man rang the doorbell at my parents' house in Bogotá
and handed me an envelope addressed to them in fancy calligraphy.
I thanked the messenger and opened the unsealed envelope-an engraved
invitation to a reception honoring high-level cabinet members
of the Colombian government.
The names on the cream-colored cardboard took me back to
my childhood in Barranquilla. Ana Maria and her husband would
be hosting the party. She and I had been close growing up; our
families took trips together and we slept over at each other's
houses. Alvaro, who was in tenth grade when I was in seventh
and was friends with the unapproachable boy I had a crush on,
was the country's new vice-minister of energy. And the vice minister
of agriculture, much to my amusement, was Arturo, who had insistently
kissed me when I turned fifteen. Our mothers would have liked
it if we had kissed more, because we would probably be married
today. In 1976 girls in Barranquilla married the first boy they
kissed, mostly, because kissing seemed to go hand in hand with
getting pregnant. If I had stayed there, I would be the wife
and the mother of the children of a vice-minister with a bright
future, a role I was brought up to perform. But I am not wife
or mother, a reality that neither I nor anyone who knew me then,
would have predicted.
The invitation was tempting. Without hesitation I decided
not to go back home to New York that week as planned, but to
stay for Ana María's party.
I felt excitement at the thought of talking to Arturo again,
more than fifteen years later. He was a university student in
Bogotá when we first met, at a funeral, and I was a ninth
grader at the American school in Barranquilla, but whenever he
was home for holidays he would hurry over to see me. I have fond
memories of his visits. Because I had a boyfriend then, his visits
were a little illicit, but the truth was that I enjoyed spending
time with Arturo more than with José Luis, my novio oficial.
I would sit for hours in Arturo's car, parked out in the driveway,
and listen to him talk about his life in big, metropolitan Bogotá
where he shared an apartment with friends, about the classes
he took at the university and the books he read. But what interested
me most was when he talked to me about la politica.
José Luis didn't really talk to me about much, other
than telling me a million times every day that he loved me forever
and that I was his girlfriend and that I would one day be his
wife. When we went out he discussed soccer, cars, and the top
forty hits on Miami's Y-100 radio station while I sat next to
him in silence and he held my hand. José Luis liked telling
me what clothes to wear and when to be home. If he called and
I was not there, he became impossibly possessive-"Where
were you? Who were you there with? Who did you talk to? "
One evening he drove away without me because he disapproved of
what I was wearing and I refused to change. When I showed up
at the party without him, I was told by his friends that I was
being disrespectful and that I had better return home immediately.
My girlfriends agreed I should not stay at the party. If he had
wanted me to change, they added, why was I making such a big
deal? It only meant that he was serious about me, that he was
really in love with me. I had felt humiliated and angered by
José Luis's request. They thought it was romantic.
José Luis and I made up after that fight, but he continued
to ask me to change. My skirts were getting shorter and my tops
skimpier. I had learned early that it was through being beautiful
and seductive that I would be noticed. Every father's dream was
that his daughter would grow up to be a Miss Colombia. I was
not tall enough to be told that I would be Señorita Colombia,
and my face did not have the delicate features of a statuette
of the Virgen María. But plenty had shown interest in
the forming curves of mi cuerpo and the roundness of mis tetas
as I went from child to señorita and I was allowed to
wear high heals and stay till midnight at the parties at El Country
Club. I went all out. At fifteen I looked like a brown-skinned
Lolita with glossy, pouting lips, tight jeans, and six-inch heels.
I transformed my mother's scarves into strapless bandeaux which
I tied across my chest, and I wore bathing suits that were tinier
than the ones most of my friends wore. For a costume party, Mercedes,
Claudia and I wore Playboybonny outfits.
To José Luis's complaints I soon had to add my mother's,
my sisterts, my grandmotherts. My mother yelled at me because
my shorts were too short. To make a point of how small my green
and purple bathing suit was, my sister tried it on her doll.
I am a little over five two, but my body was definitely more
formed than the doll's. I knew that in my swimsuits my breasts
looked like Farrah Fawcett's in the poster all the boys liked,
and I liked the way my buttocks sneaked out of my cutoffs like
slivers of crescent moons. But it was confusing to be reprimanded
for the one thing that I had been hearing a girl should most
want to be.
The way I looked reflected little about the way I acted.
My mother told me I looked like a putica, a little slut, every
time I wore those cutoffs. But I knew putas were the girls who
slept around, and I had barely been kissed. I had, sort of, kissed
José Luis and Arturo, but I really had not encouraged
it. The first time José Luis kissed me, I gagged. It felt
like such an intrusion. But he pressed me so much that I would
let him, just to get it over with. I assumed I had to-he was
my boyfriend. When he did, I closed my eyes tight, opened my
lips, and waited as he slid his toogue inside my mouth. It felt
just like when the doctor checked my throat with a wooden stick,
telling me to open wide and say aaaahhhh.
I preferred kissing Arturo. Somehow it felt less forced.
Plus, Arturo was the first person who had shown any interest
in what I had to say. One day he tried to kiss me and I did not
want to. He did not press for my kiss, as my boyfriend did, but
he got angry, and although I didn't mean to make him angry, it
was not dear to me why it was necessary to kiss when talking
felt better-more satisfying and somehow more intimate.
I never discussed how it felt to kiss Arturo or José
Luis with anybody, not even with my best friend, although I knew
Eugenia and Carlos also kissed. Carlos was one of José
Luis's close friends and sometimes on Friday nights the four
of us would drive around the thirty blocks of upscale Barranquilla
that circumscribed our small world, listening to Barry White
and Julio Iglesias. José Luis drove and I sat next to
him changing the tapes. Eugenia and Carlos kissed in the backseat.
After a while, Carlos drove while we sat in the back and kissed.
Eugenia tells me now that she loved to kiss Carlos but Carlos,
unlike José Luis, was not her novio and she was heartbroken
when, at the end of that year, he had to get married. Vicky,
his real novia, was pregnant.
Three, sometimes four times a night the four of us would
drive past El Gusano, Barranquilla's hottest discotheque. It
was on the Boulevard del Prado, the city's main drag where prostitutes
and men with fully developed breasts, coiffed hair, and heals
strolled up and down the avenue or leaned against the dry palm
trees. We all knew about the prostitutes, but I did not know
that the transvestites wore so much gold lamé to attract
customers-other men who paid to have sex with them.
Every time we drove by the nightclub, which was owned by
José Luis's friend, whoever was at the wheel would honk
at the club's doorman. Sometimes José Luis and Carlos
parked the car and walked inside-to buy cigarettes, they said-while
Eugenia and I stayed in the car. José Luis would always
bring back lemonade and Chiclets for me. Shortly before midflight
he drove by for the last time, signaling to the doorman that
they would be back. Eugenia and I would be driven home and dropped
off in time for our midnight curfews. They would head back to
The Worm. Whenever I asked to be taken there José Luis
insisted it was not a place where I-a good girl-could go.
Being with Arturo was different. When he called, I felt that
instead of policing my days he actually wanted to talk with me.
When he was with me, I don't think he noticed much what I wore.
I am pretty sure he too went to The Worm, but when he was with
me he was never in a hurry to meet up with his friends. In fact,
sometimes he stood them up and stayed with me longer. We would
talk and kiss until very late, way past my curfew. I liked the
fact that Arturo did not respect my father's rules. José
Luis by contrast felt like the executioner, one of many reasons
that made him the perfect boyfriend in my parents' eyes. My friends
also found him pretty enviable. He visited and phoned daily and
showered me with gifts-delicate gold bracelets, tiny heart-shaped
diamonds, and tons of Toblerone.
Arturo gave me a book. From Bogotá he brought me Machiavellits
The Prince. "I'm happy," he announced, "I found
it with a prologue by Napoleon. " When he handed it to me,
he called me muñeca and said, "Here, start learning
something about the world." I never really read it then,
but I loved opening it to the page where he had written with
his gold Cross pen: "This, undoubtedly a maíor dassic
about Politics, leads us inevitably to think that la Vida y la
Politica are a long Machiavellian comedy of desires, aspirations,
successes, and failures where the human soul will find enough
elements to develop its feelings." Arturo's words, like
the allegory of the fox and the state, made little sense to me
then, but I liked the feeling owning that book gave me. I liked
his handwriting, which seemed so grown-up to me. The way he signed
his name, pressing hard on the paper, reminded me of my father's
formal script. They were signatures that emanated self-confidence,
authority, and importance. They belonged to men, about whom I
was consumed with curiosity. What they did, how they talked seemed
much more alive than what the women did.
I felt I owned knowledge and shared some of that self-assurance
every time I held the thin paperback edition I kept, for years,
inside the drawer of my pink night table. Unlike José
Luis's tokens of love, which to me felt like things that I should
want but actually didn't, Arturo's book made me feel special,
like he was talking with me, not making me. At night, after my
sister had gone to sleep, I opened it, turned pages without reading
them, read sentences without understanding them, wondering, after
turning out the lights, what he meant every time he talked about
the importance of politics. Later on, however, I would understand
that the politics Arturo talked about-like Machiavelli, my boyfriend,
my father, and for that matter any man I came into contact with-
was a world that I could not enter for one simple reason. I was
not a man.
I have always lived among men who were born to talk politica,
to do politica, even to rule. Because I was curious, I was allowed
an occasional taste of their exclusive world. I was allowed to
dance around them, to ask a few questions, to dabble with a few
opinions, but if I probed further I was sent rapidly back to
my place. I was to be next to them as a daughter, eventually
as a potential wife, but not on a par with them, not as an equal.
I was born into a class where the men rise to be leaders, and
I was shown early on that I was not to become one. My place as
a woman was as a follower, and how presumptuous of me to think
otherwise. Both men and women knew that this inequality was sanctioned
and enforced by rule, customary law, culture, religion, tradition,
and history. Machismo, or whatever one calls it, is a rigid system
that both men and women promulgate. "It is not attractive
to be so opinionated," a boyfriend's mother once told me
as a piece of complicit feminine advice.
Men and women today roll their eyes at me, subtly edge away,
or change the topic of conversation whenever mention is made
of this book. Many like to argue that things are different and
that I do not know it because I am out of touch with my culture.
Friends will remind me that I haven't really lived in Latin America,
that I left twenty years ago. Things have changed, they say.
In some ways, I know, they have. Women now do not need their
hasbands' permission to work outside the home or open a bank
account. Today, women make up half of the labor force. I am also
aware that in Colombia, for example, half the university graduates
are women. I even recognize there has been some room in politics.
