Family Secrets

Stories of Incest and Sexual Violence in Mexico

Gloria González-López

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479866175
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Mexikanische Geschichte

“My breasts stopped growing when my grandfather touched them,” confides ‘Elisa’, a young woman who recounts the traumatic incest and sexual abuse she experienced in childhood. In Family Secrets, Gloria González-López tells the life stories of 60 men and women in Mexico who, like Elisa, saw their lives irrevocably changed in the wake of childhood and adolescent incest. In Mexico, a patriarchal, religious society where women are expected to make themselves sexually available to men and where same-sex experiences for both men and women bring great shame, incest is easily hidden, seldom discussed, and rarely reported to authorities. Through gripping, emotional narrative, González-López brings the deeply troubling, hidden, and unspoken issues of incest and sexual violence in Mexican families to light. González-López contends that family and cultural structures in Mexican life enable incest and the culture of silence that surrounds it. She examines the strong bonds of familial obligation between parents and children, brothers and sisters, and elders and youth that, in the case of incest, can morph into sexual obligation; the codes of honor and shame reinforced by tradition and the Church, discouraging openness about sexual violence and trauma; the double standards of morality and stereotypes about sexuality that leave girls and women and gender nonconforming boys and men especially vulnerable to sexual abuse. Together, these cultural factors create a perfect storm for generations upon generations of unspoken incest, a cycle that takes great courage and strength to heal from and overcome. A riveting account, Family Secrets turns a feminist and sociological lens on a disturbing trend that has gone unnoticed for far too long.

1

En familia

Sex, Incest, and Violence in Mexican Families

“My breasts stopped growing when my grandfather touched them,” Elisa revealed in explaining her petite body, which has the appearance of a slender, flat-chested adolescent. Tearfully she described the sandpaper sensation of her maternal grandfather’s hands on her tender skin, an aging man who in his eighties fondled her breasts from age seven to eleven. Back then Elisa’s father’s behavior was also confusing to her. After his night shift as a cab driver in Ciudad Juárez, Elisa and her mom would patiently listen over lunch as her father shared the horror stories and dangers he experienced at work and how blessed he felt to be back home after a long night in the frightening streets of the city. Then, after lunch, he would take Elisa by the hand to accompany him for a nap that never felt right.

“You must change, you must change, because if you don’t, I kill you.” Helián still recalls the words that his father would repeat consistently while using his thumb to penetrate his anus during his childhood from ages three to eight. At the time, Helián was an effeminate boy who suffered in pain and confusion, not understanding what his father was trying to tell him with these horrifying actions and death threats. “But change what?” he wondered. Why would his father kill him? Helián never asked; he was afraid. At the age of eight, his father penetrated him anally with his penis and left him bleeding on the bathroom floor. He received medical attention, but the tragic event was never discussed in the family. When I interviewed Helián, he was living legally as Heliana in Monterrey, a college-educated, bright, beloved, and popular school teacher in her forties who takes self-prescribed hormones and dresses modestly. “Have you ever watched Tootsie?” Heliana asked me in an animated tone of voice, as she explained that she was neither transgender nor transsexual and that Dustin Hoffman offered her years ago a creative and humane way to survive in homophobic Mexico, where, to be an effeminate gay man with a soft, gentle voice was a death sentence.

“Why the fuck my parents took so much care of me, if in their own house their own sons abused me, and they did not even know about it!” Renata exclaimed with tears of rage. Sobbing, she described the scattered but graphic memories she began to experience vividly and with shock and confusion after she and her husband attended a spiritual retreat the year before we met for her interview in Mexico City. In her memories, it became more and more clear that her oldest brother forced her to have sex with him when she was four or six and he was seventeen or nineteen. Raised in an upper-middle-class family concerned about the dangers of the outside world, Renata and all of her siblings completed college while enjoying a pampered life of comfort and privilege, private schools, and at least one vacation trip to Europe. Renata’s parents, now deceased, will never know what she experienced with her brothers. Although she has told her sisters about it, she does not know if she will ever confront her brothers.

“Isn’t your stepdaughter becoming pretty? Why don’t you check her out?” Although Samuel felt confused by these questions asked by a woman he met through a chat room as he experimented with cybersex in his free time at a cybercafé in Guadalajara, the conversation also aroused his curiosity. Eventually he yielded to the temptation to engage in sexual activity with his eleven- or twelve-year-old stepdaughter. Carefully hiding his actions from his wife, he fondled her in her sleep and later undressed in front of her and kissed her deeply on the mouth. Eventually the guilt overcame him and he confessed to his wife about his cybersex activities and what he had done to the girl. His wife was devastated but appreciative of his honesty; together they sought professional help.

