By Madeleine Bair

For Rosalva Contreras Chirino, family tradition is a distressing subject. When she thinks back to her childhood in an impoverished section of Mexico City, she remembers the terror of witnessing her parents fight in the home. Sometimes she would flee to a relative’s house to plea for help,

but outside intervention was out of the question. “All the families that I knew were violent,” she remembers. “It was natural.”

Chirino recalled those times decades later, when she noticed her three-year old daughter watch her husband hit her, just as she had watched her parents fight. Realizing that domestic violence would continue its destructive cycle with her children, Chirino decided she had to make a change in her life, not so much for her own sake but for that of her children. “No,” Chirino thought, “I don’t want my daughter to repeat this. Breaking the chain was my responsibility.”

That decision, made after suffering twenty years of verbal, physical, and psychological abuse from her husband and the father of her four children, was the beginning of Chirino’s long, challenging, and ultimately triumphant path out of domestic violence. Now divorced and running a small business in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, Chirino is speaking out about her abuse with the hope of empowering other women to “break the chain.”

“I was guilty of thinking it was he who had to change,” says Chirino of her ex-husband. “Finally I realized that the one who had to make an immediate change was me.” One reason Chirino found such change so hard to make was that she had no role models of functional families or women who left abusive relationships.

Where she grew up in Mexico, domestic violence, she says, “was culturally accepted.” But violence against women is not unique to Mexican society, according to Professor María Ochoa of San Jose State University. “The reality is that women are abused across cultural lines, social lines, religious lines,” says Dr. Ochoa, who edited the recent anthology, Shout Out: Women of Color Respond to Violence. She points to three factors that prevent many immigrant women from leaving abusive relationships: financial dependency on the husband; the reluctance of an undocumented immigrant to seek help from authorities; and a lack of social services that reflect an immigrant’s language and culture.

Such was the case with Chirino, who spoke no English and knew no one outside of her immediate family when she moved to the Bay Area with her husband and children. “I remember one beating I sustained here,” Chirino recalls with tears in her eyes. “I went to my neighbor to ask to call the police. The police came, but they almost left because they could not understand me.” Fearful of a beating if her husband found out that she had called the police, Chirino stopped the officers from leaving. “I think they felt my desperation.” They had her collect her belongings and her children, and took them to a shelter for abused women.

Chirino remained at the East Bay shelter for months. From there, she went to a church which helped her find a job. She points to a combination of books, support groups, her children, and social workers as the resources and inspiration that helped Chirino understand the roots of her abusive relationship and find the self-confidence to leave it for good.

“This would not have happened without help,” she says. “I consider that each person who has come into my life and offered me support was God’s way of telling me, you are not alone.”