The Feminista
Patrick Oster
"The Mexicans. A personal portrait of a people"
2002
ISBN 0060011300
_________________________________________

Even as a little girl, there was always something that made Rosa María Ortega want to do more, to be more. It was not a common attitude among little Mexican girls. At least it wasn't one many Mexican girls talk about. Mexican girls, particularly girls from poor families such as Rosa María's, are told that they are going to be mothers and housewives. That's what they will be. They are given some education. But few poor parents pay for more than six years of grammar school. If there is just so much money in the family budget for schooling, as is the case in so many Mexican homes, it goes for boys. The boys will need schooling, parents tell their daughters, because they will be the ones to go to work. That's what Rosa Maria's parents told her older sister, María Teresa. "Why do you want to go to school?" they asked. "You're just going to get married. What do you need an education for?"

Some years later, they told Rosa María the same thing. But she did not buy it. When she was told that she would have to quit her studies when she finished grammar school, she sneaked out of the house and defiantly signed herself up for high school. Maybe because she was the baby of the family, her unwilling parents let her continue.

Rosa María's sister was not so lucky. Seven years older than Rosa María, she was given all the household chores to do. That meant cleaning up after Rosa María's four older brothers. As brothers will do in some Mexican families, they beat her when she did not iron something properly or when she forgot to make the beds. Rosa María's father, a construction worker, and her mother, who ran a small food shop, said nothing. By the age of sixteen, María Teresa had had enough. She got married, perhaps a little earlier than she had once wanted, and moved out. As her parents had predicted, she became a housewife and mother. She now has five children.

"I shall always remember the courage of my sister," said Rosa María of the violence that Marfa Teresa had quietly suffered. "It made a very deep impression on me."

Rosa María was only nine years old when her sister moved out. She was too young to take over Maria Teresa's duties. She did some things around the house. Her brothers never beat her when they were displeased. "But I was always afraid that they would," she said.

Rosa Maria had wanted to go to the national University in Mexico City, where she was born and grew up. But she only made it through twelve years of school. That was twice as much education as the average Mexican gets, twice as much as her sister got. She said she feels privileged to have gone so far. But it wasn't as far as she wanted to go.

While still in high school, Rosa María met Juan José Castillo, who would become her husband. They fell in love. Modern ideas were floating about Mexico in the late 1970s when they met. Government forces had gunned down rioters in 1968 and 1971 to put down student protests. Students and others had fled Mexico to the United States and Europe. Later they brought back ideas of feminism and other isms that were changing the world In 1973, Mexico, faced with staggering population growth, had begun encouraging women to use birth control. With unstated acquiescence from the government, abortions rose in number, even though abortion remained (and remains) illegal. The size of families was going down. Women, previously held hostage at home by six or seven children, were finding time to go out and meet people, to learn of the world. With some of these new thoughts in their heads, Juan and Rosa María talked of what kind of marriage they would have. Juan appeared the very model of a modern man. That made him an exceptional man for Mexico, where ideas of machismo often make it difficult for a man to be tender, considerate, or even fair with women. Juan talked about how they would both work. They would share the expenses of their new home. He said he'd help with the housework and with rearing the children they planned to have. Befitting this modern attitude, Juan and Rosa María moved in together without formally getting married. Fifteen percent of Mexican marriages are unión libre, or common-law ones. Usually people don't get married because they can't afford a marriage license or all the ceremonial rigmarole that goes with civil or church weddings. In Rosa María's case, not getting legally married was just a matter of principle.

"I loved him," she explained. "I wanted to live with him. That was all. To get married seemed a little false ["phony"]. "

Juan and Rosa María began their marriage in 1978. He was twenty. She was eighteen. They didn't have much money, so they moved in with his parents, as many young married couples in Mexico do. Juan and Rosa María were preoccupied with their studies. But there was still work to do around the house. Rosa María did her share of the cooking and cleaning. But Juan always seemed to have some excuse why he couldn't do his. It bothered Rosa María that Juan wasn't keeping the promises that they both had made before their marriage. But she kept quiet. She did the extra work. That was the way it was supposed to be, her mother-in-law told her. A woman's place, after all, is in the home, she said.