* * *

You have begun to read a book that will be very difficult to get through. Needless to say, the entire project was an emotionally challenging endeavor. After listening to each one of the life stories, however, I believe it would have been even more painful for me not to give life to this book.

This book is about the life stories of sixty Mexican women and men who, like Elisa, Renata, Helián, and Samuel, honored me with their trust and shared their most intimate and frequently untold stories of incestuous relationships and sexual violence in their families. I met and conducted in-depth interviews with these adult women and men in Ciudad Juárez, Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Monterrey in 2005 and 2006, and established contact with them through the generous support of activists, women’s groups, community organizers, and other professionals. I also include the insightful and thought-provoking lessons I learned from interviews with thirty-five of these professionals.1 Some of them include activists whose names now appear in publications about Mexico and human rights, policymaking, and laws aimed at protecting children and women.2

Incest in Mexico

Why write a book about stories of incest and sexual violence in Mexican families? As a Mexican feminist who identifies as a public sociologist studying sexuality-related concerns and topics affecting the well-being and living conditions of Mexican families, I realized in 2005 that it was time for me to choose the subject for my next project. At the time, I was interested in pursuing a project that would address the urgent needs of a community that had been close to my heart for about four years: Ciudad Juárez. Since 2001, I had been visiting this border city as a long-distance volunteer to run workshops on violence against women and gender inequality for community-based agencies in the city. I have a background as a couples and family therapist working with Latina immigrant women, including Central American women who were raped during war. The experiences of these women moved me to organize the workshops, and in 2005, I asked local activists how I could be of help as a researcher. “What kind of research is needed by the professionals who work with families that have experienced sexual violence?” I consistently inquired in these conversations. I learned that while other researchers were already highly involved in investigating the perverse disappearance and violence against hundreds of women in the city, other topics needed immediate attention, yet they had remained invisible and ignored. Through these informal conversations I learned that girls and women who seek help from community-based agencies rarely report that a stranger is the person exercising violence against them. Rather, it is frequently someone within their families—not outside the family—who has sexually assaulted or molested them. Yet, life stories about the people who endure these experiences have not been examined and published. Incest and other sex acts within families, I learned, were the best-kept secrets of women and their families. This was an unexplored enigma for clinicians and professionals who had read little or nothing about incest or related topics in Mexico. Their limited knowledge was based on what they had recently learned from publications written and published in the United States, such as the influential work of sociologist David Finkelhor. As I did preliminary research, I learned that my activist friends in Ciudad Juárez were correct: the social sciences have been complicit in this silence. To this day, the few publications on incest-related concerns in Mexican society include personal accounts or autobiographies, descriptive statistical examinations, legal and judicial themes, and studies on popular culture in the humanities. However, there is no empirical research to date about incest, sexuality, violence, and family life in Mexican society.3

This book is a feminist informed, sociological study that documents and discusses the life stories of Mexican women and men who have experienced sexualized acts, interactions, and relationships within their families and contrasting urban patriarchal cultures and economies. In the book, I explore why and how sex, in varying forms, may be used against the will of children and women and as a complex form of power, control, and everyday family life. The women and men represented in these stories grew up in families where silence and confusion around sexuality were an unquestionable norm. I allow the stories to speak for themselves and avoid concepts such as survivor and perpetrator—concepts that some of these Mexicans actually perceived to be too pathological, foreign, or offensive to even capture the complexity of their lives; I use “victim” selectively. The stories also expose the ways in which the thrills of voluntary sex are lived within family cultures of secrets, betrayal, and lies, and the mysteries of love and romance.

Why is sexual violence in Mexican families so under-researched and under-examined? I gained some insight into this silence through my interviews. In general, the silence around sexual activity in Mexican families creates an atmosphere of ambivalence and ambiguity in which sexual secrets fester. These cultural ambiguities are reinforced by the double standards of morality that disadvantage women within both the family and society, and by family ethics promoting the idea that women should serve the men in their families—all of which makes girls and young women especially vulnerable. In a patriarchal society where women are trained to be sexually available to men, a girl or a young woman who is forced to have sex by her uncle, for example, may perceive it as “normal” and never talk about it. This woman’s life may become an emotional labyrinth if these encounters become repetitive or seductive while she realizes that her uncle is loved by her own mother for being the generous source of economic support to her family. Some of the men that I interviewed who engaged in sex with other men of their same age group (for example, two adolescent male cousins) told me that it was difficult to know if their mutually consensual sexual encounters were always completely voluntary, or involuntary. They also explained that they were more distressed about the fact that they were having sex with another man than the fact that this man was a member of the family. The life stories that I gathered led me to question the very definitions of incest and to uncover deeper insights regarding the complex interplay of family, culture, and state that forms the backdrop of these sexual experiences. I also learned with certainty that Mexico is a profoundly sexist and homophobic society.

