Reading Blog 8

Quote from Andean Lives:

“He kept on traveling, and since many people knew I washed clothes, that's how I'd earn a little money for my belly, because he wouldn't give me a single centavo or even let me see the money he earned.” (pg. 117) 

Hi loves!

This quote is from the mere 25 pages of Asunta’s account in Andean Lives. The man she is referring to is her first husband Eusebio. After the death of her first child, her husband became even more absent than before. His job selling merchandise gave him a reason to be continuously on the move. Amidst the tragedy of losing their child, the coping mechanism is distance. Him refusing to share financial accounts with her further adds to the separation of their lives. This sentence introduces financial abuse, which is typically intertwined with intimate partner violence. Asunta and her husband are already living amongst poverty, and her having to work to feed herself goes against the supposed social contract of a marriage where she is the childbearer/caregiver and he is the breadwinner. The use of the word “belly” is interesting to me because she is not only feeding herself but also her growing child once she gets pregnant. Even though her children aren’t surviving infancy, she is still upholding her side of the marriage while her husband isn’t. She makes money doing laundry, which is an extension of household duties. “Womanly” tasks like laundry are typically undervalued so her survival is harder because it’s more difficult to earn adequate compensation. Her already emotionally precarious marriage is further destroyed by financial stress and isolation.

The sentence structure is interesting. The commas break up the sentence into clauses. “He kept on traveling” and “that’s how I’d earn a little money for my belly” are an independent clause, while the rest of the sentence is made up of dependent clauses. There is a concreteness in action arising from the independent clauses in which they could stand alone. They are definitive events. However, she decides to use commas instead of periods to connect the clauses. Asunta asserts that her husband is away, and then she reacts through the dependent clauses of  “since many people knew I washed clothes.” The next assertion she makes is that she was able to feed herself. The final part of the sentence is another dependent clause that explains her husband withheld money from her. Given all the adversity Asunta faced in life, her use of explaining events with an independent clause asserts an acceptance of events, and the subsequent means of overcoming the adversity. The commas infer a causation between the events in this narrative in which things seem to happen to her and then she has to react. The explanation for why she had to earn money follows her already solving the problem of hunger. She doesn’t employ a sense of suspense in her narrative. The structure of this sentence can be extrapolated to the rest of her story. Her voice is matter of fact. She is very much retelling the events of her life in a plot based manner. She is reactionary before she dwells, I think as a means of survival.