That’s No Victim, That’s a Graduate With Honors

Guadalupe Vidales made time to talk to me Wednesday morning, in the thick of finals and on the eve of her graduation with honors from UC Irvine. High-strung as a hummingbird in spring, she plopped her large purse on a patio table outside a campus cafe, opened her book, “The Authoritarian Specter,” and started to squeeze in a little studying while I stood in line to order breakfast.

When I returned with coffee and egg sandwiches, Lupe produced a blue folder full of newspaper clippings about her, neatly preserved in clear plastic sheets. Soon, the articles were spread across the table on top of her research paper on Latina victims of domestic violence. The articles told her life story in two languages: Immigrant woman moves to Huntington Beach from Mexico City and overcomes language barriers and beatings from an abusive husband on her road to self-improvement and professional success.

Lupe, obviously no novice at being interviewed, wants to know my intentions before we start. She doesn’t want to be portrayed as a victim anymore, she says, speaking in her snappy, rapid-fire Spanish. She points to an article about her award as outstanding student of 1995 at Orange Coast College. Scrunching her face, she registers disapproval of a quote attributed to her and highlighted in bold type: “My life became a living hell.”

She doesn’t deny saying it. In fact, the rest of the quote is more specific and revealing: “I could see that I was becoming old and ugly. My kids would always see me sad and crying.”

Seven years ago, her life must have felt like eternal torment, tied to a bad marriage that, out of custom and religion, she believed should last forever. But nowadays, though she continues to speak publicly about her experiences, Lupe doesn’t care to see another story about how she suffered, broke away and struggled to survive on her own with two small children.

“I won the [outstanding student] award for what I had accomplished, not for what I had been through,” Lupe said. “Being a single mother and a victim of domestic violence, that simply served to give me passion for my work.”

Lupe’s accomplishments, not her suffering, earned the spotlight Friday night at a special Honors Convocation for UCI graduates. Her passion has made her magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and has won her awards for outstanding contribution to the community and excellence in research. Tonight, Guadalupe Vidales Ibarra, 38, is scheduled to receive her bachelor’s degree in psychology and social behavior.

And she’s already been accepted to UCI’s doctoral program in criminology, law and society. In her application to the graduate school, where she’ll continue her research into domestic violence, Lupe states: “I want to know how and why certain populations resist seeking legal assistance and how state institutions can increase the access of minorities to legal help.”

As she sat under the morning sun on the Irvine campus, the weightiness of her concerns seemed to float away. It may sound strange, but I laughed frequently while Lupe told her sad story. She used amusing, Mexican expressions that gave tragic anecdotes a lighthearted touch. Plus, she was wearing a blazer in bright Mexican pink and whimsical half-moons dangling from hippie-style earrings.

Maybe she was just too busy this week to get sentimental. But she never came close to crying during our talk. She reported her own story with an investigator’s wry detachment.

“She represents the power of transforming a painful and negative experience into a benefit for society,” said Vice Chancellor Manuel Gomez when he briefly came up to our table.

Lupe did a lot of crying when she transferred to the university in 1996, feeling alienated and isolated. Part of it was the typical transfer-student blues. But she also felt quite different from most of her college classmates, even the other Latinas.

“I don’t resemble anybody, do I?” she asked in Spanish, with the right answer in mind. (“Me parezco a alguien? No, verdad?”)

Lupe is older than most undergraduates and speaks English with a heavy accent. She’s a doctor’s daughter, a fair-skinned former student of pharmacology at a private Jesuit university in the Mexican capital. She had eight siblings and many well-to-do girlfriends (ninas popis) whose parents sent them to Europe and the United States to study.

Lupe’s family fell on hard times when her father became ill. In 1988, she decided to come to Orange County, where her grandfather had practiced dentistry for decades, and she moved in with a married sister.

Lupe met her husband in English class. From this point, her tale becomes all too common. She fell for his good looks and his charm. They were already engaged when he yanked her hair in the car during an argument over money, but she told herself she could help him change.

After they were married, she prayed that he would change. Instead, he forced her to cut the long, silky hair that had garnered so many compliments.

But she says what hurt her most was the time her ex-husband tore up a picture of the pope, an act of contempt for her Catholic beliefs. It was her faith that had kept her in the marriage, a purgatory she was meant to endure, and endure with fervor, to earn her place in heaven.

To her, divorce was unthinkable. It would bring shame on her family and ruin her future. In Mexico, she said, divorced women are still considered discarded goods by machos who value virginity. (“Ya no eres virgen, ya vales menos.”) The fear of society’s disapproval kept her trapped.

In her research, Lupe has studied the attitudes that prevent Latinas from using services to escape abusive relationships. In her current honors paper, she uses charts and graphs to capture the cultural values that enslave them, like they did her.

Faith: “I must leave things in God’s hands.”

Fatalism: “It’s the cross I must bear.”

Family: “How can I leave my children fatherless?”

For Lupe, the fear of forever traumatizing her children overcame all that psychological baggage. In court documents she says she filed at the time and to this day she recalls how her ex-husband hit her repeatedly. It even happened, she told me, the day before she gave birth to her second child, Karla, in 1992. Her son, Franklin, was just a year old at the time. She didn’t want them to grow up with the bad example of an abusive home.

Lupe decided to break the cycle of violence and her mother, Aura, encouraged her, saying, “I’d rather have a divorced daughter than a dead one.”

With her son and infant girl, Lupe took shelter at Interval House. There she met Nancy Marquis, a bilingual counselor who understood her culture and helped her understand the services available in this country. She helped Lupe get back into school and get her certificate as a domestic violence counselor.

“She was the one who gave me the energy to do it all,” Lupe said. “She was a base for all of us, Latinas and non-Latinas. I adore her.”

Tuesday night, Lupe also spoke at a “graduation” program for Project Self-Sufficiency in Huntington Beach, a city-run program that helps low-income, single parents get on their feet. She thanked the group for helping her find affordable housing and make her studies possible.

Marilyn Quayle, wife of the former vice president, made a surprise appearance at the event, top-heavy with politicians. To her credit, she noted all the children in the room, squirming on the floor under their mother’s chairs, sucking lollipops and making funny, messy noises with their mouths.

“They watched you grow,” Mrs. Quayle said. “They watched you change. They watched you get excited about life. What you’re showing your children is, no matter what happens, when you have a dream, when you live in this country, you can make it happen.”

Lupe, who became a U.S. citizen, says she misses Mexico but she doesn’t plan to go back. She believes she can accomplish more in her adopted nation.

“In Mexico, I would be a divorcee stuck in my mother’s house and judged by everybody else,” she said. “Here, people respect me for who I am. Here, I know I can change the world.”

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.