Family money grew tight. By 1980, Rosa María decided she had to quit school and go to work so she and Juan could meet expenses. It would only be for a while, she told herself. Then she would go back to school. She would become a college graduate. Juan, however, had other ideas. Gone was the Juan who had promised so much, who had seemed so egalitarian. Now he was acting very Mexican, very macho. He did not want her to work. What would his friends think, he said. They would say he was not a real man, because he could not support his new wife on his salary. His mother said the same thing. To show Rosa Maria that she could get by without working, Juan's mother began buying her dresses and other things. She told Rosa Maria she was tonta ("foolish") not to let her man take care of her. Juan had a different technique to discourage her working. He beat her.

Rosa Marfa continued to work nonetheless, first as a department-store sales clerk and later in a variety of odd jobs. After a long day, she had little energy for housework. But she got no help from Juan, even after they rented their own apartment in 1984 Rosa Marfa put in what Mexican women call a doble jornada, a "double day." She worked first at her job and then, for almost an equal time, at home. She cooked. She cleaned. She ironed. Later that year, her son, Carlos, was born. Rosa María quit her job to take care of the baby. She became a housewife for the first time. She had more time around the house. But in the early months after Carlos was born, she was feeling the fatigue that new mothers do. She found child care and housework very tiring. But still Juan refused to help out around the house. He said it was no work for a man. He became more demanding. Sometimes when Rosa Marfa did not have the meals prepared on time, he beat her. With a baby to feed and clothe, Juan's salary proved inadequate. Rosa María set up a small repair business in their home, taking in broken appliances and other things to help make ends meet She still had to care for the baby and take care of the house. But Juan continued to do nothing to help. The following year her daughter, Lluvia was born. Things got worse. The marriage had not been going well. Rosa María was just too independent for Juan's tastes. He had made that clear. He had not only Rosa María's uppity ways to contend with. Now there were two more mouths to feed. Three months after Lluvia was born, Juan moved out. He moved in with another woman and has had a son by her.

Mexico has laws that say that Juan must support his two children by Rosa Marfa. But like many Mexican laws designed to protect women, they mean a lot more in theory than they do in practice. When Rosa María recently discovered that Lluvia has a congenital eye condition that requires lots of antibiotics and a corrective operation, she went to see her estranged husband. She pleaded with Juan to give her money for their little girl. He said he had none to spare. He had a new family. He had other responsibilities, he said. Angry, Rosa Marfa filed a legal complaint. The law was on her side, she had been told. But just before Juan was scheduled to appear before authorities to explain himself, he quit his job. At the hearing, he said he was unemployed and couldn't afford to pay anything. The authorities let him go. Rosa Maria didn't get a peso.

"I lived with that man for six years," said Rosa Maria. "It took me that long to find out who he really was."

Rosa Maria felt angry. She didn't know where to turn. She began searching for other remedies to get Juan to fulfill his obligations. In her search, she discovered a program that helps Mexican women learn about their legal rights. The Women's Program for Service, Development and Peace (Sedepac) offered Rosa Maria paralegal training as a defensora popular. A defensora helps battered, abandoned, or just poor women with legal problems. Defensoras go to police stations to help file complaints or to court to help present cases.

Rosa Maria took the defensora course and finished it in February 1987. She set out to help others while trying to solve her own problems. Her first case was typical of those that would come later. The woman had been beaten up by her husband and had been the victim of sexual violence. He had wanted to have sex. She had not. He beat her, then forced her. As far as the police were concerned, it was just a little disagreement between husband and wife. It's a man's right to make love to his wife, most Mexican police officers will tell you. Most police officers are men. That's not what the law says, Rosa María told the police. It was not perhaps what they wanted to hear. But thanks to defensoras like Rosa Maria, they are hearing it more and more every day.

Poor Mexican women-the majority of Mexican women-are hearing it more often, too. To most of them, it is a surprise. Most Mexican women have been told all their lives that they are inferior to men, that they must obey men. They feel ashamed about what has happened to them, be it rape or a beating by their husbands. They are stunned to find out it is a crime for their husbands to hurt them physically. Many feel regular beatings are just part of their lot in life. If their husband does not mistreat them, they think, then they are just so much luckier than the next woman.

These days, Rosa María's clients are poor Indian women of the Mazahua tribe who live in Mexico City. The government has given the women free space for a women's center in a small attic above La Merced, a large fruit and vegetable market in the heart of the capital. Every day they come to the center to weave dresses or shawls or to make yarn dolls that they sell in the streets. With the money, they support themselves as well as the center's social and educational activities, which include Rosa Maria's defensora work. No one makes very much. Rosa Maria gets a hundred thousand pesos a month (forty-five dollars), which is about half the wage the average Mexican makes.

