VIOLENT TIES

THE ROLE OF KINSHIP IN STATE AND GENDERED VIOLENCE FOR SALVADORAN MIGRANT WOMEN

Resumo

In the 21st century, El Salvador has come to occupy a notorious position as one of the most violent countries in the Western hemisphere and the world. While built on a history of authoritarianism and civil conflict, El Salvador’s current violence is driven by novel dynamics: securitization, corruption, and hyper-masculine competition between armed groups including transnational gangs. In this context gendered violence has risen dramatically, with femicides increasing at a rate that outstrips the growth rate of murder and assault metrics more generally. Just as increasing numbers of Salvadoran women find themselves driven to migrate by violence, the treatment of asylum seekers in the United Stated has moved rapidly towards a punitive spectacle of “enforcement” characterized by criminalization and abuse of migrants, including strategic assaults on kinship ties and the rights of parents and children. Thus, the treatment of asylum-seeking women in the U.S. replicates forms of gendered violence that they are often fleeing, which similarly leverage kinship and family affection to violent ends. The present research investigates one component of this transnational regime of gendered violence that impacts Salvadoran women and exposes them to risks. Our contribution is to illustrate and analyze the role of kinship within that violent system. We do so through analysis of a composite narrative constructed from asylum seekers’ stories, utilizing a methodological strategy innovated by Lynn Stephen (2016), and building on foundational scholarship on kinship and migration (Parreñas 2005; Ábrego 2014). Through the composite narrative, we trace the ways womens’ kinship ties and their roles caring for kin serve as a point of leverage for abusers and violent actors, increasing their vulnerability to displacement. Once displaced, women encounter similar forms of hypermasculine policing and weaponized kinship in the U.S. immigration enforcement system, and in the “multigenerational punishment” inflicted over time by legal exclusion and legal violence (Enriquez 2019, Menjívar and Ábrego 2012). As we conclude, these systems produce a kind of social death (Patterson 1982) for displaced women by weaponizing or annihilating their kin ties—often through law or by agents acting under color of law. This violence disproportionately impacts indigenous, poor, marginalized women who face intersectional oppression and bear trauma from civil war (Speed 2019), revealing once more the ways policies that are race and gender-neutral on their face can nonetheless operate to target marginalized people. Rather than understand these forms of violence as an accumulation of private acts, we conceptualize kin-based gendered violence as organized throughout the U.S.-Latin American regime of state violence. Throughout, we attend to the ways that the subjection and manipulation of women through their kin ties and relations of care is embedded within laws and the de facto practices of law enforcement and other authorities whose impunity enforces machista authority and social relations. The authors highlight that kinship is also a resource for women—both in terms of mutual aid and solidarity within social networks, and as a resource to strategically leverage social recognition, survive and resist the transnational regime of gendered violence (ex. Rivera Hernandez 2017).