Violence Against Latina Immigrants

Citizenship, Inequality, and Community

Roberta Villalon

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814788264
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Caught between violent partners and the bureaucratic complications of the US Immigration system, many immigrant women are particularly vulnerable to abuse. For two years, Roberta Villalón volunteered at a nonprofit group that offers free legal services to mostly undocumented immigrants who had been victims of abuse. Her innovative study of Latina survivors of domestic violence explores the complexities at the intersection of immigration, citizenship, and violence, and shows how inequality is perpetuated even through the well-intentioned delivery of vital services. Through archival research, participant observation, and personal interviews, Violence Against Latina Immigrants provides insight into the many obstacles faced by battered immigrant women of color, bringing their stories and voices to the fore. Ultimately, Villalón proposes an active policy advocacy agenda and suggests possible changes to gender violence-based immigration laws, revealing the complexities of the lives of Latina immigrants as they confront issues of citizenship, gender violence, and social inequalities.

1

Introduction

Theoretical and

Methodological Approach

Angela, Claudia, Julia, Luisa, Laura, Martha, Rosa, Manuela, Ana, Susana, Clara, Silvana, Rosario, Mónica, Samuel, Yolanda, Patricia, Ramona, and Leticia were all immigrants. With or without immigration documents, they had all left their native lands to help their families survive. In love, and in pain, they had all endured intimate partner violence in the United States. Courageously and fearfully, they had all tried to break free from their abusive relationships and sought help. Some found their way out. Others did not. In this book, I explore the disparate fates of Latina battered immigrants in their search for nonviolence, autonomy, and citizenship by uncovering and defying entrenched discriminatory principles and practices still at work in this country from a feminist of color perspective.¹

Latina, black, postcolonial, and critical race feminisms have been particularly acute in their contribution to the struggle to end violence against women. As the battered women’s movement developed, and violence against women was redefined first as a social problem (as opposed to an acceptable private matter)² and later as a human rights violation, feminists of color underscored the need to shift from universalizing to differentiated accounts.³ While it is true that all women can be victimized on a gender basis (as “white” liberal and radical feminists initially claimed in order to legitimize the need to end violence against women and make it a policy priority), intersecting racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, immigration status, and sexual, religious, and political orientations also come into play in terms of the kinds of violence perpetrated, and the resources available to overcome abusive conditions.⁴ For instance, immigrant women’s vulnerability is based not only on their gender but also on nationality, race, ethnicity, language, religion, documented or undocumented immigration status, threatened legal status, situational isolation from family and community, cross-national frames of cultural and legal reference (including ideologies, laws, and practices in regard to gender equality and sexuality), and socioeconomic status.⁵ Latina, black, postcolonial, and critical race feminisms have focused on the specific constraints that limit minority battered women, with the aim of elaborating strategies, programs, policies, and laws that better reflect their experiences and improve their particular situations—as opposed to those of the “universal” battered woman, which in fact were modeled after white, middle- or upper-class heterosexual housewives.⁶ Similarly, feminists of color have stressed the need to provincialize mainstream and Western accounts of violence against women by taking into account the specific cultural and social contexts of the community where the women live or used to live, contrary to understanding oppression from a hegemonic standpoint,⁷ which perpetuates “new forms of colonialism” and is “out of touch with the realities experienced at the grass-roots level.”⁸ With the goal of meeting the particular needs of the most disadvantaged, feminists of color have adopted a methodology committed to building knowledge from below, that is, in collaboration with the people about whom the research is being developed, because “without them, the myriad individual and collective histories that simultaneously run parallel to official accounts of historic events and are their sequel, almost inevitably get submerged”⁹ and become invisible.¹⁰

In this spirit, I developed activist research¹¹ at a local nonprofit organization in Texas to learn about the experiences of Latina battered immigrants in their quest for U.S. citizenship through the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA). Advocates, activists, and scholars alike have considered these laws as successful achievements for women’s and immigrants’ rights movements.¹² In principle, VAWA and VTVPA legitimize battered immigrants in their particular victimization and provide them with services conducive to breaking free from abusive relationships and becoming legally and economically autonomous U.S. citizens. However, through my research I found that formal and informal barriers that filter immigrants either as worthy to become legitimate citizens of the United States or as illegitimate subjects remain in place. Intersecting gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, and class inequalities not only permeate the current legislation but also tend to be reproduced by nonprofit workers. This results in the exclusion of the most underprivileged immigrants (those Latina immigrants who are women of color, extremely poor, with few years of formal education, undocumented, in relationships with residents or other undocumented immigrants, originally from Mexico, homosexual, and/or unable to fit within “normal” standards of civil behavior) regardless of their histories of abuse.