The problems these women bring to Rosa Maria are typical of the ones that she encountered in her own marriage. Sometimes they are worse. Violence in the home is the most common complaint. Husbands verbally threaten their wives if they don't do what they are told. Others boat their wives. Some force their wives to have sex when their wives are not willing. Others complain they are verbally abused in the streets. Mexico has a tradition of piropos, clever but sexist sayings that Mexican men yell at passing women in hopes of annoying or attracting them. It's a little like the tendency of some construction workers in the United States to whistle at or tease women who pass their building sites. It's just a lot more widespread. "Rosita ["Little rose''], here is your gardener," is one piropo Rosa Maria might have heard. More generic piropos go: "What curves! And me without any brakes," or, "I wish I were a stamp so you could lick me with your little mouth." Sexual harassment at work is common too. Surveys done by feminists groups show that 95 percent of women in Mexico City have been subject to sexual harassment, about a quarter of it direct sexual propositions.

As a first step to ending such aggression, Rosa María tells women at the center that they have rights. In 1975, women were given equal rights under the law when a constitutional amendment was passed. They have the right to work, she tells them. They have the right to leave the house, despite what their husbands might say. They have a right to an education. If they are raped, they can file charges against the man who did it, even if he is a boyfriend or a husband.

Part of women's surprise at learning of such rights stems from the brainwashing they get in Mexican society. Women have had the right to vote since 1953. A woman has ran for president. A woman has held the no. 2 post in Mexico's ruling political party. Women have been governors and senators and federal deputies. Hundreds of women run their own companies. But the reality of Mexican life is that it is male-dominated, male-run. Married men are entitled to have lovers. Married women are not. Adultery is against the law for both sexes. But a complaint by a woman against her philandering husband is generally not taken seriously by the police. If a husband chooses to file a complaint against his wife because she has cuckolded him, however, that is serious.

"For that," said Rosa Maria, "a woman can go to prison. However, the normal thing is not for a man to file charges. If his wife commits adultery, he will beat her."

Rape laws likewise require a woman to prove not only that she did not want to have sex with her violator but that she tried to prevent it. Police, judges, lawyers, and even doctors do not treat rape victims with the sensitivity and respect their condition warrants. It is not unlike the situation in the United States some years ago, before rape reform became widespread.

"By the time she gets through with the doctor and the police," said Rosa Maria, "a raped woman feels as if she's been raped two more times."

Much of this male attitude stems from the image men have created for women in Mexican society. A married woman is expected to be a wife and mother. Period. She is expected to emulate the pure, abnegated Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico. In matters of sex, she is expected to be passive. If a man wants exciting, aggressive sex, he will get it from his mistress. Even widows are expected to show no sexual interest in other men, while no such expectation exists for widowers.

The situation was no different with Juan and Rosa María. Rosa Maria does not know if Juan had mistresses in their short marriage. Sometimes it takes a man a little longer to stray. But she does know that Juan did not appreciate her sexual advances. Rosa María tried to be more open, more experimental in her sexual relations with Juan. She wanted their lovemaking to be more interesting, more exciting, more loving.

"I tried new things with Juan," said Rosa Maria. "At first he liked it. He liked it very much. But a few days later, he reprimanded me. He said I had acted like a puta ["whore"]."

The virgin-wife image is passed down from father to son. It also goes from many mothers to daughters. With this sort of attitude ingrained in men and women, it is not surprising that many a loving relationship sours into suspicion and fear of betrayal. Out of fear of being cuckolded, men forbid their wives to go out of the house unescorted. They upbraid their wives if they talk with other men at parties. When they walk down the streets, they are vigilant for men who might flirt with their wives. When some man does, husbands blame their wives for encouraging it, as Juan sometimes did with Rosa María.

The experts will tell you this male insecurity is a legacy of Mexican history. When the Spanish conquerors came to Mexico, they came without their women. They took Indian women as concubines. The Indian men felt humiliated and betrayed. Modern Mexican men, 90 percent of whom have some Indian blood, retain that fear of humiliation and betrayal, the experts say. All this has given Mexico a unique brand of machismo, a cruel bravado that masks a fragile masculinity. Mexican men, under pressure from this tradition, often hurt and betray others before others can betray them. This insidious idea even invades the family.