Latin women have served as attorney general, prime minister,
vice president, even as president. In 1997, twenty-three women
served as ministers, two as presidents of Congress. Ecuador and
Costa Rica have women as vice presidents. Women are aspiring
to the presidencies of Colombia, Venezuela, and Honduras. Nonetheless,
I am not satisfied. Women have entered the work force as secretaries,
bank tellers, even officers and a few highranking executives,
but the reality is that less than one percent are decision makers
and most women work as domestic servants or maquila operators
receiving exploitative wages and no health benefits. Regardless
of the hype about the number of women in government, they only
occupy about twelve percent of the legislative seats. It is men
who are still making the rules.
Spaces open up for women if they enter public life ready
to follow men's roles. When, in 1996, Ecuadoreans elected a woman
as vice president, Rosalia Arteaga was able to name three women
to the cabinet. Guadalupe León, known as a social researcher
working on gender issues, was named minister of labor, the first
woman to hold the post. A few days before she was sworn in, she
attended a dinner given by the president to introduce his new
cabinet. She had heard through a friend, mule, also a member
of the new government, that some members were nervous about her
nomination. He called early the next morning to congratulate
her. Everyone-he reiterated, everyone-was commenting on how impressed
they had all been with her, how professional she had seemed..
She was startled. "But," she told her friend. "I
didn't utter a word all night."
"That's exactly right."
Few women challenge the more-than-five-hundred-year-old
system that makes men the executors of our lives: as our fathers,
as our husbands, as our spiritual and secular leaders, as our
governors. In Barranquilla, I grew up guided by big and small
signals that would prompt me to follow this rule unquestioningly.
I was educated to follow God and men, programmed to think of
myself as an obedient daughter until the day I was handed to
a husband, someone con un apellido, a member of El Country, a
photocopy of my father. My future was predetermined by everyone
around me. I was to be the wife of a man like José Luis
or Arturo.
But a few months after I turned fifteen, my parents decided
to send me away to school, and I left behind the path that had
been traced for me the day I was carried home from the hospital
with my tiny earlobes pierced, wearing pink.I finished high school
in the United States, where I stayed on for college. Ever since,
I have been a rootless contradiction: too impetuous, emotional,
and erratic for New York; too independent for Barranquilla where
una mujer que vive sola really means she is loose.
When the counselor at the Academy of the Sacred Heart called
me into her office to talk to me about college plans, I had none.
I had never thought that, like Arturo, I could go to college.
Unlike my classmates who had been practicing for their SATs for
years, all I had heard about my future was about el dia que te
cases. It was marriage, not college, that would hand me a life.
Then suddenly, at that formative age, the heavy rules I had known,
and had always had a hard time following, were breached. I was
able to see, hear, experience differently-so much so that today,
almost twenty years later, it is still hard for me to go back
to Colombia and feel comfortable being the woman I have become.
I looked at the invitation again. My friend Ana María's
name had changed. Joined by the seemingly insignificant but so
meaningful two-letter word de, "of," she had added
her husband's surname after hers. Though I had been surrounded
by women whose names included this possessive preposition-my
mother, my grandmothers, their mothers, my teachers, my aunts
all use it-I was always struck on seeing it added to any woman's
name. But I was especially jarred when I saw it next to the names
of my childhood friends-surprised that none of them minded bocoming
in such a public and formal way a man's belonging.
It would be easier to understand if the de were something
I saw only among those girlfriends who never left Barranquilla
to study abroad, who never lived on their own, who went from
their twin beds to their marital beds. Julieta, who married a
distant relative of mine when she was, at the most, seventeen,
was among the brightest in her class, but she stopped studying
the day she got married-pregnant, of course. She moved in with
her husband's parents while he finished medical school and she
became a wife and mother who stayed home. During my confusing
first week as a freshman at the University of Michigan, I received
a letter from Julieta which didn't help clarify my thoughts.
I still remember feeling a tinge of envy when I saw the return
address on the tiny envelope filled with teddy bears and balloons
in which she announced the birth of her son. While I was struggling
with sharing a small room with Jodi, my strange roommate who
liked to be called Jazz and whose eyes were as open as Marty
Feldman's, Julieta shared her bed with a man who had given her
a name- Julieta S. de Gutiérrez-the passport to enter
a real life. At her age, she could not vote, yet she belonged
to a man and that made her into a grown-up. As I reread her letter,
today, I realize it is the note of a child:
¡Hola Silvana!
How are you? q'tal el cole . . . The baby is born, he is
pretty, blond, chubby and blue-eyed. Everyone is crazy about
him. My dad is all excited because he looks like him.
Can you imagine-me, a mom. I myself can hardly believe it.
Write to me, kisses
Juli
But Ana María, like me, had been exposed to more:
boarding school in New York City, college on the East Coast,
frequent trips to Europe. After graduating from college in Virginia,
she returned to Bogotá and started working for her father,
the president of one of Colombia's largest engineering firms.
Ana María became her father's right hand, a position that
put her in touch with the country's lines of power. She was soon
working around the clock, hopping on a helicopter to visit a
bridge in construction or negotiating a contract for a new road
for the government. At a meeting at the Ministry of Public Works
she met the undersecretary who less than a year later became
her husband.
Ana María married with all the pomp that was expected.
The cheeses were imported from Curaçao. The carrots were
flown in from Miami. She was the first one of my friends who
did not have to marry in a hurry-she was not pregnant. She also
continued to work and waited more than a year to have her first
child. To my mother, she is admirable. She is an ejecutiva, my
mother tells me, trumpeting her success loud enough for me to
feel uncomfortable, especially when she gets to the part about
how she is also a wonderful wife, a great hostess, and a devoted
mother. But whenever I hear the praises, I cannot stop myself
from thinking that she, too, signs her name as a possession.
I tell myself that maybe Ana María doesn't see it that
way. But how can calling yourself and signing your name Señora
de-Mrs. of-not give you a sense of being owned? What is her need
for doing so? I've always wondered.
When Julieta and Ana María married-Julieta in 1978
and Ana María in 1982-they had, by law, to sign their
names thus, to be identified as the possession of a man. In Ecuador,
the civil code still requires the "de," and in Venezuela,
not using it was considered by the law a "grave insult"
and was grounds for divorce. Until recently, men had patriarchal
authority, patria potestad, over all decisions involving a couple
and their children. Under Latin American law, which is based
on the Napoleonic code, men are the sole heads of the marital
unit because women, like children and the retarded, are seen
by the state as creatures incapable of full development and therefore
in need of protection, protection provided by men-fathers, brothers,
husbands. The management of the family is in the husband's hands.
Without his consent, the wife could not accept or relinquish
an inheritance, act as a guardian, or exercise a profession.
By taking on the names of their husbands, my friends had acquiesced
in such imprisonment.
Latin America's constitutions have been rewritten since
then. There is legal recognition of the individuality and equality
of women. As of 1988, Colombian women do not have to use the
infamous two-letter word. But customs, which are followed more
strict, than law, have yet to catch up. Most women in Latin America
still use the de attached to their names. I am surprised not
only to see my friends using it but to see it attached to the
names of women who are working on women's issues. A woman who
considere herself a feminist was asked why she used it. She was
quick and point out that she was married to a very good man.
Does that then make it okay?
And still there are laws that perpetuate inequality. In Bolivia,
a married woman cannot buy property without the consent of the
husband, and, as in Guatemala, he can prohibit her from takin
certain jobs. Children born out of wedlock are automatically
in the custody of the "supposed" father. In Peru, women
are not allowed to work the night shift, or to work in mining,
in construction, or in anything that will jeopardize their health
or their "good manners." Young boys swarm the streets
of Lima shining shoes, selling newspapers, flowers, candy, or
lottery tickets. Girls cannot. In Panama, if a married woman
wants to open her own business, she needs to present an authorizing
letter from her husband to the ministry of commerce in order
to get an operating license. In Ecuador, a divorced woman who
wants to remarry needs a certificate that states that she is
not pregnant. In Chile, there is no divorce.
I had been in Colombia only a few days when the invitation
to Ana María's reception arrived. Being back was always
tense. I feel my life stops when I'm in Colombia and I'm thrown
into the whirlwind of the mundane and now foreign concerns of
others. My family's and my friends' lives-their meals, their
laundry, their ringing phones, their cocktail parties, even the
way they express themselves-do not belong to me. A friend tells
me she could not visit her brother in Miami because her husband
"didn't let me go" and a friend of my sister's, a working
woman, says that she cannot go away on a work trip because her
husband "does not allow me to spend a night out of the house."
Words like this leave me feeling as if I've landed, not in my
childhood home, but on Mars. This regimented world where every
day, after lunch, the men go to work and the women stay behind-sitting
at the table, smoking a cigarette-has always felt uncomfortable.
I have sat through many meals, I have smoked many cigarettes,
yet I've been unable to play the part of "woman" the
way they play it. If I were married to Arturo, as I dreamt of
all those years ago when he gave me The Prince, how would I feel
asking for his permission to write this book or to go on a trip?
When I told Arturo I was leaving for the United States, he
told me that if he were my father, he would never send his daughter
to the States. Girls are different there, he said. If I went,
I would get a bad reputation. My mother's friends told her the
same. She tried to explain I was going to an all-girl Catholtic
school, the prestigious Sacred Heart where all the Kennedy girls
go, but it was impossible to get them to change their image of
the United States where girls are libertinas, a disparaging word
freely used to describe girls who have sex with their boyfriends.
My mother talked to me before I left. Don't feel any pressure
to be like them, she kept telling me as my departure grew closer.
Do not forget, she said, the principles you have learned in your
home. Completely sincere in my promise, I reassured her that
I wouldn't.
As she had warned me, my new classmates seemed to fit the
bill of libertines. In 1978 the sexual revolution had even reached
the halls of the Academy of the Sacred Heart. My American friends
not only had sex with their boyfriends but they actually planned
for it. Laura had her boyfriend Tim stay for the weekend whenever
her parents went away.
Situations like this shocked me at first and, when alone,
I would hold tight to Arturo's words and my mother's advice.
