Before I began my Tinker research project in Venezuela this summer, I had been intrigued by the symbolic importance of mother figures in Caribbean societies. I was interested specifically in the historical relationship between the breast-feeding woman and the children she nurtured. From the 17th through much of the 20th century (and even within certain socio-economic groups today) Caribbean infants are nursed by women other than their birth mothers. Often these women have been considered socially and racially inferior to the class they serve (formerly as slaves and presently as low-paid employees), yet paradoxically, they have held the power of largely shaping the subjectivity of each generation’s elite youngsters. Thus, the mother or her surrogate often holds the keys to the formation of the citizen-subjects of Caribbean nation states.
I had always been curious about Venezuela’s unique socio-political position in Latin America (and indeed the world) since Hugo Chávez’s ascent to power in 1999. I had the hunch that Chávez’s “21st century socialism” would make creative use of the maternal figure to use and exploit her unique qualifications as (pro)creator of nationhood and nationality. The renamed Bolivarian State of Venezuela seemed like the perfect Caribbean nation in which to begin an interrogation of the position of the modern mother in Latin American society. Thus, to outline the questions with which I began the summer: What kind of mother figure is represented to the public in Venezuela? What are the obligations of this mother to the Venezuelan nation? How does the nursing mother’s body affect the national body politic, and vice versa? Lastly, how are these obligations evolving in the face of pressures external to the state, such as the global commodification of women’s bodies? I have to qualify this last question by recalling that the Venezuelan beauty industry is one of the largest in the world, producing more beauty queens than any other single nation. Thus, I wanted to contrast the images of these women with those of the self-sacrificing, racialized and often de-sexualized mother.
The society in which I found myself upon landing in Caracas on June 12th was quite different from the one I had envisioned. First and foremost, the socialist revolution is by no means as complete or solidified as Chávez’s supporters claim it to be. Although many of the laws passed in the 1999 Constitution positively affect women’s lives, the Revolution has yet to challenge perceived views on a woman’s place in society. For instance, although the Constitution affirms the rights of parents to decide on the size of their families and obligates state financial support of pre- and postnatal care, it has yet to guarantee a woman’s access to a safe and sanitary abortion. Thus, affluent (most often white) women must go abroad or to private clinics to efficiently terminate their pregnancies, while the vast majority of the female population must proceed with the clandestine and complicated procedures available to them illegally. Paradoxically, this set of practices reinforces the capitalist prerogative that financial means determine access to basic health services. As always, abortion is more about class and race than simply a woman’s rights over her own body. Real-life women are therefore not always the protagonists of Chávez’s new social experiment of solidarity and equality. Instead, they are often the victims of an old-order ethics of exclusion and competition.
Despite—or perhaps because of—their somewhat precarious status, mothers are revered in Venezuela, as in much of Latin America. The vast majority of Chávez’s supporters ideologically and practically support his rhetoric on the crucial importance of the mother in the continual creation of the Bolivarian nation. The centrality of the maternal figure has not changed significantly with Chávez’s creation of a socialist state. What has changed is the purpose for which the ideal and the image are creatively exploited. Before, the mother was treated by her compatriotas with cautious distance, delicacy, and sometimes resentment or jealousy. Her soft, round features provided a sharp contrast to the long line of wiry, light-skinned, playboy-bunny Miss Universes that Venezuela has so famously produced. Now, the voluptuous Latina Mother is exalted as the key to the future of a liberated, racially-healed, class-free socialist leadership in a threatening, racist, consumerist-driven world. The Mother’s symbolic duties are multiple and her imaginary power intoxicating. The excited emphasis on the Mother figure leaves real-life poor urban mothers somewhat in the dust—most still face the everyday hardships of day-to-day existence in a racially heterogeneous developing country—but at least they are now celebrated in a fashion undreamt of by their own mothers and grandmothers.
The degree to which this effulgent rhetoric of exaltation mitigates the material and emotional hardships of racialized and impoverished motherhood is a question I often asked myself. For all practical purposes, the difficulties of poor women’s lives have not been substantially ameliorated in the past decade. Indeed, many experience increased social pressure to be active in socialist civic life while still maintaining immaculate households and children—the infamous “double shift” tacitly required by both male partners and traditional patriarchal society. However, the Mother figure—albeit in purified, whitewashed form—has certainly assumed increased public prominence as an agent and subject of the socialist revolution, and as such, increased respect, admiration and even awe among the populace. The working-class and poor women with whom I spoke seemed to revel in the aura of stardom automatically bestowed upon them by their association with this omnipotent Mother. At the same time, they fulfilled social exhortations to real motherhood, managing to enjoy the state injunction to assiduously apply themselves to the serious task of full-time mothering, regardless of skin tone or political persuasion.
