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Manolo
Maqueira, SJ The following reflection is offered by the Fr Manolo Maqueira, SJ, on the conditions faced by young men and women living in the poor neighbourhoods of Guatemala City.
Powerlessness instead of rebellion When I first attempted to get close to young people in the most marginalized areas I did so with many preconceived notions. I thought that I would be dealing with young people who disagreed with what was happening in society, who rejected a series of social modes and who were interested in their gangs and drugs. I thought that I would come across young people with a strong dose of rebellious attitudes. As I began to immerse myself among this population, I was surprised to discover that just the opposite was true. I do not know if this is a localized experience, but I discovered that a sense of powerlessness was the fundamental characteristic. There is a powerlessness to participate in a society such as this one, which others may reject, but which is seen as an unreachable utopia for these young people. Utopia is defined by others as a place that does not exist, but which motivates one to advance toward it as a goal. For these young people, however, utopia is a place that does exist, but the path to it is blocked. There are no paths in their lives leading to this utopia. There are no paths to reach this world that is real, "the other world", that they see on television and perceive everyday in their own country. They move in a different world in which rebellion is absent. There is violence and aggression, but there is no struggle to leave it behind or change it. This leads to low self-esteem. What shocked me most when we went to talk to these young people was that they repeated two things: "we are bad" and the desire to "be normal". These were two phrases that were repeated often by everyone. They also repeated phrases like: "my family tells me what is good, but I chose what is bad"; "The more bad things I did, the less people loved me"; "I make my family suffer"; "In the group we learn how to be bad. In the group we only learn to do evil things. We like to kill. We only think about killing, about revenge, about violence. We are only concerned about ourselves, we do not care about anyone else". These are phrases that reflect a sense of powerlessness. The terrible thing for me about these young people is that they are like a mirror reflecting all the frustrations they have experienced since childhood with their parents, stepparents, older siblings, etc. They seem to accumulate the failures of those who went before them. In most of the cases their parents have failed. Their parents are generally people from the interior or the highlands who came here (Guatemala City) ready to work. They believed that they would find work and progress, but they did not progress. Their lives since childhood are full of frustrations and powerlessness, of believing that they can do nothing in life. Their lives are like mirrors in which you can see the reflection of many young who do not have jobs. They may not belong to a gang, but they have nothing to do. There is a large number of alcoholics who can be seen in any of our marginal areas. Women struggle more than men There is a difference in the situation faced by men and women. I think that women do not give up as easily as men. Women seem to be more resistant with more love. I do not know how to explain it, but they seem to be more responsible. Women, faced with the situation in which their children live, tend to fight. Men, on the other hand, can leave. They feel that they are not capable of caring for their wives. I met a young indigenous couple, he was 17 and she was 15, and they had a newborn babe when they arrived here. They did not know anyone and lived in one room. I was called because the child had died. I was called to take care of them and say the mass. The neighbours called me. They had gone to the doctor the day before. The child was four months old and they took him to the hospital. They did not have the money to pay the hospital fee for the test, so they went home and watched their child die that night. Two or three months later the young man was an alcoholic and the young girl had returned alone to her parents in El Quiché. The girl would not have gone home if they had had more children. The man would have left, as he was incapable of caring for his wife and child. Life was greater than him, he could not win the battle in this society. He lost. The woman stays with the children and fights. She struggles washing floors, washing clothes, doing whatever is necessary. She never stops struggling. This reality creates a kind of woman that has influence on the children. I think this is a topic that needs to be researched: the influence of a marginalized mother in a marginalized culture. A mother who has to face a tough life, a mother who is aggressive toward the man who left her, who probably abused her, a mother who, sensing aggression in her surroundings, tends to insulate the family around a closed nucleus. The child learns very early that the house is good and the outside is bad, but the child also lives on the outside and is educated in the streets about what is bad. Outside the home he or she learns what is bad, that what his/her mother does is good and the world itself is bad. This said, however, I do not think that women have a higher self-esteem. Women struggle more, but this does not create self-esteem. When I interview young women who belong to gangs and ask why they join, they say they "want to be like the boys". Joining the gang means being like one of the boys. Even if it means being like marginal boys, it is better than being a girl. By joining a gang they adopt the attitude young men have toward life. There is obviously some degree of self-esteem in each of them. For young women, curiously, their principal aspiration is being able to live on their own away from their family. Something that comes up often and piques my curiosity is the issue of the maquiladoras (assembly factories). In our view we often see the maquiladora as an exploitation, but for many young women it is a source of liberation. This is even more important on the internal level, because it allows them a degree of freedom from the husband. It gives them the freedom to search for what they want because they earn a salary. Fear of adulthood I think this conclusion is drawn from the same sense of powerlessness. When I ask them, "What does it mean to be an adult", they respond that an adult is someone who has responsibilities, someone who takes life seriously. One of their responses is: "We still have time to have fun in life". Adults have to think about things. Young people, on the other hand, feel a sense of powerlessness, because they do not know if they can be responsible. They prefer to see life as a joke, because they are afraid. Joining a gang is a way of prolonging their youth, of avoiding responsibility. When they do take on responsibilities, they often feel incapable to meeting their commitments. One the saddest things I see around my house is young women at the age of 21 or 22 with two or three children living with their mothers. The young men also live in the same neighbourhood, but separate with their families. Many of them tried to form a family. They were together for a year or maybe a bit longer. They had two children. They got together again and had a third child, but they do not feel capable of forming a family. They return to their group of friends, because they do not feel capable