My analysis of how and why the most disadvantaged battered Latina immigrants are left unprotected and my suggestions on how to turn this around are based on activist research at a legal nonprofit organization that I will call the Organization for Refugees of America/Organización para Refugiados de América (ORA). ORA proved to be an excellent example of how extreme cases contribute to the understanding of the construction of difference and normalcy, marginality and dominance,¹³ because of the type of services it offered, its location, the population it served, its organizational history, and its staff’s profile. From 2000 to 2008, ORA was the only organization in central Texas that provided free legal services to underserved immigrants, identified as individuals with earnings below 125 percent of the officially defined poverty line (i.e., annual earnings lower than $17,500 for a household of two in 2008);¹⁴ at the same time, it was the only organization providing these services that was not affiliated with a religious group. Four of its five legal programs were devoted to immigrant survivors of different kinds of abuse (domestic abuse; sexual abuse; extortion; false imprisonment; human trafficking; and political, racial, ethnic, religious, gender, or ideological persecution). Additionally, ORA’s location in Texas, a border state with one of the largest numbers of documented and undocumented immigrants in the United States,¹⁵ and with a high proportion of incidents of family violence in terms of its population,¹⁶ made the organization a good selection for a case study, particularly during the hostile environment after September 11, 2001. An overwhelming majority of ORA’s clients were from Mexico and Central America, but the organization served immigrants from all over the world. ORA, with its ethnically diverse staff, presented itself as an inclusive organization that provided services to all immigrants, regardless of their ethnic, religious, or political background, in their language of origin. In this way, ORA allowed me to explore the workings of culturally sensitive organizations, which have been both celebrated as safe havens for immigrants¹⁷ and questioned as colonial and patriarchal by many feminist researchers.¹⁸ Its history also made it a good choice for a case study: ORA developed from a politically radical, volunteer-based grassroots legal group into a politically moderate employee-based nonprofit legal organization. While this kind of institutionalization process is common,¹⁹ the in-depth study of ORA provides clues to overcome its exclusionary effects.²⁰

I worked for two years as a part-time volunteer intern in the ORA’s battered immigrant assistance program, which provided legal services free of charge to low-income immigrants who qualified as applicants for citizenship under VAWA and VTVPA. As such, I worked with ORA staff in providing services to immigrants, including screening interviews on the phone and in person, collection and translation of immigration and abuse histories, translation from Spanish to English of affidavits and supporting documentation related to the cases, preparation of immigration forms and citizenship applications, and other on-demand tasks. My direct participation in these activities allowed me to gather data about the ways in which immigrants presented themselves; talked and wrote about their experiences of migration and violence; expressed their demands and concerns about going through the application for citizenship; showed their feelings, fears, frustrations, and hopes; made sense of their situations; and reacted to the formal and informal requirements of the application process. Furthermore, my participation also allowed me to observe the legal assistants, attorneys, and other ORA staff in their interactions with the immigrants (or “clients,” as they were called in the organization), such as how ORA staff expressed themselves, the verbal and body language they used with the clients and with their coworkers, their reactions to the histories of abuse, and their attitudes toward law enforcement officers and immigration authorities. I also participated in meetings related to immigration and women’s issues to which ORA staff were invited on a regular basis (such as meetings on legal advocacy and violence against women), which made it possible for me to collect primary data on how legal and social workers organize their activities and modify their services on the basis of changes in legislation and one another’s work experiences (e.g., in their discussions about successful or complex cases, or their conversations about lobbying activities). After my workday, I recorded my field observations in journal form, including not only immigrants’ and staff members’ stories but also my own role, feelings, and thoughts.²¹

