Abused Women Share Pain, Hope

It seemed like a simple enough request: List your dreams, the things you hope for in life.

Around a large table, the women took turns, speaking in Spanish, sometimes so softly that the others had to lean in to catch the words.

They said they wanted education--for their children, for themselves. One asked shyly for happiness, another for love. But when the group that calls itself Mujeres Latinas en Accion turned to the heavyset woman with a gap where her front teeth should be, she just shook her head, shoulders slumped.

“Don’t have any,” she said. “Don’t have any dreams.”

Feeling flattened by life is nothing new for the women who gather each Wednesday night in Pacoima. All have been victims of domestic violence. Some still face husbands and boyfriends whose fists and insults beat them up.

Together, they are trying to shed the feeling that being mistreated is simply their fate. Bit by bit, the women in their 20s and 30s who started the group last spring have convinced women to join them.

Most have been brought up very traditionally, to submit to the will of their husbands. Rather than question their spouses’ behavior, they have questioned their own worth.

Partly, it’s cultural, said Jeannette Salazar, one of the group’s founders, whose Mexican grandfather married her off when she was a teenager to a man twice her age.

“It’s being Catholic. It’s thinking that, being married by the church, they have to take it,” said Salazar of her own experience and that of some of the other women.

And because most of the women are very poor, without legal papers, without much English or faith that the system is on their side, few have ever known that they had anywhere--or any right--to turn for help.

Recently, the group of about 40 women celebrated news from a 30-year-old mother of two from Mexico, whose husband travels to Mexico for work. Last year, she found out that he had another woman there.

Now, she and the children rent a room not much bigger than a box.

“It has no window. But the bathroom has a small window,” she said. “It’s not much, but I feel safe.”

To place women in new homes, the group’s organizers scour the Internet and phone books for ideas. They call shelters, looking for beds. They learn as they go. Experience with abuse is their only expertise, but it counts, they say.

“The group can help, because we know what it’s like,” said Minerba Salazar, another founder. “We don’t need a degree in psychology.”

The idea for the group, whose name means Latin Women in Action, came out of conversations in the Pacoima Urban Village Family Resource Center, a grass-roots nonprofit organization whose aim is to give poor families tools in such areas as parenting and job training.

It was in the organization’s computer classes that a few women started talking and found that they shared a history of abuse. Soon they were reaching out to other women--whose needs they sensed by the way their hands shook over the keyboard in computer class or the way they suddenly stopped showing up for lessons.

Newcomers to the Wednesday night sessions come because women they trust have told them to, and usually they come warily.

“They look at us like we’re going to talk bad about their husbands,” said Salazar of the many older women who now attend. “But it’s not about that. It’s about finding strength inside.”

That can take a long time.

“The women, they come in shy. They’ll come real quiet. But sooner or later, they’ll start talking,” she said.

When a woman opens her mouth at last to tell her story, everyone in the room claps loudly.

They clapped loudly, too, at the start of a recent meeting, when they surprised one young woman with presents and a huge pot of pozole, a Mexican soup. It was her 25th birthday.

The meeting focused on fear--on how to accept it and get past it.

As an exercise, Ines Ramirez, who led the discussion, had the women stand up, shut their eyes and imagine a happy, calm place.

As she talked, one woman wept silently, holding a crumpled, mascara-streaked tissue to her eyes.

Ramirez passed out crayons and paper with the outline of a body on it. She asked the women to use colors to show where in their bodies they felt different emotions--red for anger, blue for sadness, green for jealousy, black for fear, brown for guilt and yellow for happiness.

The weeping woman, who was afraid to reveal her name, colored the head green, the feet brown, the body a thick black.

“No yellow,” she said softly, when asked to show her drawing. “No yellow.”

She wants happiness, she said after the meeting. She wants to leave her husband. They have been married for 19 years, she said. Only the first few were happy. He doesn’t let her go out without his permission. He won’t let her learn to drive. He invites all his friends over to drink. Then, in front of his friends, he throws the food she makes on the floor. For more than 10 years, he’s had another woman.

Meanwhile, the woman said between sobs, she spends her days in a factory and cleaning houses, paying the rent because her husband doesn’t work.

In the meeting, the woman did not share her story with the group. She simply asked in a whisper if anyone knew a driving teacher. Over pozole, the organizers gently began talking to her about her options.

And as the group filed down the stairs late in the evening, the woman without dreams was given a homework assignment: to start having them and believing in them.

“I have panic attacks. I can’t breathe,” she said. “But I come up here and somehow I feel better.”