Obviously, my questions changed as the weeks passed. I found myself increasingly befuddled by the paradoxes of modern motherhood in a multi-racial nation which adamantly proclaims itself to have evolved past racialized divisions of gender and class. I realized that it is impossible to expect the Bolivarian revolution to overcome the legacies of color-based systems of representation that have so dominated Caribbean life for the past several centuries. Given all of the contradictions of Venezuelan modernity, however, I was still impressed by the enduring emotional strength emanating from the mothers I encountered. In a myriad of complex ways, they continually resist stereotyped or idealized representations of motherhood, as well as imposed norms of maternal “instincts” or behaviors.
 |
Adriana with Antonela, named after Adriana’s grandmother Antonia. I met mother and daughter at the Instituto Merideño de la Mujer y la Familia, where they had come to an information session about proper nutrition for toddlers. Antonela is 11 months old; she still breastfeeds occasionally as a supplement to her regular diet of soft foods. I subsequently spent several afternoons chasing pigeons with her in the central park.
|
One unnerving contradiction that I discovered was embodied in a campaign advertisement for a provincial political leader in the Andean state of Mérida. The ad depicted a mother’s white breast as central focus, with an infant suckling in the lower corner of the poster. The viewer, it was assumed, would be complicit in “natural” merging of state socialism with motherhood into one collective aspiration for the future. As the ad no doubt intended, I as viewer was drawn to the milkiness of her skin—if only because of the contrast it provided with the racial demographics of the local population. I knew many mulata and mestiza women, but none were as white as the mother depicted here. In addition, because women are permitted to unselfconsciously breast-feed in public (and in fact many businesses that I observed even provided blankets and pillows or foot-rests for the nursing mother) I was not unfamiliar with the scene of mother-infant suckling in markets, banks and parks. However, no mother nor infant I knew of would boast of skin that white. Although I was not in close contact with more affluent and perhaps much lighter-skinned mothers, I knew that the vast majority of the general public was a colorful racially heterogeneous mix.
(Statistically, only 20% of Venezuelans are considered “white.”) However, white upper-class women would not typically be the most fervent of Chávez supporters. In any case, the advertisement in question was clearly supportive of the Bolivarian Revolution, yet it depicted an unrealistic scene of a whitened—dare I say foreign-looking? —mother with her infant. While this type of depiction would come as no surprise in México, Puerto Rico or Perú (where the obsession with white body as commodity is well documented) I was surprised that the Venezuelan people would assent to such artificial whitewashing for the purpose of promoting state socialism.
In addition, Venezuelan women, just like women everywhere, have to live with the claims that their partners and husbands have over their bodies. Breastfeeding interacts with female sexuality in ambiguous ways. Although some of the women I interviewed spoke about a feeling of autonomy and privacy between them and their infants, most also expressed tacit or outright concern about the reaction of the male gaze. The sensual ties between a nursing mother and her infant necessarily challenge Adrienne Rich’s notion of a society’s “compulsory heterosexuality,” which assumes that sensual bonds by nature can only take place between members of the same generation (not to mention the same race). Refreshingly, most Venezuelans whom I spoke with did not express feeling similar social pressures discouraging cross-racial romantic or sexual relationships. However, I found that in general, in the past decade, Venezuelan mothers have experienced an increase in the intensity of the normalizing gaze of the state over their private lives.
To return to the poster mentioned above, it is hardly necessary to reiterate that not all of the Venezuelan mothers with whom I spoke tolerated inaccurate, whitened representations of themselves and their children for political purposes. In fact, not only were these women vocally resistant to the commodification of their breasts and their bodies, but many strove to challenge the idealized female body as white, pure and chaste by vivaciously flaunting dark-skinned, pregnant or lactating, overweight, or otherwise uncontrolled bodies in public. This seemed to me a fitting response to the constant barrage of paper-thin Venezuelan models rigorously trained, primped and primed for the brief career of an international beauty queen. Despite conservative social norms which attempt to contain proper sexuality within heterosexual and racially homogeneous marriage, I found many women living in a great diversity of familial and household situations.
The Revolution’s effect on women has been complex and multi-faceted. All in all, the core of Venezuelan social tradition (already subjected to, or enhanced by, global commodity culture) has remained virtually unaffected, despite its exploitation by the proponents of state socialism. Mothering continues to be an inherently public affair, even if the sense of the word “public” has changed over time. In Venezuela especially, there is very little privacy over one’s sexual and reproductive self; if the local Cuban doctor is ignorant of a woman’s condition, the neighbors most certainly are not. As always, bodies are controlled to the extent that they subject themselves to the regulatory systems of the state and the community. However, “proper” sexuality and “clean” or “healthy” maternal practices have never been fully contained within any socio-political system; some aspect of bodily being always manage to escape external control. Thus, I see hope in women’s continued diversity of behaviors in reaction to state vigilance and exploitation of the maternal figure.
|