of accepting responsibility. They are moving backwards. The gang frees them once more of their responsibilities. Violence Violence is a fatality. It is like a destiny from which one cannot free oneself. First, the young people here are born into violence. Their homes are tremendously violent. As children even their mothers, their good mothers who would even kill to protect them, are violent. Life itself is violent here, it hits people hard. I am impressed by the figure of the mother, who is adored. The image of the mother is the strongest thing they have. I find it interesting to hear a young man, who might have killed five or six other young men, say "Mom, don’t hit me" or see his mother give him a beating in front of his friends. They are born into violence. When one grows up amid abuse and humiliation, one tends to become insensitive to these horrors and repeat the pattern of abuse to resolve problems. They learn from childhood that problems are solved with violence, because that is how their parents solved their problems. Any problem, any discussion, is solved with violence. Children learn that in life you either learn how to hit or are hit. There are not many options. The absence of a father, which produces insecurity and a sense of abandonment, is violent. The fact that children have to work when they are as young as 10 and 11 is a form of violence. At first, children think that work is like playing, and they like to play and have access to some money. A child that starts working at 10, however, tries to escape from work by the time he or she is 15. They might be unable to work for the rest of their lives. Lack of affection is another form of violence. They live in a world where it is prohibited to show affection. This is a violation of their personality, because they are not allowed to express affection. It is world in which they experience pain from childhood. Every time there is a corpse in the street there is a group of children watching and laughing. They go from one funeral to the next. Violent death is something normal to them. They are also treated violently because they live in a marginalized world. When the police arrive, they arrive swinging clubs. They are beaten if they are brought to jail. When they are detained there is no justice, no law, nothing. When they are arrested they know that they will not be released until they pay a bribe, regardless of whether or not they committed a crime. Violence is exercised against them and they have no recourse but to react violently. One of the young men I interviewed, who is now dead, said: "The existence of violent groups forces you to join a violent group". This is a dramatic sequence for me. Last night I spoke to four mothers who are concerned because their sons have been threatened by other groups and can no longer go to school. The boys are in the sixth grade and they do not belong to any group. These boys have to stop going to school for safety reasons. The violence unleashed by young men is like exercising a kind of local power. It is a mechanism for denying that they are powerless. Humiliating or causing someone harm is a way of retaliating for the abuses that they themselves suffer. At other times violence is like an explosion, not of rebellion but self-marginalization. Because I do not want to be marginalized I will brake the rules and marginalize myself because that is what I want. By marginalizing myself, by choosing to be bad, I blame myself. Finally, violence can be a form of self-punishment, a form of suicide. This is when I do not direct my violence at "others" but at people like me, those who belong to my world, who are bad like me. What would a "Jubilee Pastoral" look like in this context? The reason for many consequences, among them violence, is the lack of self-esteem. Any kind of pastoral work has to reinforce self-esteem, this is key. The first pastoral step is to accompany young people. This accompaniment at times means sharing their sense of powerlessness. How do we get close to them? The fact that people from the Church are close to them makes them feel that they are important at least to someone. This is the first discovery. Many of these young people feel as though they have no meaning for anyone else in the world. When you interview them they speak with pride, because it is probably the first time that anyone from outside their world has listened to them. It makes them feel good because they feel as though they are important to someone. Another key for this kind of pastoral work is affection. These young people have never felt affection in their lives. The only kind of affection, of feeling loved, comes from the mother. In many cases, however, the mother spends the entire day out of the house because she has to support the family. And in order to support the family, mothers also become slaves to the violence. They mix love with violent authoritarianism, because this is how they were taught to love. When someone breaks this cycle and shows tenderness, shows them they are the object of tenderness and caring, they are working profoundly to increase self-esteem. There is a Christian community in our neighbourhood, but it has also been beaten down. All of the members of our Church council, for example, have children who are in trouble: daughters who are living on their own, sons in prison, children living on the street, etc., so the Christian community also has difficulty in getting its message across. The central problem of our religious message is that we are working within a situation in which we cannot tell the people to do something. We cannot tell them that they need to change society. It is even difficult for us to form groups in our community ... because they are embarrassed to be from here. When we ask them where they are from they mention somewhere else. The only people proud to be from our community are the gangs, because they accept their marginality. Young people do not want to be from our community, but to be young people from somewhere else. This is their goal in life. Their identity is their lack of identity. How do you break through this difficult situation? It is possible through the formation of very small groups that are well aware of what is going on around them. How do you offer identity where marginality is the key? You do this by separating geographic marginality from personal marginality, accepting the first but rejecting the second. In other words, admit that I am marginalized geographically, economically and socially, but I am not marginal as a human being. This is what our pastoral work must aim at, which is difficult. The easiest thing for them is what is offered by the evangelical churches. These churches offer the people even more reasons to remain marginalized. First, there is the evangelical fanaticism: "I have converted and am good. I am one of the good, and the rest of you are evil". The next step is reinforcing what was learned during childhood, that everything is evil. The only thing that can save you is God. You do not have to fight for salvation, salvation comes through God. On the other hand, in the Catholic Church we complain and tell you "you have to struggle so that young people can be different". Our message is much slower. It is closer to the people, it is about them accepting their own reality. I think it is the most effective message in the long run. It encourages people to accept that they are marginalized, but not in spirit. They are not marginalized God. Ref.: LADOC, vol. XXX, n. 3, Jan./Feb. 1999.
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