Studying Incest in Mexico: Writing about Mexican Families

Incest and sexual violence in families are prevalent in the history of many cultures and societies and are not exclusive to Mexican society. Incestuous activities have been identified in influential texts in Western and Westernized societies including but not limited to the Bible, and they have been examined across all academic disciplines covering human behavior. European and U.S. male intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Talcott Parsons, and Edvard Westermarck have theorized about incest from different historical periods, disciplinary perspectives, and cultural standpoints; anthropologists have offered groundbreaking revelations and examinations of these behaviors in different cultures, and psychiatrists, psychologists, and sociologists have looked at these patterns as well.

In the United States, pioneering books on incest include Kiss Daddy Goodnight (1978) by feminist writer and activist Louise Armstrong, Father-Daughter Incest (1981) by Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman, and The Secret Trauma (1986) by sociologist Diana Russell, who also conducted research on incest in South Africa.4 Sociologist David Finkelhor (1994) identified sexual abuse of children as an “international problem” in an ambitious and comprehensive study of twenty countries (with the United States and other developed nations included), highlighting the prevalence of these incidents involving blood relatives as well as paternal figures such as stepparents and adoptive parents across a wide variety of cultures and nations.5

Thus, although my focus is on Mexico, it is important to emphasize: Incest is not only a problem for this nation. Incest and sexual violence within families is a phenomenon that occurs in many societies around the world, as does sexual abuse at large.

For the purposes of this book, I consider the definition-in-progress I have suggested in the past, which actually emerged from this study: “Incest refers to sexualized contact (involuntary and/or voluntary, and the gray area in-between) within the context of the family; this may take place between individuals sharing the same bloodline and/or within close emotional family relationships and involving vertical (i.e., relatives in authority positions and minors or younger women) or horizontal relationships (i.e., relatives close in age).”6 Likewise, I am still working within the conceptual traps I discuss in this book and consider that involuntary incest takes place through a wide array of expressions of sexual violence.7 Incest is in fact diverse and complex, and it may involve varying degrees and sophisticated types of coercion. In chapter 5 I incorporate the concept of kinship sex as I look at a complex, nonlinear multidimensional continuum between coercion and consent. All concepts—incest, sexual violence, and kinship sex—are interconnected and examined within contexts of power and control dynamics, and relationships of gender inequality shaping family life.

The goal of Secretos de familia is to offer a close up view of incest and sexual violence where they exist in Mexican families while also zooming out the feminist sociological lens to provide a more structural analysis of these phenomena. In other words, this book is neither about Mexican families per se nor about family life in Mexican cultures. This book is only about the Mexican families where incestuous activities and sexual violence have become intricate labyrinths to be deciphered by the members of these families. Although the lines between non-incestuous families and incestuous families in Mexico may at times become fine and blurry, this book offers a critical perspective about the ways in which patriarchal beliefs and practices perceived as harmless and “normal” in mainstream, non-incestuous families may take perverse turns and create the nuanced and complex social conditions and circumstances that make girls, boys, and women vulnerable to the expressions of sexual violence I examine in this book. In other words, these Mexican-specific cases provide an opportunity to explore incest and sexual violence as sociological phenomena, rather than through an overly psychologized lens.

Because the book offers a contextual analysis, there are certain features of Mexican society that are significant in explaining incest and sexual violence at the social institutional level. As a social critic of the ways in which influential publications have promoted stereotypes about Mexican families, the book The Children of Sánchez comes to mind.

Repudiated by some and celebrated by others, The Children of Sánchez (1961) was first published in English by U.S. American anthropologist Oscar Lewis as an “autobiography” of a family living in Tepito, a working-class section located near the center of Mexico City. A movie based on the book was made years later, starring Anthony Quinn and other famous movie stars. I originally read the book in its Spanish version—Los hijos de Sánchez—as an undergraduate student in Monterrey. I had some form of ethnographic flashbacks of this book, especially when my informants shared detailed descriptions of crowded housing and vecindades (urban dwellings) in their recollections. At the end of my interviews, I also became aware of the sophistication of the life stories that women and men had shared with me with so much honesty. I thought about relevant methodological and conceptual concerns and limitations. For instance, the so-called concepts of the culture of poverty and machismo did not capture the complexity and richness of the stories I listened to for specific reasons.

First, Lewis suggests his controversial paradigm, the culture of poverty. From this perspective, people growing up in enduring poverty develop specific attitudes and behaviors, an entire value system that is reproduced and sustained across generations. That is, the poor trapped in vicious cycles of poverty develop a culture of their own—“poverty is ...