Barranquilla's mores were so deeply ingrained, so hard to root
out, that it was only during my junior year in college that
I was finally ready to allow a boyfriend into my bed. When Laura
found out that my boyfriend was spending the night, she made
sure she talked to me about birth control-and, oh boy, was I
not open to her concern. Three years after my arrival in the
United States, I was living on my own, yet I had never spoken
to anyone about sex. Laura's questioning offended me-did she
think I was one of them? How could I tell her we weren't really
doing "it," that we just kissed and slept, that if
she walked with me past the lions guarding the steps of the graduate
library, she could hear them roar. College lore had it that the
imposing statues knew when a virgin passed by-but no one had
heard their call since 1868.
What would have happened to me if I had not left when I did?
Those that stayed-Eugenia, Julieta, many others-were pregnant
before finishing high school and, most probably, before ever
having a discussion about sex, let alone one about birth control.
While girls in Barranquilla kissed and got pregnant, girls in
the U.S. talked about sleeping with their boyfriends and were
likely to be on the pill or to know how to use a diaphragm. And
I, at the time, only thought of my new classmates as being a
bad influence on me, not as contributing to my becoming responsible
about my sexuality.
Because I left, I did not have to marry the first boy I kissed.
My friends did and today they have children in their teens. When
I go back, my outspoken aunts and my friends ask with amusement
and with shock, "And so who are you with now?" I have
become the gringa libertina they predicted. If someone asked
my parents today for advice on whether to send their daughters
to study abroad, they, I think, would agree with Arturo. I'm
sure glad they sent me, though.
I heard my mother's voice through the kitchen entrance. She
was telling the cook what to prepare for dinner as I walked in
with Ana María's invitation.
"I think I'll stay for this," I said, handing her
the envelope.
"It's a great idea," she said. "You'll get
to see all your old friends."
"That's what I thought."
When my father was my age, he had a wife and three kids,
sat on a different board of directors every day of the week,
presided over Barranquilla's Chamber of Commerce, and worked
closely with the Colombian president. Every Sunday we went to
Mass, usually at six in the evening at the Inmaculada, where
the lulling sound of the breeze against the coconut palms entered
the open windows and rocked me into a doze. I would not really
understand, or listen to, what the priest was saying; unlike
the good feeling I got from Arturo's book, Mass was not something
that interested or intrigued me. Sitting on a loog pew, standing,
and kneeling repeating over and over a litany of words that sounded
as if something very important and very bad had been our fault
seemed incomprehensible and unfair. What was it that was por
mi culpa, por mi culpa, por mi propia culpa? My eyelids often
felt very, very heavy as I pondered, as Padre Becerra spoke,
what we had done that required repentance with such guilt and
remorse. I couldn't think of anything I had done. Did calling
my sister fat or locking myself in the bathroom to read Henry
Miller qualify?
At eight I had my First Communion, which meant I would be
a sinner if I didn't attend Mass with my parents every Sunday
at dusk. By then, I also knew the prayers and every one of the
priest's lines by heart and the only part I looked forward to
was when the priest would lift his hands and bid us offer each
other the sign of peace. People hugged their neighbors, kissed
their families, waved and winked to their friends. Iri Barranquilla
darse la paz took forever. But that was not enough to make me
want to go back every Sunday. Trying to stay home to study for
an invented test or complaining of a sudden stomachache never
worked. I would hear how I should have done my homework before
church and how going to church was as important as finishing
schoolwork, especially after having had my First Communion. Faking
a stomachache was scarier. The religion teacher had told us God
knew everything, including, I assumed, if I had a real stomachache.
Communion, I was told, meant I was receiving the body of
Christ. It was frightening and hard to imagine how it was possible
that the same thin, long-haired, bearded man on the cross next
to my grandmother's bed was going to be entering my body in the
form of a thin and bland full moon, but when I asked I was told,
sternly this time, that these were the mysteries of God and His
Church. My front teeth were not yet fulIy out when, dressed like
a child bride, I received the body of Christ for the first time.
My long white dress came from Spain, where cloistered nuns had
spent months embroidering it. I wore a veil with a train and
I wanted to wear the ring with the yellow heart that I had received
at a birthday party but my mother said no, the day was too special
for a plastic ring. I woke up very early that moroing, before
my mother did, to comb my hair and practice saying amen in front
of the mirror.
I never stopped being nervous whenever it was my turn for
the priest to place the white wafer on my tongue. The religion
teacher and my grandmother had told me to pray and think about
Christ the moment we felt His body in our mouth. But all I could
think of was how the tasteless wafer was sticking to the roof
of my mouth and how I had been instructed not to chew but to
suck. Sucking only made it stick more, and regardless of how
hard I pressed my tongue to my palate, it stayed stuck. Mass
would soon be over but the taste of the body of Christ remained.
As we walked out, my parents always ran into friends, married
couples with children, families that looked like ours. The parents
would exchange greetings, stop and chat under the almond tree
in need of rain. The men-a senator, the city's governor, the
mayor of the moment, the movers and shakers-gathered in a circle.
The wives stood in silence or talked with each other outside
the circle. They all looked well-dressed and poised but my mother
was always the prettiest. While the other children ran back and
forth from the parked cars to their parents' side, I would just
stand by my father and listen to the men's conversation, which
always started with the same line-"Ajá y que hay
de nuevo en la politica. "
My father, like Arturo, like all men I knew, talked incessantly
about politics. At family gatherings, my grandfather and uncles
and father sat around discussing the Conservative Party while
the women sat in silence or made sure their husbands didn't need
a new drink. During election time my father was always busy campaigning
and fund-raising for his party. He was proud of the Christmas
card he received every year from Alvaro Gómez Hurtado,
the Party's leader, thanking him for all he had done.
The only time I saw my mother participate in politics was
when, right before elections, the women, the wives of the politicos,
would meet at one of their homes and help stuff envelopes with
voting sheets. On election day they wore T-shirts stamped with
their hnsband's faces and handed out envelopes at the voting
stations. The servants in our homes were each handed one, and
their patrones would tell them that they wanted them to vote
for the Conservative or the Liberal candidates. It was hard to
escape voting for the candidate of their choice, or to keep your
vote private. Up until recently, the voterts index finger was
submerged in blue ink if the vote was cast Conservative, in red
if it had been Liberal. (This could have serious consequences.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Conservatives and Liberals staged
one of the most violent witchhunts in history-shooting, stabbing,
burning each other's property, and leaving more than 250,000
Colombians dead.) Upper-class Colombians like to marry within
their class and within their party, and the man of the house
expects his sons, daughters, wives, and servants to vote with
him.
This is not unusual. During Mexico's 1994 elections, women
complained that their husbands were taking away their voting
cards, preventing them from casting votes of their own. Machismo
transcends country and class borders. Chicano workers in California,
striking at a cannery in Watsonville, received little support
from their compañeros, who preferred them to be at home
cooking, not demanding better salaries. Many women were forbidden
outright to stand on the picket line.
I was convinced Arturo was different. He was even supportive
when I decided to go on to college. I am also sure that I chose
to major in Political Science because it was what sounded the
closest to what he talked to me about. I still carried around,
unread, the little book he had given me. Freshman year, he wrote
frequently. In his letters he sent strength and advice-"I
hope that when I see you, you will have many things to teach
me about that beautiful profession you chose." To keep me
up to date with his successes, he sent all the newspaper stories
that were being written about him. Right out of school, he was
already some kind of public person. He had been named director
for health services, and also selected as Ejecutivo del Año,
as my father had been at his age. I was proud of Arturo's accomplishments,
but what I really liked was that he shared them with me while
calling me his muñeca. "When you return I will show
you the books I read about politics. They are really excellent
and they really deserve my hours of dedication. You will see."
In an effort to bring him together with what I was reading-
Locke, Hobbes, Marx, Rousseau, an English edition of The Prince,
flyers announcing demonstrations on campus, U.S. hands off EI
Salvador, Disinvest in South Africa-I kept his letters mixed
with the mess on my desk. I anxiously anticipated our reunion
in which I too would show him my books, in which I would kiss
him fiercely before he would kiss me, in which I would no looger
simply sit in admiration, listen, and ask questions but would
also tell him what I had learned about his politica.
Upon my return, I traveled to Monte Carmelo, my grandfather's
finca, an incongrous name in this case, for the "farm"
is bigger than some American national parks. Arturo's family's
finca is nearby and I knew he was there that week. I called him
and he promised to come over that evening. After a year of learning
politics from lefty, ex-draft-dodging professors, the place where
as a child I had milked its cows, swum its river, saddled its
horses became a microcosm of income disparity and exploitation.
When Arturo arrived I wanted him to be Che-he insisted on Machiavelli.
As I walked him to the gate and he said good-bye, I knew that
that would be the last time he would call me.
I would now see him at Ana María's party, I thought.
We could reminisce about our talks, even laugh at our youthful
intolerance. In Ann Arbor I had discovered liberation theology
and leftist politics, theories about the culture of imperialism,
CIA plots in Central America, sit-ins and demonstrations-the
staples of a college campus at the end of the 1970s. My student
days opened a Latin America that Arturo had maybe seen but had
refused to recognize. We were adults now, he a minister, I a
journalist. It would be fun, I thought as I passed my index finger
over his name in haut-relief on the invitation.
AQUI ME QUEDE
Seeing Arturo's name next to an important title was not surprising
to me. At an early age, young and privileged men like him are
seduced by politics, by prestige, and by power. Being a viceminister
in your early thirties is, I think, an act of arrogance, but
in a way this is an arrogance that is instilled in these men
the day they are born. It is pretty much par for the course.
Arturo is an upper-class man, in a world owned completely and
absolutely by them. As far as the hierarchy goes, he is at the
top. This is a world where some people-the rich, the white (or,
more accurately, the less mixed), the politicos, the industrialists,
landowners like Arturo's father, like my grandfather-have a lot,
and where many more people have very little. But regardless of
which side of the tracks you're born on, the rich or the poor,
the men who own the land or the men who work it, it is a world
where men have carte blanche in domination of their women. Just
as my grandfather expected my grandmother to vote Conservative,
our gardener expected his wife, our cook, to give him her salary.
As recently as 1995, a Panamanian husband sought to divorce his
wife because she did not cook him dinner or take his clothes
to the dry deaner. That she worked full-time was irrelevant in
his view. Those chores, he argued, fall under her obligations.
More dramatically, and regardless of the fact that in the
last two decades most constitutions have been rewritten, the
judicial system throughout Latin America will rarely convict
a man who kills his adulterous wife-men have a right to defend
their honor. In Panama, until 1991, for a man to be adulterous,
the relationship had to be scandalous and continuous. For a woman,
it took one slip. A rape victim in Peru was told by the judge
that, as she was not a virgin at the time, it did not really
matter that she was raped. Her rapist would be relieved of prison
if he offered to marry her. And as in thirteen other countries-Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic,
Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and Paraguay-a
rapist may go free if he marries his victim with her consent.
