Women’s Work

“Americans think we’re all poor and trying to get to the United States. They don’t think about the people working to improve themselves here,’’ says Alma Rodriguez, a family lawyer who quit her practice recently to earn a second professional degree in psychology. Since suspending her law career to go back to school, she has been living the life of a poor student. So she rents out rooms in her home, and has set up a little tienda -- like a corner store in the United States before the advent of 7-Eleven -- in her garage to help make ends meet. She also hired a fellow student to work part time, even though she could get by without the help. The other student doesn’t come from a professional family like she does (her father, too, is a lawyer) and needed the money to stay in school.
“I’m not rich,’’ Alma says. “But I can help one person. And then maybe she will be able to help someone else.’’
When she was practicing, Rodriguez, 28, worked in family court, mainly overseeing the distribution of belongings in divorces, which she says are very traumatic, but more common than people think. (The official divorce rate in Mexico was 11 percent in 2004, compared to 3 percent in 1970 and 49 percent in the U.S. today)
But she wants to focus her psychology practice on women who are victims of violence. She says relationship violence is very common in Mexico because most women still accept it as normal. Her thesis is a study of educated women and domestic violence. She’s says there’s little difference between them and their less-educated counterparts because even women with university degrees consider control and abuse by their male partners normal.
Every weekend, Alma returns to her parents' pueblo, where the whole family gathers for Sunday brunch, and she has to listen to her grandparents grouse about the fact that she’s not married. Her father and mother are a little worried, too, because after age 25, if a woman in Mexico is not married, she’s old maid material. “Te quedaste para vestir santos,’’ the saying goes. (“You stayed behind to dress the saints’’ – no real English translation.)
But it was her parents who taught her not to take any guff from a man. Her mother still regrets not finishing her own education. Her father, though traditional in his own marriage, doesn’t want to see his highly educated, successful daughters play servant to anyone. Her older sister, another lawyer, is single as well.
For now, Alma is happy to dress the saints.