The stereotype is that Mexican families are strong. Indeed, many are. Brothers and sisters play with each other and their cousins, but rarely with outsiders. Sons and daughters often live in their parents' homes, even after marriage. Those who want their own homes often build them next to or on the same block as their parents' house, sometimes with financial help from their parents. Mexican families stick together. They are insular, almost clannish. The family is all. But among Mexicans, there is another family stereotype, a much nastier one. In this stereotype, fathers and mothers still adore their children, whom they call mi rey ("my king") or mi reina ("my queen"). But the love is not so strong when it comes to man and wife. Among Mexicans, it's a dirty little secret that, after the bloom of honeymoon romance has faded, a husband often pits himself against his wife. Husbands, when they have become fathers, expect to be treated like a king when at home. But they spend an increasing amount of time outside the house, drinking or playing dominoes with friends or dallying with their mistresses. They rant and rave when their wives want to go out, secretly worrying about the possibility of wifely infidelity. Wives, feeling suffocated and spurned, smother their sons in motherly love in hopes of turning their male offspring-Daddy's pride and joy-against their fathers. Sons do worship their mothers. But despite mothers' efforts, sons, when they become husbands, start the cycle all over again. They become suspicious of and cruel toward their wives. This is the stereotype. It is not the case universally. Many Mexican couples who have traveled widely abroad or been university educated are fighting the stereotype with loving, sharing marriages. But as with so many stereotypes, this distressing image of Mexican married life springs from an undeniable, substantial reality. Just ask Rosa María.

Countering such attitudes will be a difficult task, Rosa Maria acknowledged. The male-dominated government encourages continued inferior treatment of women through nonenforcement or selective enforcement of rape, child support, adultery, abortion, and equal-rights laws. While it is no longer obligatory, most marriage ceremonies continue to include a reading of a letter by Mexican politician Melchor Ocampo, a practice that began in 1859. In part, it says: "The man, whose sexual attributes are principally courage and strength, should and will give protection, food and guidance to the woman. The woman, whose principal attributes are abnegation, beauty, compassion, perspicacity and tenderness, should and will give her husband obedience, pleasure, assistance, consolidation and counsel, always treating him with the veneration due to the person that supports and defends her." Television commercials also portray a woman's role as exclusively a domestic one, with a side role of pleasure-giver for those women who aren't marreid. Movies portray the man as the one who knows best.

"I saw a terrible movie last week," said Rosa Maria. "It was called Cuando Quiere un Mexicano (When a Mexican Loves a Mexican). It was with Jorge Negrete. He played a charro [a type of Mexican cowboy] who is at first rejected by a beautiful Spanish woman. He tells her he loves her and wants to marry her. She refuses. He slaps her several times. And she changes her mind! What kind of message is that for women? Why should you want to marry someone who beats you?"

As I sat listening to Rosa María, a vibrant, beautiful, obviously intelligent woman, I couldn't help wondering why she had become what she had. Given the social forces loose in Mexico, she could have as easily become a quietly suffering, pliant wife. Half of Mexican households are headed by women like Rosa María, whose husbands have run out on them. Half. They quietly bear the burden of rearing abandoned children. What had made Rosa María so different from these quiet millions? From where did she get her outrage, her drive, her strength? I asked her if there was someone, some influence, that might explain it. Improbably, she said, it was a man. In high school, she had gotten interested in theater. Her theater teacher had encouraged her to continue her studies. She had talent for the theater, he said. She explained that she didn't know if her parents would let her finish high school, let alone be serious about theater.

"He told me," said Rosa María, " 'The theater is your responsibility. To finish school is your responsibility. You have the talent. You have a responsibility to use it. If your parents won't respect your talent, you have to respect it yourself.' "

Ironically, one of the roles that Rosa María played in that theater class was that of Marta, the youngest daughter of The Children of Sánchez, Oscar Lewis's 1961 study of poverty in Mexico. The nonfiction best-seller had been made into a play and later a movie. There were astounding parallels between Rosa Maria's life and Marta's, but important differences, too.