In Costa Rica, a rapist may go free even if he marries the raped
woman without her consent.
In Argentina, last year, a cook accused of systematically
raping his eleven-year-old stepdaughter every time the girl's
mother-his wife-left for work was immediately released from prison
when he announced he would marry the girl. Under Article 132
of the Penal Code, his ten-year sentence would be repealed if
the marriage took place: " In the case of violation, rape,
kidnap or dishonest abuse of a single woman, the delinquent who
will marry the offended will be exempt of his sentence, if she
consents after she is restituted to her parents' home or to another
safe place."
The girl, who was pregnant, accepted the offer-with her mother's
consent-to marry her mother's husband, her rapist, so that the
newborn would have un papá.
The fascination I had felt listening to my father and to
Arturo discuss politics mutated into real concern after college.
I discovered that journalism would allow me to infiltrate their
separate dusters. And I would be better equipped to crawl inside
if I covered Latin America as the gringa they thought I was becoming.
As one, I could comment on and question the politica that once
I had felt they kept me out of for the simple reason that I was
not a man. While I lived in rented rooms in Managua and Mexico
and squatted in friends' homes in Panama stringing for newspapers
as a way to understand the politics that I had been surrounded
by and at the same time shunned from, back home José Luis,
Arturo and about a dozen more friends acted as patrician adults,
walking the halls of power in Bogotá, leading the lives
my father and their fathers led at their age. While I voted en
blanco as a form of protest, my brother was ready to vote Conservative.
But following, in this case, was an act of preserving their
selfinterest. The State in Colombia has always guarded the economic
interests of the country's patriarchal oligarchy-an elite that
still depends for its survival on a class-divided society and
on women being excluded from public life. When I become ohnoxiously
repetitive during family dinners about the fact that Bogotá's
Jockey Clab will not admit women as members, a friend, in jest,
provides me with the clearest answer. "If we do," he
says, "what will we have left?"
In Colombia-and, in Latin America from Mexico all the way
down to Argentina-just as landowners are not eager to divide
up their huge parcels of uncultivated land to the campesinos
who live on it and work it, men are not ready to see women as
free participants in the country's civil society. They are more
than happy to continue to see women as wives, mothers, virgins,
or whores, but not as engineers, journalists, lawyers, surgeons,
or statesmen. We are still encouraged to want to be beauty queens
and soapopera heroines, beautiful and virginal. The ones who
kiss with their mouths closed are always rewarded with the successful
and handsome husbands.
I feel the eyes rolling again, of men and women who will
accuse me of exaggerating. Look at how many women in Colombia
are in altos cargos. Great! I say. Before Madeleine Albright
was named secretary of state, Colombia named a woman minister
of foreign affairs. True! And women all the way from Argentina
to Mexico have been appointed to high governmental office. I
know about those twenty-three ministerial posts, three vice presidencies,
two presidents of Coogress. But let me point something out. Men,
knowing that it is politically necessary to name a few token
women, do it with a certain discretion. They feel fine relinquishing
the ministries of education, tourism, culture, not to mention
family and women's affairs. As a matter of fact, of the twentythree
ministers, only three are in different ministries. In Colombia
and Mexico, María Emma Mejía and Rosario Green
are foreign ministers, and in Chile, Soledad Alvear heads the
Justice Department.
But comments like the one I heard in Ecuador are more eloquent
than the actual appointments about how men in power see the appointment
of women. "It's really nice to have ladies in the meeting
of Congress," the first secretary of governmenr said, referring
to the possible appointment of a woman to the Ministry of Tourism.
"I would like it very much if Soledad Diab were made responsible
for the Ministry of Tourism, not only because she is a beautiful
woman but also because she knows about the field." Is it
a coincidence that Irene Saez, the woman running for president
of Venezuela is a former Miss Universe?
Venezuelan elections are scheduled for December 1998 and
the thirty-six-year-old former Miss Universe appears to be a
serious contender despite her limited political experience. She
has served as mayor of Chacao, the richest part of Caracas, where
she has started early morning tai-chi classes for the elderly,
two orchestras, and a school of ballet. She has also outlawed
"passionate" kissing in public. But as Agustín
Blanco, a professor of history at the Catholic University of
Venezuela, told the New York Times, "what people vote for
is the image of a beautiful woman not a woman who is judged on
her intelligence, her capacity and accomplishment."
Like my friends, like their friends, my parents married young.
My father was twenty-two. My mother was eighteen. She went to
a convent school, where she sFowered wearing a thin white role
over her body. She left before finishing to marry him, to be
de mi papá, to go with him to New York while he finished
a master's degree in economics. Three months after their marriage,
she was pregnant with me.
I saw a picture taken in the midst of a Syracuse winter.
She stands next to him, snow up to her ankles in a setting that
for her must have felt like the moon. She had never felt cold
or spoken English. Yet in her face I can sense that she feels
protected by him on this new planet. Despite his young age, my
father radiates power through the photograph. He looks like a
bull ready to take on any matador, and she looks proud to be
married to him, as if she needs nothing more in life.
My parents keep a picture of my brother on his graduation
day from Culver Military Academy in a silver frame in the family
study upstairs. Like my sister and me, and many of our friends,
he too was educated abroad. We were all being prepared to take
on the roles we were born to play in this Latin opera of feminine
submission and masculine power. My sister and I attended an allgirl
Catholic high school. Many of our girlfriends spent a year at
finishing schools in Switzerland learning French, how to set
a formal table and who painted the Mona Lisa. Instead, my brother
attended a military academy where many privileged Latin boys
his age-he had dassmates from Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador,
Panama-learn discipline. "Very important that he learns
discipline," says my father. What they learn, as far as
I am concerned, is how to continue thinking the world is theirs.
Flipping through my brother's yearbook, I ran across the quote
next to the photograph of the graduate from Guatemala: "I
want to be democratically elected as dictator of my country."
My brother was barely eighteen when he graduated with medals
across his chest. But there is already a look to him in that
photograph, regardless of his boyishness. He stares straight
at the camera, conveying that he is capable of smashing it if
something does not go his way. There is something similar about
those two photographs-the way my father stands next to my mother,
and the way my brother stands next to the school's gate, with
their feet apart and their hands clasped in front-that sends
the message that they are confident of their place in their world
of power. A power that, in Latin America, is determined by their
sex.
I walked into Ana María's grand apartment with my
parents. I was nervous and excited, but the way I looked made
it easier to stride into the world of white wine and whisky,
where every man stood like my brother, stared like my father,
and spoke like them both. My mother had spent the last few days
maneuvering to make sure I wore something appropriate, so she
was delighted. She really suffered every time I came back to
visit and wore only blue jeans. The day I told her I would stay
for the party, she went through my duffel bag and pulled out
a crumpled black taffeta skirt.
"This needs a blouse," she said, lifting it up
and heading to her bedroom to call Doña Berta, one of
Bogotá's fanciest dressmakers. She pleaded with Doña
Berta, who was saying it was impossible to have anything ready
on such short notice. She was the busy couturiere of beauty queens
and society ladies, and to make a quasi-glitzy blouse for me
was not as interesting as the important wedding gowns and the
long beaded evening dresses she was used to designing. But my
mother, with her usual charm, convinced her. This was urgent.
As I scoured the room for Arturo, I was glad of my mother's
insistence. I liked the feel of the black bodice that Berta had
made for me. It was long-sleeved, with a round, low neckline,
and it was sprinkled with little rhinestones. I looked around
the apartment. It was hard for me to grasp that it belonged to
someone I once shared teenage secrets with. The dark red damask
on the decent replicas of French fauteuils, the perfectly framed
scenes of English foxhunts hanging from the walls, and their
three-year-old blond boy dressed in his best sailor suit all
seemed too incongruous to have any relation to my life. I was
a penniless cub reporter traveling like a gypsy from war-torn
Nicaragua and polluted Mexico to sensual Riode Janeiro and eerie
Paraguay writing about military coups, drag trafficking, political
corruption, and the transmission of AIDS in Latin America. This
was the home of two people who were traditional, and comfortable
with the way things were, who didn't question but followed, I
thought. What had happened to me?
Nonetheless, there was a certain familiarity to the scene.
Some time ago I learned how to act as a girl of privilege at
a cocktail party and, like riding a bicycle, I have not forgotten
it. My father held my forearm as he proudly steered me across
the room where men stood in small circles holding their drinks.
"Remember my daughter Silvana?" he interrupted.
"The one that's a journalist."
But since I am not as tall and striking as my sister, and
they could not ask me about my husband or my children, they smiled
politely and went back to their conversation about the price
of coffee.
My mother called me over to the sofas where the women sat
separated from the men. They welcomed me with careful kisses
on the cheek, making sure not to smudge their red Chanel lips,
and turned to my mother to tell her how happy she must be to
have me home, if only for a few days.
"You don't think you'll come back to Colombia?"
one of the ladies asked. " You like it there too much. "
"She's too independent for here," another one replied.
A uniformed waiter holding a silver tray handed me a whisky.
He was pouring water into my tall glass of Boheme crystal when
I spotted Arturo across the room. He, like every other man there,
was dressed in a gray suit. I walked over to where he was and
stood straight in front of him with a big smile on my face. He
stretched his right arm out, and offered me a handshake and an
uninterested greeting.
I remained next to him waiting for more.
"So, how many kids do you have now?" he asked politely,
in that intimate yet impersonal way people in politics practice
so well.
"What? "
"Tienes niños," he repeated. "¿No
tienes niños?"
My no was followed by my very own nervous laugh.
"Aren't you married? " he asked, surprised.
"Married. No. Me? No. To whom?" I thought he was
joking, that this was his way of breaking the ice.
He insisted. "I don't know, but I thought by now, by
now, you would be married. You must be, what, thirty. Right?
"
" That's right. I am thirty. "
"Well, I'm sure you do have a boyfriend." His voice
had burned paternalistic. "Boyfriend, right?"
"Yes, " I said, "boyfriend. "
"Whenever I ran into your cousin, the one who's married
to Felipe, I always ask about you. I thought you had married.
I do know you're living in New York, right?"
"Yeah, New York. Finishing my master's at Columbia,
international affairs, and I've been reporting from Central America.
