Imagine for a moment that you are an immigrant in another country, a stranger in a strange land. You arrive, perhaps in the company of the man you married back home or perhaps to live with your new native husband. You’re probably poor, but your husband might have money. You don’t know anyone in this new place except your husband and possibly his family, and you don’t speak or understand a word of the language. For all intents and purposes, you are deaf and mute and invisible to everyone but your husband in this new place, utterly dependent on him with nowhere else to go, no-one else to turn to, and no way to communicate even if you did.
You might have married a good man, in which case you will be encouraged to learn the language of your new home, to make friends, to drive or find work if that is what you choose. He will make sure that your immigration is certified as soon as possible so that you are both citizens by law. Your children will go to school and grow up happy in your new life. Things don’t always work out this way though, and you didn’t marry a good man. Perhaps you come from a culture that arranges marriages or you simply had to cling to this man out of poverty or fear of trying to survive on your own, but he is anything but good. He hits you. He screams. He threatens, terrorizes, and demeans. He rapes you. If he is a legal citizen of your new home himself, he tells you that he could have you put in prison or deported if you make him angry or deny him anything he wants. If you have a child he might repeat all of these abuses on the child on top of promising that if you cross him or defy him at all he will make sure you and your child are separated forever. You are utterly alone, because he has done everything he could to keep your immigration status in limbo, he has isolated you so that you can’t learn the language of your new home, he has instilled a fear of everyone who could help you in your heart and, worst of all, depending on the culture you come from you might not even recognize that, at least in your new home, the things this man is doing to you are illegal and reprehensible.
There are resources and shelters out there for women in this situation, but they’re much more difficult to access; the already crippling obstacles that keep native women from reaching out for aid in abusive situations are compounded by language, cultural, and perceived legal barriers. But there is hope, in the form of La Amiga and the FVSS. La Amiga is an initiative within the Partnership to provide better, more thorough services for immigrant and non-English speaking women suffering from abuse, and since it began two years ago it has improved the lives of over 100 women who otherwise would have fallen through the cracks. The program received funding from the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga, and for that we thank them.
The services La Amiga provides seem like common sense when you think about them. At the core, all La Amiga really does is act as a combination of translator and caseworker for non-English speaking and especially Latina victims, but there is really more to it than that. She is familiar with the culture of the women she speaks with as much as she is with their language, and this does wonders when it comes to helping them. In addition, she has done things like put out Partnership fliers in Spanish so that Latinas can actually understand what is written on the ads and know how to get help*, created a video in Spanish that carefully walks women through the process of arriving at a shelter if they come at night or during another time when La Amiga or a translator isn’t present, and she makes sure that immigrant women trying to escape from abusive relationships understand that their husbands’ threats of deportation and separation from their children are not true as well as providing them with the resources to achieve full citizenship.
All of this appears to have worked. Before La Amiga nine out of every ten English speaking women who came to a shelter remained and made the transition to independence, whereas fewer than five in ten Spanish-speaking women did the same. Only seventeen Latinas sought any help at all in Shelters in 2007-2008. In 2008-2009 however, more than one hundred Latinas and other non-English speaking women (and don’t be fooled, she is as much a Chingu or a Mitr as she is una Amiga) sought assistance and nearly eighty-six percent of those women didn’t return to their abusers.
La Amiga’s name is Lydia Salva, and I sat down to speak with her recently about her work with the Partnership. Ms. Salva is an amazing, vivacious woman who has seen more of the world than most of us ever will. She is also remarkably humble for someone who has done so much to help so many people, but she explained to me that she doesn’t really do as much of the work as you might think. All she does for the women she helps is provide support and resources for them to use.
“The mission of the Partnership is, ‘Empowering people to build better lives,’ and I like that,” she said. “I think that’s good. The Partnership is an amazing team. They’re always training you, and they empower you to empower others.”
She told me a lot about the special concerns and threats facing immigrant women and especially Latinas that make them so vulnerable. “Statistically, the Latin American woman is the most abused woman in the United States, whether she’s married to an American or she’s married to a Latino,” she said. “Those three countries that have the highest rates of domestic violence are right here in Hamilton County.” The statistics back this up: the World Health Organization reports that nearly one in two women in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras is a victim of domestic violence and that the most abused of all foreigners living in the U.S. are Latinas born abroad. Lydia was adamant, however, that domestic violence and abuse can’t be laid at the feet of race or culture or nationality and used as a scapegoat. “Domestic violence is not limited to a culture to a language or to a social status. It’s the same, and the pain is just as bad.” She mused that all sorts of things could contribute to the higher rates of violence in Latin America, from Catholic veneration of Mary encouraging women to suffer silently with dignity as part and parcel to motherhood to the pretty much constant oppression and abuse of native peoples and those descended from natives by Spanish colonists and their white descendants. She did mention that a lot of abuse is tied to unemployment and joblessness and that as we see unemployment rise in the U.S. we are seeing a rise in domestic abuse as well. “It’s not an excuse. None of this excuses it, but they are explanations,” she said.
