Victims Put Their Feelings About Domestic Violence on the Line

The event appeared to be a flop. It was touted as the launching of a powerful exhibit that would awaken the students of Cerritos College to the nightmare of domestic violence.

The campus’ Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance had arranged to display multicolored T-shirts decorated with personal statements by women who had been beaten or abused by their boyfriends or husbands.

The idea originated with the Clothesline Project, started by a group of women in Cape Cod, Mass., in 1991. It was supposed to make people ask questions, give them a taste of what the victims feel, said the Cerritos College event’s organizer, Janet Sosa, a sophomore.

The T-shirts--most of them borrowed from an earlier exhibit at Cal State L.A.--were painted with messages like, “Mom, I understand why you stayed but I’m glad you were brave enough to leave. Love you, V.M.” Organizers invited students to paint their own shirts to add to the Clothesline.

Trouble was, the students who passed by the Student Center seemed more interested in eating lunch or hearing a nearby band play.

The event’s guest speaker, unwilling to compete with the musical noise, walked out. Organizers were forced to take their cause outside, setting up a table with paints, T-shirts and materials on domestic violence.

Not a good day, murmured Sosa, the disappointed organizer.

And yet, as the day wore on, one by one, they came.

“Can I have a shirt?” asked Holly, a 47-year-old student in ornamental horticulture wearing bluejeans and a cap. The teenagers at the table offered her a red one.

“Red’s too violent,” she said. They gave her a light blue one instead. While Holly began painting, a 48-year-old business student named Maria Valdez approached. She’d brought her own shirt from home.

“One time, he beat me so bad, I didn’t know who I was when I looked in the mirror,” she said.

The shirt belonged to her son. She wanted to paint her message on it because her ex-husband “battered him more to get back at me.” Valdez’s eyes teared up and she pondered her message.

Meanwhile, Holly was painting words on her shirt as fast as she could think of them.

“I survived broken bones, black eyes, knife wounds, bloody noses . . . “ she began.

Valdez turned to Holly and asked, knowingly: “How long?”

“Ten years,” Holly said.

“Twenty-one years,” Valdez said. Holly said she ran away from her abusive partner in 1980. She declined to give her last name because she still worries he may find her and try to hurt her again. She had too much to express this day; she needed two T-shirts.

“I am a valuable and worthwhile person and I deserve respect,” she wrote. “I am proud that I left. It took guts and courage not just fear.”

Holly said she finally decided to leave after a woman at a domestic violence shelter told her she didn’t want to read about her in the newspaper.

“You know what that means?” she said, her eyes watery. “The obituary.”

A broken nose and two black eyes later, she left.

By now Valdez finally knew what she wanted to say.

“It is better to walk away than to be carry away,” she wrote in red paint. On the grass, Nikki Lucero sat down with a shirt and began painting a female figure behind a red brick wall. The 30-year-old student, working toward her teaching assistant’s certificate, had copied the image from a pencil sketch she’d done. It had more than a dozen thought-bubbles emerging from the female figure with memories like, “When I was pregnant, you beat me,” and, “Your pet name for me was ‘stupid.’ ”

The brick wall around the figure, Lucero explained, symbolized how she felt. “I’m in prison and I just can’t get out,” she said, breaking out into uncontrollable sobs. She’d left a man but was still haunted, she said.

As the women shared their stories, students a decade or two their junior listened silently, often nodding reassuringly or trying to hold down the corners of the shirts as they blew in the wind.

The organizer, 19-year-old Sosa, told a story about a boyfriend whose jealousy got out of control, who’d grab her and shove her. When her family ordered her to end the relationship, she saw him secretly.

“He did make me feel good,” she said, “except for those times.” Last fall she left him, and she thought she was over it--until the T-shirts from the Cal State L.A. exhibit arrived at Cerritos.

“It made me realize I wasn’t OK,” she said. “What’s to stop one from getting into another relationship like that?”

She said she would go to her first meeting of an off-campus support group for victims of violence.

But the one thing Sosa did not do on the day the exhibit opened was write a message on a T-shirt distilling her own experience.

She couldn’t, she tried to explain several days after the three-day exhibit closed. “I’m not there yet.”