As a matter of fact, oh, I was just in Mexico working, covering,
covering . . . Mexico." I said it all in one breath, a ramble
whose only purpose was to give some meaning to my life-a life
and work I enjoy, a life that I am proud of and that Arturo
with one question had just made all go up in smoke.
I was exculpating myself to Arturo for not being married,
for not having children, for my unwillingness to play the game
of a woman commanded by her need to be only mother and wife.
I felt Arturo's reproach of who I had become and, for the first
time, it hurt. Usually I disregard the comments of my mother
and my female friends who today have teenage children, when they
mention my unmarried status. But Arturo's implied criticism was
different. I felt he was putting me down for having followed
what he had once started.
I understood that what made me different was not that I was
interested in having a career. My mother was right. Many of the
women born into my privileged world had college degrees and careers.
It was more a question of attitude, a question of how I saw myself
vis-a-vis male authority. In this setting, my independence was
not attractive, my brashness was unbecoming. I had not followed
the advice Colombian women give other women: "A docile character
assures happiness in marriage and wil1 make a woman the ideal
partner for a man until death."
I guess it's un-decorous for vice-ministers to hug at cocktail
parties given in their honor, but that's what I really would
have liked. I wasn't there to congratulate him on his new job.
I was interested in the person who had, for the first time and
in many ways, opened my eyes to a different world from the one
that was slated for me. In a way I was there to thank him, to
show off a bit because I felt he could recognize his influence.
I also wanted to ask him how it felt being so close to power.
It must be titillating to feel you belong to the future of a
country. At the same time I wanted to take him aside and warn
him what happens in the game of politics played by those who
follow the rules of the little book he had given me almost twenty
years before. But Arturo turned his back and continued talking
to the other men in gray suits. (Six months later, in one of
the frequent cabinet shuffles, he was replaced.)
After my disappointing encounter, I turned to my mother and
her friends. The ladies with the Hermes scarves around their
necks and the big pearls clipped to their ears were always warm.
They always seemed to have a good time at cocktails sharing
their juicy chismes while lighting each others cigarettes with
their 24K gold Dunhills. Instead of financial transactions, government
contracts, and soccer scores, they chatted giddily, like girls
at a sleepover, about recent divorces and upcoming shopping sprees
in New York or Miami.
I arrived to hear a litany of praises for Ana María.
The reception was so elegant, her husband was sooooo nice, her
son so beautiful, she was so chic, nice, conversadora, inteligente.
The lady with the longest nails said that she had heard that
for Ernesto Mario- Ana María's father-she was indispensable
in the office.
Like my mother, they dream of having a daughter like Ana
María. She married into one of Colombia's more traditional
families con apellido importante. She is charming and social
as can be. They always sound surprised when they add that she
has time to be a mother, a wife, an important businesswoman.
She doesn't cease to amaze them: She cooks, goes on holidays,
gives and attends dinner parties. She might need some help with
her taste in clothes and antiques but, nonetheless, she is always
bien arreglada, nicely turned out. My mother 's praise for her
strikes me as a hint that I should reexamine the way I live.
Grow up, she tells me constantly. But what she really means
is be a woman-like her, like her friends the charming Chanel
ladies, like Ana María.
I gave up the life of a Latin princess when I decided to
stay in New York. I traded a big house for four hundred square
feet I call home. Instead of having breakfast served to me in
bed on a tray I buy coffee at the corner Greek deli. I do not
travel in a chauffeured car. My nails are short; my long hair
is usually in need of a trim. I do not visit the beauty salon
as often as they do. When I have friends over for dinner, I don't
rely on several servants to make the soufflé rise and
I don't look like I just stepped out of a Saks Fifth Avenue catalog.
I do not have a husband who has power lunches, or wants one to
use his last name-the one that appears on the gold American
Express card that would allow me to go shopping in Miami.
Unlike the women who raised me and those who grew up with
me, I've always lacked faith that those "things" that
I so much should want would be able to protect me. I've never
felt comfortable with taking the steps necessary to have the
life I was raised to have. I've wondered many times if, in reality,
this is what I truly want and I'm rejecting it because it is
what I was told I would have and I don't have it. But it is impossible
for me, today, to walk into the life I was born into and not
feel the consequences of those shopping trips. I cannot enjoy
a lunch with the ladies, un almuerzo de señoras, without
thinking that while we are being served a sumptuous meal
by servants in aproned uniforms, men, their husbands, are deciding
the economic future of our country. While we eat at a table
set with Christofle silverware on starched manteles, they are
passing laws that will affect us directly. Unless more than 9.4
percent of the legislative seats of the Colombian Congress are
filled by women, by women who will change the laws, rape will
still be consídered a crime against the state, not against
an individual. Abortíon will still be punished with prison
while thousands of women will continue to die from them.
It became especially hard to sit still for these five-hour
lunches after my visit to the Hispanic AIDS Foram in Jackson
Heights, Queens, in 1991.
I was there to see its director, who would explain to me
the pattern of transmission of AIDS in the Latino community
in New York. Miguelina Maldonado swiveled her chair to grab
a black plastic folder with the seal of the City of New York.
She opened the report and, out loud, went down the list of categories
marked as high risk: homosexuals, MSMs, IVDUs, and blood transfusions.
I knew IVDU stood for intravenous drug user but I had to ask
Maldonado what MSM meant.
"Oh, you know, m'ija. M-S-M," she said in a strong
Puerto Rican accent, "stands for men who have sex with other
men."
"Men who have sex with men? "
"Ahhmm."
"Wouldn't they be listed under homosexual transmission?
"
She shook her head no and smirked, satisfied she was one
up on rne, another Latina.
"Bisexual?" I tried again.
" No. Simply men who happen to have sex with men. They
are neither homosexual nor bisexual."
"Oh, of course," I said.
Of course.
Being a Latin American woman, as soon as I heard those words
I knew what she was talking about. All the jokes and the comments
came back: he is such a macho, he tucked another man; marica
es el que lo da, faggot is the one who takes it. Stuff I had
overheard in the background of boys' conversations all of a
sudden became institutionalized, percentages in a study about
AIDS. Miguelina and I had started speaking about AIDS and men
having sex with other men in the sterilized language of a graduate
student and the director of a state-funded social agency. After
my second cup of coffee we shed the formalities. I was startled.
We agreed that in Latin American culture, two men can have sex,
and one of them-the active partner-would never think he has
had homosexual sex. We talked for hours trying to come up with
some kind of baroque explanation-a mixture of manhood, homophobia,
and religious influence that could bring our men to the point
of persuading themselves that two men can have sex without
it being a homosexual act. But what was really disturbing for
us was what this sexual behavior meant for women, partners
of men who have sex with other men, with AIDS in the picture.
"In this group, she said, "the use of condoms is lower
than any other group."
Memories of my youth in Barranquilla sprang up-the car rides
on Friday nights, the transvestites walking down the rich boulevard
where I grew up, the conversations among men-even boys my age-who
referred to men as either machos or maricas, sissies, faggots,
el que lo da. Being called a girl was as much of an insult. I
remembered my motherts suggestions about what it meant to
be a girl, about saving myself for the day I got married, how
she I shouldn't wear those shorts that made me look like a slut.
I thought of Mrs. Gaspari, the religion teacher, who kept saying
that God punishes those girls who look at their bodies naked
and I was sure she had said it looking straight at me and I had
thought oh my God, she knows, He told her. I also thought about
Julieta, Ana María, Lali, Mercedes, Eugenia, my cousin
Rosanna-pretty girls who became mothers without ever beirig anything
other than pampered daughters living by the codes of our strong
fathers. We had strict curfews, we weren't allowed to go to El
Gusano, and we were told only bad girls did. When we had boyfriends,
they added their own authoritarian rules to those of our fathers:
no talking to other boys, no short skirts or small swimsuits,
and if there was kissing and touching it was never talked about.
The boys respected our imposed curfews, dropping us off at midnight,
eager to meet with their friends at El Gusano and, sometimes,
at bordellos. It was right there sitting in Queens looking at
the number of women being infected with AIDS by their husbands
that I realized how dangerous the connection between our sexual
culture and the Catholic Church and AIDS was, not only for my
friends but for all Latin American women.
I left Maldonado's offfice with the statistics and with my
heart pounding. If AIDS is seen as something only gays get, but
men are having sex with other men without ever considering their
act as a homosexual one but just as something that they occasionally
do, where does that leave their women? Girlfriends who have been
raised to think of their sexuality as sinful and unmentionable,
and wives who have sex when they are ordered to?
I spent the following six months traveling around South America
interviewing epidemiologists, sociologists, gay activists, transvestites,
prostitutes, wives. My fear was confirmed when I read a study
by the Colombian epidemiologist Dr. Juan Eduardo Céspedes.
A housewife in Latin America, asserted Dr. Céspedes, is
at higher risk of contracting AIDS than a prostitute.
" Why? "
"The hidden bisexua,iity of Latin men."
That same week I was told that eighty percent of the wives
who had tested HIV-positive at Bogotá's Simón Bolívar
Hospital had been infected because of the bisexual activity of
their husbands. Most of these women had married as virgins. Their
husbands were the only man they had made love to.
I faxed my story to Tom Schroder at the Miami Herald.
"Wow," he said. "This is pretty explosive.
You are sure about what you are saying?"
"Yes," I said.
"Well, we are going to check it with our bureaus down
there. We need to be very sure, you know. In Latin America when
the Miami Herald says something, then it becomes a fact. People
really read this paper carefully, and we are about to say that
all these married men are having sex with other men and they
don't think that's having sex with a man. I've never heard of
such a thing."
"I'm sure, Tom," I said. "Listen, there are
many references in literature. Vargas Llosa mentions it in La
ciudad y Los perros."
"That's literature. This is stating it. I need to be
very careful. I need to get ready to answer a lot of angry calls
and letters."
The MiamiHerald received no phone calls and no letters, which
to me meant it is better to leave the earth unturned when what
is to be uncovered might prove impossible to deny.
When I decided to write this book, I knew a big part of my
interest was selfish. I would be able to ponder the string of
questions that, like douds over my head, have accompanied me
on my travels as I go from my small apartment in New York City
to Ana María's floor-through in Bogotá to my grandparents'
house in Barranquilla. My experience is not unique. It is that
of a privileged white woman cafe con leche, really-who grew up
as the princess in a fairy tale and was given the chance of breathing
a little of the air outside her provincial palace. Women like
me have been accused of being influenced by the United States;
we are told that our ideas are foreign and imperialist to our
societies, that everyone is fine with the way things are, that
machismo is a fact of life. "Relax. Lay back," everyone
remarks when I try to explain. "You're becoming too American.
