Machismo #1 By ***Irisol Gonzalez-Vega***

Growing up, I thought to love meant to serve, to endure. I thought you had to be the mujer perfecta and never leave, to be loved.

I am a proud Latina, daughter of immigrants from México who grew up in a hard working family, seeing my father work 6 days a week as a construction worker to put food on the table and my mother in a factory to make ends meet. My father immigrated to the United States at the young age of 17, having to survive on his own many times. At home in México, love was equated with hard work. Therefore, if he worked hard, he knew he was doing a good job and was a good son. Despite his hard work ethic, my grandfather never openly professed his love. He never gave my father hugs, much less proclaimed “I love you”. “As a result, my father was never taught what love was, only sacrifice, which he inevitably passed to my mother and whole family” (Ornelas, 2023, p. 2).

As Latina mujeres and women of color, we are never taught to have high expectations of partners, to never settle, and most importantly to love ourselves first.

When my mother married my father, she noticed “he would get angry easily and lose his temper” (Ornelas, 2023, p.3). In response, she demonstrated marianista tendencies, self-sacrificing herself continuously, denying her wants, needs, and desires with hope that she could change him (Gil & Inoa Vasquez, 1996, as cited in Ornelas, 2023). However, my father never changed, his behavior only intensified. Ultimately, due to my dad’s temper and machismo, he pushed my entire family away, strongly affecting my brothers (p.3). They not only stopped speaking to him but became him, “unable to show emotions and act out in anger”, unable to process their feelings (p.3).

I became conditioned to obey men, believing it was dangerous if I trusted my intuition.

As I got older, I too started to adopt marianista behavior: “My mother influenced me to be a self-sacrificing woman in order to have men respect me. Her inability to say ‘no’, in order to keep the peace, was passed down to me. I grew up with the wrong idea of love, and inevitably sought the wrong kind of love from the world” (Ornelas, 2023, p.4). My father’s machista and my mother’s marianista behaviors influenced me to jump from romantic relationship to relationship for 8 years looking for both a father figure in a partner, as I never actually felt love from my father, and an older brother since he stopped communicating with us altogether. Since I never really had secure, healthy love in my home, I stayed in emotionally and mentally harmful relationships because that is what I was accustomed to. I continually tried to change the essence of who I was to make them happy and stay, because deep down, I never had a consistent male figure in my life. Ultimately, accepting any type of love, losing myself in the process.

However, now at age 26, I realized I wanted to carve a different future for myself. After many years of anxiety and depression, I realized that I needed break out of that cycle of violence to truly become liberated from the constraints of intergenerational trauma. I realized I needed to become courageous enough to trust myself and start to soothe my inner niña.

“I will take up space even when it hurts. I will stand with my head held high, even when I doubt myself. I will prove them wrong, even if I have to provide it all to myself first”-Prisca Dorca Mojica Rodríguez

I am currently on my own healing journey, sanando mi corazón y mente. Part of my journey has been discovering the true meaning of love. Earlier this year, I conducted research on what self-sacrificial love (marianismo) means for Mexican migrant, Catholic mothers in my Master’s program. One of the most profound lessons I learned from my research participant Martha was “El amor no lastima”. As a mujer chingona who endured numerous years of domestic violence, she powerfully taught me that healthy love helps you grow and affirms your value as a woman.

"La sociedad y la cultura hacen de las mujeres seres que aman a los otros. A las mujeres les ha sido prohibido el amor propio. Es la mayor perversión de la cultura patriarcal"-Marcela Lagarde.

At the end of the day, the longest relationship we have is with ourselves, and we can no longer continually sacrifice ourselves to keep the peace, compromising our mental and physical health. We must have more open and honest conversations in our Latinx homes to stop this toxic narrative ahora! If we do not speak out and make men uncomfortable, our young girls will continue to become indoctrinated, giving of themselves to their deathbed.

References:

Art: Gonzalez, Irisol. https://www.irisolgonzalez.com/machismo-1

Instagram: @Irisolgonzalezart

Lagarde, M. (2001). Claves feministas para la negociación en el amor. Puntos de Encuentro.

https://we.riseup.net/assets/119761/claves-feministas.pdf

Ornelas, Jessica Guadalupe, "CALLADITAS NO NOS VEMOS MÁS BONITAS: TESTIMONIOS OF MEXICAN MIGRANT CATHOLIC MOTHERS’ RESISTANCE TO MARIANISMO" (2023). Master's Theses. 1471.

https://repository.usfca.edu/thes/1471

Pineda-Madrid, N. (2011). Suffering and salvation in Ciudad Juárez. Fortress Press.

Rodríguez, P. D. M. (2021). For brown girls with sharp edges and tender hearts: A love letter to women of color. Seal Press.

Additional Resource Describing How Love Can Become Violence:

Pérez, V. F., Fiol, & E. B. (2013). Del amor romántico a la violencia de género. Para una coeducación emocional en la agenda educativa. Profesorado. Revista de currículum y formación de profesorado, 17(1), 105-122. https://www.ugr.es/~recfpro/rev171ART7.pdf

National, State, and Local CA DV Resources:

National Domestic Violence Hotline Number: 800-799-7233

CA Partnership to End DV: https://www.cpedv.org

East Los Angeles Women’s Center: https://www.elawc.org