#MeToo

I refrained from participating in the #MeToo response to sexual harassment and assault until I could speak with my two sons about what happened to me in my early twenties. On a trip to Mexico with my mother a young Mexican man raped me at knifepoint on a beach in San Blas. We knew there was little hope of an arrest so we left and came back to the states, where over the years the only ones I told about the rape were Mark, my partner of 34 years, and a few friends when the subject of abuse came up.

I also refrained from participating in the #MeToo response until I could write a more complete account of my life in northern New Mexico, where I’ve lived most of my adult life. Here, in these rural villages and former land grant commons, where a cultural legacy of machismo power remains extant, I experienced a more complex—and positive—relationship with Anglo, Pueblo, and Indo-Hispano men.

But before I talk about these relationships, I want to address how complicated they are by the struggles all of us deal with establishing even our consensual romantic and sexual relationships regardless of whether we’re women, men, straight, lesbian, gay, or transgender. I came of age in the late sixties and seventies during the sexual revolution spurred by the loosening of middle-class morality and feminist assertion. I think most of us would concur this was liberating, terrifying, and not without residual trauma. So we headed out into a world forming relationships that often imitated the status quo in a search for safety or headed into the unknown where the struggles for equality often led to disappointment and even trauma. Some of us were able to find a middle ground where we continued to work through relational power structures within a relatively secure family unit.

Because of my generational and familial experience I was hyper aware of how I was treated in the world. That alertness was coupled with a life lived mostly outside the mainstream: no career path in a hierarchical system where women were often susceptible to abuse. For the most part self-employed as writers and publishers, Mark and I never had bosses and built a house without a crew. We socialized with like-minded alternative generation house builders and workers, where any relationships were consensual, if not sometimes confused.

That’s not to say I wasn’t exposed to abusive environments. When I worked as a seasonal employee for the Forest Service in my early twenties it was mostly as a fire lookout, alone in the tower with my dogs and various lovers (including Mark). Women who worked on the fire crews were often subject to sexual harassment. I not only avoided that kind of work because of the hot, dirty conditions it entailed but because of what I knew about its record of abuse.

Mark and I became involved in community organizing in both Placitas, where we lived for 20 years, and El Valle, where I’ve now been for over 25. As land grant communities surrounded by national forests, both villages were forced to deal not only with the United States Forest Service and its management plans but with real estate developers, county and state governments and regulators, and urban based environmental groups whose environmentalism often differed from that of land based activists. I formed many relationships with activists from both the Hispano land grant communities and Native American pueblos that were both professional and often personal (dancing at the Chamisa Lounge in Española was a favorite recreation). I never experienced or witnessed any sexual harassment or abuse. As we organized over many years we were also thrown together with numerous bureaucrats in hundreds of meetings, negotiations, and field trips. While the bureaucrats may not have liked me much, I never experienced, or witnessed, sexual harassment in these encounters.

These were situations that required the good faith necessary to achieve goals or negotiate compromise. They were also the purview of activists who brooked no bullshit, and when they did break down in discord, it was over conflicting principles and purpose. To use one’s power abusively towards the person bearing the message would have rendered everything pointless.

I don’t doubt for a minute that other women activists have been in uncomfortable or compromising situations. I suspect that like me, however, the nature of our work has created an environment less likely to tolerate the abuse prevalent in a hierarchical work force. Because of shared values and long-term egalitarian relationships with my colleagues and neighbors, hyper vigilance, and a lot of luck, I’ve been able to move far beyond a terrible abuse that happened many years ago.

I just read what Sarah Shulman posted on Facebook, and it struck home:

“A person's pain can be heard and they can be held and asked what they need. They can be validated as being in pain, their suffering can be recognized.

“At the same time—simultaneously—we can also look at the event(s) that they believe to be the source of that pain in the context of their whole lives. Because, two people can have the same experience and one can be devastated for life and the other can be "oh well", because sometimes it is not the event itself that has the inherent meaning, but the histories and characters and expectations and biologies (and other factors) that each person brings to it.”