Find a husband cásate." In other words, get married
and shot up. They recognize that their husbands can be impossible,
but come on, Los hombres, mija son Los hombres, and with all
your talking you are not going to change that. You are just going
to scare them away. Un poquito de astucia femenina, un poquito
de resignación, y cada una con su cruz.
I guess it is easier to justify if one lives in great comfort
and with the status of a married woman. To them, my life might
be as mysterious and as foreign as a French film but equally
unappealing They have no interest in living like me. New York
is great- theatre, restaurants, stores-but, for a few days. Who
could dream of life with no servants?
But as I talk to the women I do not know as well, the women
who live in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, the
women who fought against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua,
the young women who support themselves by selling their bodies
for sex in Bogotá or Recife, the street girls who sniff
glue and beg for money in Montevideo, the housemaids with long
black braids and Inca faces in the households of Quito, I realize
that I cannot accept those answers and that the clouds of questions
become larger, darker. A storm of resent ment approaches those,
even my friends, who do not see that they are victims of their
own "perfect" condition.
My need to run out, to leave the lunches and explore why
there are so many transvestites on the main avenues of Latin
American cities, why millions of young boys and girls prefer
to leave their homes, even if poor, for the streets where they
are exposed to the inclemencies of weather, brutality, danger,
and disease, is not because I want to satiate an isolated personal
curiosity about untraditional sexual practices or because my
heart weeps when an eight-year-old gamin with grimy, rosy cheeks
asks me if I can give him a home. It is because I now recognize
the chain of events that leads an eighteen-year-old to sell
his body to pay for his ten-dollar room at night, even though
he knows he is HIV-positive. Most women might think of transvestites
as carnival creatures, and of street children as unfortunates
but potential criminals whom they most keep at arm's length
even when giving them a handout on the streets; I see them as
a consequence of a set of practices and beliefs that are closer
than those women ever thought to their bedroom lives.
"My clients?" says the eighteen-year-old boy sitting
on the steps of the Terrazas Pasteur, the shopping center in
downtown Bogotá where he starts soliciting work at three
every afternoon. I can't tell you exactly, because they are so
different. My clients are soldiers, viejos borrachos, businessmen,
married men, construction workers, even rich men who come with
their Mercedes-Benz."
Transvestites have told me what they do for work, who their
clients are, how many times they wear condoms. Street boys
have spoken about why they ran away from home. Women in Cuba,
in Nicaragua, and in Brazil who joined and worked closely with
armed liberation movements have confirmed that the men who
believed in Che Guevara also believe that a woman's place is
in the mountains but doing the cooking. Priests who have challenged
the orthodoxy of their Church and demanded social justice are
not ready to challenge the Church on women's reproductive rights.
This is where this book stops being my own private cry, and
I start seeing it as a call to all women from Mexico to Argentina-a
call to ponder just for a second the world of behavior that
results from having men decide for us and dictate our laws.
Unless we stop this process, we can die from a dangerous self-induced
abortion, we can find ourselves being HIV-positive having slept
with just one man, or we can be forced to marry our rapist.
As I've mentioned, fourteen Latin American penal codes
exonerate a rapist who offers to marry the victim and is accepted.
In Peru, when Beatriz Merino Lucero, the president of the congressional
committee on women, tried to introduce a bill that would eliminate
this provision, the judicial committee, a committee composed
of men, kept the basic tenet of the law. The only part dropped
was a 1991 revision that allowed one of the participants in
a gang rape to be exonerated if he offered to marry the victim.
If Merino, a Harvard-educated lawyer, were to present her petition
to a judicial committee composed more of women, the outcome
would have, most likely, been different. This is exactly my
point. It's not enough to be satisfied that women are being educated,
are in the labor force and in politics. There are women who
are lawyers, women who are being trained in the best institutions
in the world, women who are fighting to change a system that
is unfair. But the rules that prevail are still those proposed
and made by men, and what women want and what men want women
to want is starkly different. What woman would like to wake up
every morning next to the man who raped her?
So this book is not a confession or a memoir. I am not writing
it because I am angry at my mother for not liking the life I
chose. If I bring myself to open up my thoughts and my experiences,
it is because I feel that having spent the first fifteen years
of my life growing up as a girl in Barranquilla, experiencing
so closely the way men and women relate to each other in a culture
suffocated by machismo, marked me indelibly. Spending the next
twenty years in the United States has allowed me to step out
of the stringent roles that formed me. It is scary to sometimes
feel that my grandmother's submissiveness toward my grandfather
is latent in me.
What I am proposing in this book has been said before. That
in American governmental institutions and sexual relationships
are tainted by a ubiquitous machismo is hardly a revelation.
Thousands of theoretical papers, pamphlets, books, conferences
attest to the inequalities of the genders in Latin America.
But I know the difference between reading an obscure academic
paper or an impenetrable treatise and reading about the experiences
of women with names and faces. Before I started this book I
had never heard about the First International Conference on
Women held in Mexico City in 1975 nor that groups with feminist
agendas have been meeting in Sao Paulo, Tegucigalpa, Bogotá,
Havana, and many other Latin American cities since then. Their
voices tave been heard. In 1979, the United Nations drafted
the Convention on the Elimination of A11 Forms of Discrimination
Against women. In the nineties, the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio
de Janeiro, the 1993 Human Rights Conference in Vienna and the
1995 Social Summit in Copenhagen, all addressed women's issues.
The culmination of all these progressive initiatives was the
1996 Conference on women in Beijing.
Despite their immense efforts, their voices and their propositions
are rarely heard or embraced by the lady who shops in Miani
with her husband's credit card or by the hard-working single
mother living in a squatter's home of cardboard and zinc. Neither
feels the need to visit the offices that I have visited in Sao
Paulo, in Bogotá, in Managua, and in Quito. Groups like
Brazil's CEPIA-which stands for Citizenship, Study, Research,
Information, and Action-and Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones
de la Mujer Ecuatoriana (CEIME), headed by women who have been
able to
transform taboos such as domestic violence, rape, and abortion
into national issues, are equally foreign to my friends' mothers
and to their maids. For all the good faith, studies about gender
issues are written in words that are educated, grandiose, and
part of a jargon that excludes the average woman, who if raped
is afraid to report it, if physically abused at home is scared
to seek legal aid, if lying moribund from a clandestine abortion
prefers dying to being helped by a medical doctor who might
mistreat or denounce her, and upon discovering her partner
is HIV-positive will obey his order and not be tested herself.
Women in Latin America are being infected with the AIDS virus
at a rising pace, as in Africa and in Asia, where the ratio is
reaching one female to one male. The World Health Organization,
in conjuction with UNAIDS, the United Nations' AIDS program,
estimates that in Brazil the male-female ratio of AIDS cases
has dropped from 16:1 in 1986 to 3:1. In the United States, most
of the HIV-positive women are Latinas. Most campaigns are targeted
to gays and prostitutes. When I went back to The Hispanic AIDS
Forum three years after my conversation with Miguelina Maldonado
and asked Luis Nieves, the director for an MSM campaign, how
successful it wes, he said, "I don't think we've had a married
man come in yet to our meetings. The subject is waaaay too sensitive."
"How about reaching wives?"
Nieves, a counselor with years of experience, looked at
me almost contemptuously. "Sure," he said. "That's
going to be real easy. "
Millions of dollars have been poured into Latin America with
an aim that Luis Nieves knows is as hard to achieve as conviincing
the Catholic Church to distribute birth control. Pamphlets are
being printed. In Brazil, I picked up Acorda, Adelaide! (Remember,
Adelaide! ), which had the format of an illustrated story book.
Two good friends-Nair and Adelaide-are having a coffee and a
chat. Adelaide is upset. Her husband Jaime has not been home
in months, and she is left to care for their children alone.
" I think he is not coming back." She confesses to
her friend that she misses him and she is tired of all the work.
Nair reminds her that Jaime was never very helpful and that
a husband at home doesn't mean help."
A few months later, the two friends see each other again.
Adelaide is feeling better. She has been hanging out with Rubens,
whom she has known for years. He is from the neighborhood. Nair
asks her if she is taking care of herself: "Remember, Adelaide,
I'm talking about AIDS. Even if you have known Rubens a long
time, you don't know who he´s been with."
"Ah, Nair," Adelaide responds. "How am I
going to ask a man that is being so supportive that I want him
to use a condom-fica dificil . . . "
It is definitely difficult.
The work is commendable; the results are minimal. How many
women have actually been able to ask their husbands to use
condoms?
A nurse in a family-planning clinic in Vila Kennedy, a Rio
de Janeiro favela where Acorda, Adelaide is distributed, was
pleasantly surprised at the turn out to her first talk about
AIDS. When she asked the fifty women what had motivated them
to come, most had the same answer. It was the first time they
had received any mail addressed to them. The nurse talked about
AIDS and the women listened attentively. When condoms were mentioned,
the women shook their heads. One raised her hand. "Could
you tell that to our husbands? Mine will kick me out of the
house if I suggest something of the sort."
"Ajá, " meaning right on, the rest of the
women sighed.
The nurse invited the husbands for a chat t he following
week. Again, she was surprised how many had agreed to accompany
their wives. She gave her talk and sent the couples home with
condoms. The following week, she invited the women for a followup
meeting. But this time less than half showed up.
"I am sure, after they were here," she speculates,
"the husbands didn't allow them to come back."
To those that did, she asked if they had used the condoms
she had given them. Two raised their hands.
Globalization and the rise of AIDS has tumed the lens on
the empowerment of women, a favorite buzzword of the moment
for agencies of the United Nations such as the UNDP and ECOSOC,
international lending organizations such as the World Bank and
the International Development Bank, large foundations like
Rockefeller and Ford, and smaller ones like Panos Institute and
the Population Council. One can walk in the remotest village
of Bolivia and find a condom stamped with the logo of the UNDP,
one can open a glossy brochure of the IDB and see a photograph
of a toothless woman with a caption that reads "The face
of poverty is the face of a-woman." I stopped at a theatre
in Copacabana on a random Saturday and was pleasantly surprised
to listen to the strong words of Dr. Jonathan Mann, the world's
leading AIDS activist, pronouncing, "It was only through
AIDS that I realized that a patriarchal society is a threat
to public health." The house came down with applause.