As a youngster, Marta, by her own description, was sort of a party girl. "Nothing tied me down," she told Lewis. "I could do what I wanted. I felt free." Like Rosa María, Marta had been the baby of the family. She had been allowed to get away with more than her brothers and sisters. But happiness was something for children. When Marta grew up, she encountered reality. And it was not a very happy one. About the time Lewis published his book, Marta had decided to flee her house in Tepito, a rough Mexico City neighborhood not far from the market where Rosa María now works. Marta wanted to escape her boyfriend, Crispin, who had beaten her regularly and had fooled around openly with other women. With little thought about where she was going, she grabbed the first bus out of town. It was headed for Acapulco. On the bus, she met Baltazar, a butcher whom she moved in with when the bus reached the end of the line.

While I was doing some stories on what had happened to the Children of Sánchez, I met Marta, whose real name, Berta Hernández, Lewis had changed to protect her. She is a plump, serious woman in her fifties. She had four kids by Crispin and seven more by Baltazar, whom she threw out of the house fifteen years ago. He had become an abusive drunk and had beaten her, just as Crispin had. She can't explain why she stayed with either one so long, except to say that that's what Mexican women of her generation were expected to do.

"A man who can't beat women isn't a man," she told me. "So goes the saying. Men still have three or four women [on the side].

That is the right. Women can't protest. They have to accept it . . . because the man is the boss. A woman's only real function is to have children and to take care of them until the end. A woman can't breathe. She has no life of her own when she's married."

One of Berta's sons has become a doctor. She has a daughter who is a computer programmer in New York. It is a remarkable achievement for an impoverished mother of eleven. But Berta's work is not yet done. She still has three school-age children to rear. She supports them by crocheting doilies and tablecloths that she takes to Tepito to sell once a month. She was making about fifty thousand pesos a month when I talked with her in late 1986, a little less than the minimum wage. It wasn't much money for a family of four, one of whom is Adrian, a teenager retarded since a childhood bout with meningitis.

Berta, who once dreamed of becoming a blond and falling madly in love, adores Adrian, an engaging, lumbering boy. But she also knows that Adrian's condition makes it unlikely she'll have any lovers ever again. It is something that weighs on her heavily.

"I haven't had any love life since my husband left," she said. "Who would live with the responsibility of taking care of my child hanging over his head?"

Berta is resigned to a simple, perhaps even sad, remainder of her life. But she is content to know that she has regained her dignity, her independence. She is free of the brutal men who once professed love for her. She takes solace in the Protestant religion, to which she has converted. She feels bitterness toward a Catholic Church that has given her sex little support. If Rosa Maria had been born more than half a century ago, as was the woman she once portrayed in a high school play, would Rosa Maria too have shared Berta's resentful view of life? If Berta had been born in 1960 like Rosa Maria, if she had heard the siren call of feminism, might she have had Rosa Maria's hope for the future? Two kindred spirits. Two different outlooks. But perhaps, in the end, the same fate.

Rosa said she felt more fortunate than Berta. But she couldn't be sure her future would be any happier. She had no guarantees she would ever be able to return to school. She didn't know if she'd ever make a decent salary. She did not know what she would do about Lluvia's eye operation. She had not thought much about the theater for a long time. With two children, would she too be denied a love life? Whatever her fate, she said, she would not accept it quietly.

"It is too late for that," she said. "All my life I have had ambitions. I have developed an idea of what I want in life. I cannot be satisfied with less."

There are professional feminists in Mexico. Maybe a thousand strong, they are mostly educated or upper-class women. They can be seen marching for this issue and that. They complain that their husbands won't help with housework. They write erudite screeds in journals and left-wing newspapers about the sexual injustice of Mexican society. They remark that men have no interest in hearing what women have to say about bullfighting, politics, or other supposedly exclusive intellectual preserves of men. They discuss whether Mexican women will ever get adequate day care or paid pregnancy leaves. Their issues are all valid. I cannot dispute a one. If these women were in the United States, they would be in the mainstream of feminist dialogue. But they are not in the United States. They are in Mexico. And in Mexico, it is Rosa Maria and women like her who are the real feminists, the frontline fighters for equal rights. Rosa Maria does not read Fem or other well-known feminist publications. She has nothing against them. She just doesn't have the money to buy them or the time to read them. She is busy struggling in the trenches against wife abuse, sexual violence, abandonment of children, institutionalized infidelity, and a host of other problems that make other feminist issues seem like fine tuning.

"We are going to work and struggle for an equal role for women, for equal power, for equal respect," Rosa María told me, sounding a bit like a scap-box speaker. "We will march in the streets if necessary. It won't be easy. It will take a lot of time. But we will succeed because we are doing it for our children."