I complemented my participant observation by performing personal interviews with the attorneys, legal assistants, and other ORA staff. Through these interviews, I gathered primary data on how nonprofit workers comprehended (made sense of, rationalized, felt about) and embodied (performed, implemented, applied) immigration and citizenship norms, rules, and regulations. I also addressed how they viewed themselves in their double role as subjects of law vis-à-vis the state and as officers of law in front of the immigrant applicants. What were their thoughts, perceptions, justifications, doubts, and feelings about their tasks and skills, their commitments toward the state and grantors, their responsibilities toward the local community, the immigrants, and their clients? How did they see themselves in their interactions with others? What would they like to change about their jobs and about gender violence and immigration laws? Although I had these issues in mind when I conducted my interviews, I did not follow a rigid form but instead adopted a more informal frame of dialogue with the interviewees, which let me “emphasize the informant’s world of meaning and utilize the informant’s categories of understanding”²² rather than my own. In this way, both the participant observation and the unstructured interviews allowed me to reduce the hierarchical filters of data gathering (I say reduce because filters and interpretation dynamics are always at play during research or any other human interaction), as I intended not to purposely frame the subjects’ thoughts, views, feelings, and experiences as they emerge and develop.²³

Archival research and secondary sources contextualized my primary data collection. I conducted archival research and analysis of the text of laws, bills, and acts related to gender violence, and of immigration procedures and regulations. I researched websites of organizations working for or against these issues in order to understand how related knowledge is built and shared. I looked into these organizations’ brochures, informative manuals, advocacy tool kits, publications, and other materials, which in general were part of their outreach strategies to inform people about gender violence legislation and the struggles for and against it. Such archival data helped me explore the formal framework (i.e., legal parameters, profiles, requirements, uses of language, references, tactics, and strategies) within which the state and nonprofits interacted with battered immigrants. Naturally, my research has been inspired by the state of the art of the literature about intimate partner violence against Latinas, which for the most part tended to be written from social work and health care perspectives with the end goal of improving the services offered to this particular group of survivors. Examples of this kind of research are the recent studies by Hazen and Soriano,²⁴ and Brabeck and Guzmán.²⁵ Specific patterns of intimate partner violence among or toward Latina women who were U.S.-born, immigrants, or seasonal migrant workers were gathered through interviews and surveys and statistically analyzed by Hazen and Soriano, who found “high rates of victimization”²⁶ for sexual, psychological, and physical aggression, and thus underscored “the need for culturally appropriate screening for intimate partner violence in health care and other settings that serve Latina women.”²⁷ Brabeck and Guzmán focused their research on Mexican-origin women to find differences and similarities between this group and other immigrant groups. They studied both the formal and the informal ways in which these women seek help to survive abuse and suggested strategies to better serve this population. On the one hand, they found that the vast majority of survivors had accessed “more than one formal help source”²⁸ (such as shelters, police, counseling, and legal and medical services) and had a positive yet constructively critical perspective on them—these findings countered “the popular stereotype of ‘backward, submissive’ battered Latinas and immigrant women.”²⁹ On the other hand, they found that “a slightly higher percentage”³⁰ of the survivors in their study had accessed informal sources of help over formal sources, and they did so with greater frequency. Most Mexican-origin survivors had reached out to, in order of importance, immediate family members, friends, the abuser’s family, religious officials, and coworkers; these findings showed that in this regard Mexican-origin survivors acted similarly to survivors from other countries. Battered Mexican-origin immigrants also made use of similar personal strategies to survive abuse (like avoidance, defensive, spiritual/psychological, social/familial, and escape strategies), but they found that many of these were “unhelpful” and thus “less effective in terms of surviving abuse than accessing informal and formal sources of help.”³¹

While such studies (gradually growing in number but still scarce) have been helpful in addressing the particular needs of diverse survivors, their exclusive focus on service provision has left broader questions unattended. The work by anthropologists Salcido and Adelman is, to my knowledge, one of the few exceptions in the academic literature devoted to Latina survivors of intimate partner violence, since it brings “a domestic violence perspective to immigration policy and an immigration perspective to domestic violence research.”³² By sharing the stories of four undocumented Mexican survivors, these authors defy dualistic understandings of migration as a documented/undocumented process, and medical interpretations of intimate partner violence as a pathological and traumatizing experience that must be successfully overcome. They show that battered immigrants may have become undocumented as a result of their battering and that they may have chosen to stay in the violent relationship as a survival strategy. Salcido and Adelman remind policy makers, researchers, and advocates of the contradictory and unequal character of immigration and domestic violence policies and call for a reconceptualization of intervention strategies for undocumented battered immigrants.

My work contribute...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• copyright Page
• Dedication
• contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Theoretical and Methodological Approach
• 2. Violence against Latina Immigrants and Immigration Law
• 3. Formal Barriers to Citizenship
• 4. Informal Barriers to Citizenship
• 5. Resisting Inequality
• 6. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author