But Dr. Mann continues: "It is not through condoms,"
he says, "that we are going to change anything. We must
look at laws." He always refers to the example of the group
of women lawyers in Uganda who continué to fight to change
property laws. Ugandan law provides that if a couple divorced,
all assets, especially land, went to the husband. Women are
not allowed to own land, a reason why many women were scared
to divorce their husbands even though they knew about their
infidelities and the risks they were taking by staying with
them. -The women lawyers of Uganda continue their legal battle,
knowing that when women in Uganda can own land, they are more
likely to divorce their unfaithful husbands.
In this day of neoliberalism, when our countries have all
their eggs in the basket of market forces and foreign investment,
foreign journalists and foreign human rights groups have more
impact on local legislation than any local group. If there has
been attention to women's issues such as Peru's Shining Path
raping women, domestic violence in Brazil, lack of accountability
of violence against women in Haiti, it is not because our governments
decided they are concerned about women. It is because foreign
dollars will not come if they continue to be embarrassed by
these reports. It takes the work of poorly funded local nongoveromental
organizations and the influence of bigger human rights groups,
coupled with reports by foreign journalists, to do
something. about it. Latin American countries like to say with
a mouthful of pride that for the first time in history all of
our governments except for Cuba's have been fairly elected.
Civil society, open markets' privatizations, the rule of law
are the words du jour. This new trend has relegated women's issues
to the back burner. During the transitional moments, such as
when it was urgent to overcome militarism in Chile, Argentina,
and Brazil, women's issues were at the forefront. Today, as Latin
America consolidates democracy, cuts the payrolls of bureaucracy,
and invites for:eign dollars to buy cheap labor, as constitutions
get rewritten as one or two women, one or two blacks, one or
two indegenous leaders are made part of la politica, there
is less real concern less real space for women's issues to be
considered.
It is not spelled out that women make up a vital part of
the low-skilled, low-paid labor force. To lare foreign capital,
our countries are selling the cheapest labor possible. The labor
force in these Maquiladoras-assembling baseballs, T-shirts, and
microchips for foreign markets-is eighty percent female. Democracies
Wil1 never be solidified while women lack real economic independence,
no't just a job that keeps them poor and second-class citizens
according t o our customary law and social codes. It is a step
in the right direction that Latin American countries are having
clean elections, but as long as women are still kept out of
the political process, it is a mockery and a falsity to call
it democracy. Regardlless of Violeta de Chamorro, Noemi Sanin,
Maria Emma
Mejia, Rosario Green and Irene Saez, la politica sigue siendo
asunto de hombres. In 1994, two women ran for the presidency
of Peru six for the vice presidency. But as well-known political
analyst Mirko Lauer told the New York Times: "These women
are not really running as women. They are running as any other
politician would. Neither of these women [running for president]
has a feminist platform, and they are not putting forward feminist
demands. They are running within the macho context.
This book attempts to clarify why the face of poverty is
illustrated in IDB brochures as the face of a woman, why more
than half of tlte poor households in Latin America are headed
by single mothers, why married women are at higher risk of contracting
AIDS than a prostitute, why more than eighty percent of the married
women who test HIV-positive were infected through the bisexual
behavior of their husbands, why the Catholic Church is putting
women at risk by forbidding condoms and legal abortions. None
of these situations are independent, but they are intrinsically
linked with the nature of our culture, our government, and our
religion.
If I have a message in this book, it is to lay out an alternative
to what our grandmothers and mothers, our teachers and priests
wanted us to be, and what the men we are to marry feel most
comfortable with. Marriage and motherhood, although important
parts of who we are as women, cannot be the sole and total path
to our identity as women. Having a choice in whatever we decide
to do, from getting married to getting pregnant, can feel as
natural and as imperative as going to Mass, to lunch, to the
hairdresser. The Virgin Mary and Miss Colombia cannot continue
being our role models. We need to introduce an alternative to
the dichotomy between a "good woman" and una mala
mujer; there is something between mother and whore. The definition
of "good" need not entail being virginal and submissive.
To be self-assured and independent does not mean we are whores.
Meanwhile, for starters, I propose that we make our women politicians
talk about legalizing abortion, our soap-opera heroines have
orgasms, our beauty queens have better hobbies than collecting
bathing suits and tomar el sol, our love ballads impart messages
that give women strength and not tell them to just live for romance.
Anything that keeps us from thinking that women don't have to
think because men think for us. It is okay-no, it is indispensable-to
think.
When I write about this, I feel the sturdiness of my convictions.
When I walk into Ana María's life, my whole body wobbles.
All the things I feel strongly about and proud of disappear the
moment I'm presented with the picture of what I was supposed
to become and didn't. Whenever I witness a husband calling his
wife from his cellular phone 'simply to say hello, to ask about
the children, to say "I love you" in between his important
meetings, I feel I am exaggerating But it takes about a second
to feel reassured when I walk into a mixed gathering and see
the men on one side of the room talking about the possibility
of a coup or the naming of a new cabinet while the women are
on the other side talking about what dirty words their children
are learning at school and the youth concerts at the Alliance
Française. Then I wonder if they feel as left out as I
do. I'm happy I didn't marry in Barranquilla where a woman is
a quedada, a spinster, at twenty, and old by twenty-five whether
she is a married woman or a whore. A few years back, my favorite
relative and his wife invited me to dinner at Steak and Salads,
one of the few trendy restaurants in town. "But you know
what it is really called," my kinsman said to me. "
Not Steak and Salads but The Flea Market. You know why, right?
" I had no clue. "Come on, sweetie, pretty simple.
It's where the separadas and the divorciadas come," he
said."What do divorced and separated women have to do with
anything?" I asked. "What do they sell at the mercado
de Las pulgas? Pues, they sellwhat has already been used, no?"
His wife laughed, and I was swallowing fire hating a person I
had known and loved all my life. Would I too have laughed if
I had stayed in Barranquilla, if I had not left when I was fifteen
and spent twenty years in a land that has made me into una mujer
liberada, which is not very different from libertina?
I felt fortunate that I had not married José Luis
or Arturo. AsI said before, I preferred Arturo, but by the time
I was fourteen José Luis was mi novio, which translates
as boyfriend but signgfies much more of a formal arrangement.
I stopped being Silvana,who I liked being, and became known as
la novia de José Luis, whoI didn't like being. It was
pretty much taken for granted that one day we would marry. He
was the perfect candidate for a niñabien, a niña
del Country, a good girl like me. He came from aprominent family.
We were Conservatives and they were Liberals and it would have
been better if the families' politics could have
matched, but apart from that there really were no peros, no buts.
Al contrario, few families in Barranquilla qualified better-good,
decent people, lo major de lo major de Barranquilla, una buena
familia cristiana. His father was one of the most influential
politica1 leaders on the Colombian coast, and had also served
as minister And his mother, everyone agreed, was a dear, dear
woman, un amor.
José Luis and I met because there was no way we could
not. He was three years older, no one in Barranquilla goes out
with someone their same age, the boy has to be older. We went
to the same school, we swam in the same pool and at the same
beach, we asked the same waiter at the club for grilled sandwiches
de queso. I was fourteen and I liked having his attention because
I knew that he was considered cute by the older girls, especially
those from Marymount, the rival school. At seventeen, he not
only drove his own car but it was the coolest car in town-a
silver race car that his father had bought for him at the car
fair in Bogotá, the only one like it in the entire city.
I never asked myself if I liked him. It was enough that he
liked me, and that was obvious. Every day after school, he drove
by my house playing Barry White's "You're My First, My Last,
My Everything" so loudly that it was impossible not to
know he was outside. I would be in my room getting ready for
my French lesson listening to Barry's deep voice blaring out
on the street. One day on the beach he told me he would swim
to the farthest rock and back without coming up to catch his
breath to show me that I was his girl. I nodded my head and accepted
this bizarre-and macho?-proof of his love. At fourteen, I was
flattered by his attention and I didn't think I had a choice.
It's what happens, what is supposed to happen A boy sees you
and decides to be with you, and you say yes. When I saw a photograph
of my parents and his parents sharing champagne at a New Yearts
Eve party when they were in their early twenties, I thought it
was fate. It was romantic like the songs.
Soon after that I was walking into the Country Club holding
his hand, which meant we were serious novios. I watched him
play soccer, waited for his sweaty kiss after the game and for
his phone call every night at seven sharp. While he waited for
me on Friday nights, my father would ask him to say hello to
his father and would remind him that I was to be home by midflight.
José Luis respected my father's curfew more than I
did. I asked him to ignore the rule many times, but he made sure
I was home fie minutes, even a quarter hour, before. He didn't
want to be on mi father's bad list, but I now know that he was
also in a hurry to get rid of me. His friends would be waiting
for him to go to El Gusano, the dark dungeon like nightclub,
where privileged young men like him and privileged and important
married men would met once they assured themselves their wives
and novias were safe at home. Other women wore there. The guys
in drag who walked up and down the boulevard were also regulars.
The place was so dark that it was sometimes hard to know who
you were baling or dancing with. Patrons wore assured anonymity
by the intensity of the darkness. To find a customer a table,
the ushers used flashlights.
El Gusano's exterior, a huge green worm made of papier-maché,
sat in cogruously next to the imposing arches of the Hotel del
Prado ad the Art Deco mansions built in the 1920s when Barranuilla
was a becoming port town at the mouth of the Magualca River,
whose brown waters moved more than eighty percent of the country's
commerce. It was in Barranquilla, not in Bogotá,he capital,
that the busiest U.S. consulate operated. With the boom came
the American ship captains, customs brokers, and representatives
of American companies, and Barranquilla went from being a provincial
hamlet to a version of the American dream in the tropics.
In 1930 it had its own branches of the Rotary Club and the Lions
Club and an American Men's Association. Tk city's first newspaper,
the Old Reliable, was printed in English.
With a few hundred thousand dollars and the promise of providing
sophistication, Karl C. Parrish, an entrepreneur from Boston
arrived in Barranquilla and sold to the up-and-coming merchants
and rich landowners a chance for gentrification. He sold tha
the dream of suburbia, and I was born in the modern and opulent
barrio with wide avenues, green lawns, large homes, a club With
a pool, clay tennis courts, and eighteen holes of golf. We
hadrmajestic hotel, a few churches, and an American school,
named after Mr. Parrish, where we learned everything from old
textbooks from the United States Department of Defense. When
an eccentric resident of the Bario El Prado decided to open
a discotheque in the 1970s, El Gusano's big yellow antennas,
as high as the spire of the Iglesia de la Inmaculada, looked
as if a float from Carnival had been abandoned on the main boulevard
of this Latin suburban fantasia and the city's sanitation department
had forgotten to remove it.