I asked her about the men who do the abusing, about what she thinks feeds into it and what, if anything, can be done to help teach them to break the cycle of violence themselves. “A lot of these guys that are abusing, they were probably victims themselves. They saw their mom, their grandmother get beaten and they never got help. So, I’m not excusing it but I’m also looking at that. Hopefully we can help them. You have to somehow educate the woman but also educate men,” she said. “One day, when I was doing a presentation, there was a group of about fifty and there were only like ten women and most of these were Guatemalans. So, when I was talking about domestic violence some of these guys, their eyes just got bigger and bigger when I explained it to them. And I remember I asked these guys, ‘Imagine you are a kid, and your daddy is beating your mom. What do you feel? What did you feel if that did happen to you? Did you feel pain? What was going through your heart?’ And I said to open your eyes, and in a lot of these guys I saw some tears. And I said, ‘Imagine what your children are feeling’ and a lot of them bowed their heads. I said, ‘If there was a program that could offer to show you how to handle your anger would you go?’, and so many of their heads nodded. A lot of these guys, they know something’s wrong, but they don’t know how to handle it. No one has told them how to, or what to do.”
After we had talked for a few minutes about her work and her experiences, Lydia introduced me to three of the women she has helped. Their names have been changed for their safety and privacy, but they were more than happy to speak with me about their experiences with La Amiga and the Partnership.
The first person I sat down with, who we’ll call Emerald, was a quiet Asian woman who apologized for her English frequently as we spoke. All three of the women apologized for their English this way, but I assured each of them as best I could that there was no need. I’ve been led to believe that English is one of the more difficult of the commonly studied languages to learn, and none of these women had even been studying it for more than three years yet were conversational. Emerald’s story from before she began her work with the Partnership can be found
So what has Emerald been up to? She has learned enough English to get by in day to day life. She has recently gotten her Nurse’s Assistant Certification, which was a very big deal for her since she was told by her teacher not to take the test at all because of her English. She, like the other two women, had come too far and done too much to be held back by something so trivial however, and she not only took the test but was one of only seven out of a group of fourteen to pass it. She has a fourteen year old daughter who is not only enrolled in my old high school, but who makes better grades there than I ever did. She is also Sylvia’s longest-running case – her citizenship is going to come through soon, she is working as a nurse’s assistant, and what she wants more than ever now is to go back to school to be a nurse so that she can do even more to help others.
The next person I spoke with was an Indian woman we’ll call Shelly. Shelly has only been in America for a year and has only been with the Partnership for 85 days out of that, but from what I saw her life is in the process of pulling a complete 180. Her English wasn’t fantastic but it was enough to understand one another most of the time if we spoke carefully, and it’s important to remember that she has reached this level of mastery after only three months! Shelly reminded me, more than anything else, of Virginia Woolf. I don’t think she’s a writer, but a lot of what she said centered on how amazing it was to have a place of her own, where she can make her own decisions about her life and that of her son, and that this is something she has never had before. She also told me that she is learning to drive, which is another amazing experience for her because before she came to the Partnership she didn’t know how to use buses or even how to read signs to get from place to place on foot and, since Hindi isn’t nearly as common a language in America as Spanish, she didn’t even have the resources of translators or an immigrant community to help her – she was mute and paralyzed without her husband, but now she is learning to speak and to move. “I stay in home, you know? And I don’t know anything – how I go, how I speak, how I go on the bus, but in 3 months I learn too much about this,” she said.
She also echoed what Lydia told me about how many women, whether it’s because they’ve never known a life that wasn’t abusive or because they come from a more strictly patriarchal culture, simply aren’t cognizant that their situations are abusive or wrong. “In our culture, I’m talking about only Indian people, they didn’t respect women this much. I learned here that women deserve respect, because she is everything, you know? She can do everything as a mother, wife, sister, and what men can do also.”
The thing that struck me most about my talk with her, and what has informed my thoughts on all the other women, was when I asked her about her experience as a Hindi speaker alone in America. She said the quote above about being alone in the home, and when I asked her what it was like to now know English she thought for a moment.
“I can speak now,” she said finally.
The final person I spoke with was a woman from El Salvador who we’ll call Emily. The first thing you notice about Emily is her ready smile and her sense of humor, two things Sylvia tells me she has only recently reclaimed. Like many of the Hispanic women the Partnership has helped since La Amiga began, what Emily told me about her experience had less to do with shelter and material assistance, and much more to do with advice and education. What the Partnership taught her, she told me, was how to spot a person who would be abusive to her, what to look out for. They taught her that she deserves better than a man who will beat her and her daughter does as well, and she has learned to make better choices in who she wants to be and in the people she chooses to be with.
Since Lydia had been so humble for most of the hour I tried to get some praise from Emily. “She doesn’t really want to brag, Emily, so brag for her if you could,” I said. They both laughed and exchanged a few words in Spanish, and then Emily took a moment to find the correct words before settling finally on something simple.
“She helps,” Emily said.
Honestly, I couldn’t think of a better way to describe or to compliment Lydia and the rest of the Partnership. They help.
*Without being able to understand the writing, a lot of fliers and ads for women’s shelters honestly look like ads for depression medication.
To show your appreciation for the Partnership and the work of La Amiga, please go to this link and vote for them for the People’s Choice Award!
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