It was hard to miss El Gusano, especially because it was
a place associated with mystery and men. After dropping me off
on Friday nights, José Luis's car would remain parked
next to the worm's mouth sometimes until very early the next
morning. I was so curious about this place that I told him one
night I would not go home unless I went inside.
" Your father said midnight, and I will make sure you
are home by quarter to."
"But I don't care."
"I do, and you are with me. Anyway, El Gusano is not
a place for you. "
"Why not? "
"It just isn't and you are not coming tonight."
"I'll never see you again."
I was fierce and I knew those words made José Luis
tremble.
"Mi amor, please, I promise I'll take you tomorrow,
okay? "
I believed him, but what he meant was he was taking me in
the middle of the afternoon. The owner ordered the employees
to open up the place for me, and I was escorted inside a damp
tunnel that smelled like the dose where my grandmother locked
the caramelos Kraft, the Venezuelan almonds, and the jabón
de pera to keep them out of the reach of the maids and her dozen
grandchildren. The Worm was an ugly room with aluminum tables,
carpet on the walls, chairs with cigarette holes and tacky and
dirty upholstery, a bar, and two parquet dance floors.
"< Contenta? he said, hugging me as I walked out.
I ran into one of José Luis's Friday night buddies
a few years ago. He was with his wife, the girl he married at
eighteen because she was pregnant. They introduced me to their
children, a teenage boy with long hair and a younger pretty girl,
and asked me about mine.
" I don't have any, " I replied, by now used to
the question.
"You mean, none. Aren't you married yet?"
"No."
"What, then, are you doing in New York? I thought you
had married a gringo. "
"No," I said. "I just live there."
"Why? "
" I like it. "
"What do you do?" he asked.
"I'm a journalist."
"You are what? A journalist? Why there? I mean"-he
was truly surprised-"you live in New York, you are a journalist
in New York, when all you had to do was marryJosé Luis
and own a media empire? "
For him, my choice made no sense.
I could have been the wife and the mother of the children
of an heir or a grand landowner or a future politician, as was
in my cards. If I had stayed in Barranquilla, would I be satisfied
wearing clothes from Miami, having my hair done weekly, running
a house with the help of poor, uneducated women? But how would
I have reacted every time my husband told me, sometimes ordered
me, where and with whom I was allowed to go? Would I, as a mother
taking care of a beautiful home and children, even have known
that AIDS was something that needed to cross my mind?
This wife standing in front of me and asking me about my
life in New York, has she ever thought that she could be HIV-positive?
José Luis and his buddies, let alone their wives, do not
realize that the threat of AIDS is doser to them than the slums
they try so hard to avoid every time they drive out to the airport
to spend a weekend in Bogotá or to take the kids to Disney
World and then go shopping in Miami.
One thing that always warms my heart about Barranquilla
is that people are really interested to know what you are doing.
Acquaintances can be as straightforward-as nosy, opinionated,
and obnoxious-as family members. But their sincerity and their
calor, their warmth, has always touched me.
"I'm writing a book."
"About what?"
I could not bring myself to say that it explains how women
like his wife are at higher risk of contracting AIDS than a
prostitute, how T think men like him control our lives, how we
have the right to be sexual, to have a sate abortion, to know
about safe sex, to an education.
I moved to the States before I could get trapped by pregnancy
and, unlike my friends, discovered my sexuality while remaining
single. That makes me an oddball back home. Like them, I was
surrounded by family and friends who looked and thought alike.
I had a privileged upbringing in the land of García Márquez's
magical realism, inside a society where men are permitted anything
and women are confined to strict, traditional roles. I grew up
around women whose lives revolved around the lives of their men,
and then around gossip, the importance of last names, and the
Church. When I graduated from the University of Michigan, I called
my grandmother, bedridden with a very advanced cancer. I knew
her days were few. Her body, she told me, was being invaded as
fast as the Malvinas, referring to the Falklands, the British
islands that the Argentine military had tried to daim that year.
To cheer her up, I told her that she could boast in front of
her bridge partners that her nieta had a university degrce.
"I'd rather tell them my granddaughter has a husband,"
she replied.
I was twenty-one.
Living in the United States put me in touch with women who
thought differently from those I had always been surrounded by:
women who have careers and who are successful, women who see
the world, try to understand it, try sometimes to change it.
It was in this country t that I learned the jargon of equality,
independence, and empowerment. I arrived in Ann Arbor wearing
gold Charles Jourdan heels, Calvin Klein jeans, and barrettes
on each side of my long hair. The first day of class I wore a
flowing yellow gingham dress and found a class filled with students
wearing ripped jeans and a professor who cursed his country.
"Fuck U.S. foreign policy," he said, speaking about
support for the Shah of Iran. A week later he showed us Hearts
and Minds, the Pulitzer-winning documentary on Vietnam, and
the carpet was taken from under my feet. I was appalled by
U.S. involvement the gold United States of America, and fascinated
by the possibility of criticism, of confrontation of the status
quo. In Ann Arbor learned about Latin America, a Latin America
that was as foreigners the feel of the winter clothes I had to
wear to walk to class a place whose trees lost leaves, and changed
colors. I spoke about Latin America in English, in political
science language marched to protest U.S. presence in El Salvador.
I served as the translator for conferences on labor movements.
I helped create solidarity network with Nicaragua when the Sandinistas
took over But I never questioned the condition of women. I still
expect) my date to pay for me, as I had been taught.
Slowly I learned that in the United States I had the option
of taking care of myself, that paying for myself was not a humiliation
as my grandfather suggested. I slowly was able to learn that
it was up to me who to kiss and who not to kiss, when to get
pregnant and who not to. And it was sitting in the offices of
the Hispanic AIDS from in Queens, New York, that I made an immediate
connection between the letters MSM and my friends back home.
Apart from my own projection of what could have happened
to me had I stayed, or my criticism of Arturo as vice-minister
José Luis as the powerful scion, my brother eager to support
the Conservative Party, and my childhood girlfriends ready
to take on traditional roles, I am most interested in the fact
that en la politica womens issues are relegated, set aside,
both by the right and by the left. Women's issues are equally
unimportant to the Conservative Party in Colombia, which has
no women in its directorate and to Brazil's Partido dos Trabalhadores,
perhaps the most progressive party in Latin America today, a
labor party that has a thirty-percent quota for women
Most latin American women are not as interested in politics
as they e in the rituals of the Catholic Church. The women I
knew ore delicate crosses, medallitas, rosaries around their
necks. They said, borrowed, played the lottery, whatever it took
to pay for a tour to Europe that included a visit to the Vatican.
Going to Saint Peter's Square for a Sunday Mass and a benediction
by the pope was a lifelong dream. Beauty queens are quick to
answer that the person they admire the most is the Pope and mi
papá- obedient daughters to God and to the law, fit to
represent the country. But going to Mass, lighting candles, rezar
novenas, and not eating meat on Fridays during Lent is not going
to protect them from getting pregnant, or make a man stop having
sex without a condom.
To seek hope in liberation theology is disappointing. In
the 1970s, brave priests challenged the orthodoxy of Rome, became
political activists denouncing right-wing military dictatorships,
and sided with the marginal and the poor. With the concept of
comunidades de base, base communities, they organized entire
neighborhoods to rise against the harsh economic conditions.
Women were seminal supporters of the call; as housewives they
knew how hard it was to make ends meet. They were encouraged
to organize as citizens and demand better conditions for their
husbands and for their children. But anything close to demanding
better conditions for themselves as women was not only untouched
but down right discouraged. In Brazil, Dom Helder Camara talked
about the injustices of poverty but not about domestic violence.
Same goes for leftist politics. Lula, the figurehead of the
PT and a metallurgical union organizer, talks about the dangers
of privatizations and the structural adjustments of the World
Bank but will never be in favor of legal abortions: his alliance
with left-leaning priests would be forever severed. Lula will
criticize economic policies while supporting the traditional
stance of the Church when it comes to women's reproductive rights.
Can there be social justice without equality of gender?
It is not surprising that in the seventies, General Augusto
Pinochet told women that their duty was to be "mothers of
the homeland" and proclaimed that "sacrifice, abnegation,
service, honesty, diligence, and responsibility" were to
be women's chief characteristics. Millions of Chile's women supported
this view along with his repressive and murderous regime. As
for the left, it was just as male chauvinist as Pinochet. In
Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega promised to fight poverty, but when
the state-funded women's agency proposed to legalize abortion,
Ortega said that chaos ing not to give birth was counterrevolutionary
and depleted the country of its much needed youth. Would it be
any different today?
The situation is not encouraging. Not only are men not interested
in giving up more than a few token openings to women, but in
important governmental positions one sees only women who are
not ready to be outspoken about women's issues. When Mujer asked
Noemí Sanín, Colombia's presidential candidate,
what she thought about abortion, her answer is not only ambiguous
and full of hyperbole but basically pro-life: "I respect
life in whatever form, but I believe that abortion should not
be penalized by law or with prison: the woman who aborts suffers
so much that it is punishment enough."
1 am aware that all this can be described as the lament of
a bourgeois girl who traveled a little and became some what liberated.
My words can be dismissed as the rantings of privilege. Poor
and working-class women, mestizas and mulattas, are exploited
by a capitalist system, by a privileged class of which I, by
virtue of birth, am a member. But regardless of these distinctions,
as women we all live within the confines of the structure of
patriarchal domination. Regardless of our position in a society
divided by class, we as Latin American women know domestic violence,
economic dependence, sexual aggression, discrimination in the
workplace, lack of reproductive choice, and clandestine abortions.
Soon we are also going to know how vulnerable we are to AIDS.
In the age of AIDS, men's control over their women's lives
is literally life-threatening for many wives. In Mexico City,
Rio de Janeiro, and Bogotá I've met young widows who knew
their husbands had AIDS only after their deaths. A brave nurse
in Bogotá explained to me how difficult it was for her
to convince women to get themselves tested. Usually once the
husbands find out they are HIV-positive they "do not even
allow them to go to the hospital by themselves." Like the
de after Ana María's name, commonly used verbs such as
"to ask for permission" and "to allow" have
felt as uncomfortable and as wrong as when José Luis would
ask me to change my clothes. When I refused to wear a longer
skirt, my punishment was José Luis's anger. Today, to
have to do something because I say so" endangers more than
a woman's independence or sense of self, such submissiveness
may endanger her life.