A HUNGRY AND HURTING: EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL ABUSE (JULIANNA’S STORY)

JULIANNA: "I could never explain hot dogs to my mom."

Julianna, who immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic, associates her eating problems with the stresses of acculturation. A twenty-four-year-old heterosexual Latina who was raised by her grandmother in a small town in the Dominican Republic, she came to the United States when she was sixteen. When she was three, her parents fled the Dominican Republic to escape death threats related to her father's opposition to the dictatorship. They came to the United States without papers, leaving their daughter and younger son behind with the children's grandmother.

Unlike many of the women I interviewed, Julianna liked her body when she was growing up and was not subjected to diets or diet pills. In the Dominican Republic, thinness was not considered a necessary attribute for female beauty. In fact, if Julianna had any problem with food as a child, it was not wanting to eat all the food her grandmother prepared. Her grandmother told her that she couldn't get up from the table until she ate. Julianna was very straightforward and stubborn and would sit at the table for three, four, or five hours, protesting. With this refusal, Julianna exerted her will against her grandmother's protective child-rearing practices: "There are so many things about Spanish culture that don't let people be themselves. Especially when you are a woman. Little girls don't do this. Little girls don't do that."

Julianna's refusal to eat was a minor issue, however, and it did not lead to any real problems.

When she joined her parents in the United States, Julianna's relationship to food and her body changed dramatically as she began to diet and became bulimic. Separated from her parents since she was a toddler, she had grieved their absence constantly: "I felt such a crush inside of me because I could never see their faces." Yet she had not wanted to leave the Dominican Republic or her grandmother. She was not consulted about her parents' decision that she would join them in the United States, and she wondered if she had become too much work for her grandmother.23 As an adult she understands, intellectually, the reason for her parents' exile—they had been forced to "choose" between dying and watching their children grow up from a great distance —but she was also angry that they had left the Dominican Republic without her.

She had to cope with learning English among native English speakers, who were impatient and teased her. She had come from a country where she was in the majority, and she had been taught not to be prejudiced. In the United States, she felt out of place:

I didn't speak the language and couldn't make any friends. And everyone lives so far away. Everybody looked so rude when I came here. I was used to when you meet a girl you kiss [her] on the cheek. When you say goodbye you kiss [her] mother goodbye on the cheek too.

Julianna began to eat more and eat different kinds of food than she had in the Dominican Republic. In her native country she had always eaten meals with her relatives; eating at school was simply not done. In the United States she ate breakfast with her family and then again at school with classmates who would tease her if she did not do so. At lunchtime she ate a big meal at home, in part because she could not get used to "American" food: "Hamburgers I didn't like. Pizzas! I thought that was disgusting. Hot dogs. I could never explain hot dogs to my mom." After school she came home to an empty house since both of her parents worked. She no longer had the strict schedule her grandmother had imposed on her nor her grandmother's company. She had no homework to occupy her since she was academically advanced in comparison to the students at school. Whereas in the Dominican Republic people shopped for fresh food every day and only ate during meals, in the United States the refrigerator was full of food and people snacked constantly. Bingeing became her distraction and her pleasure.

The confusion caused by conflicting cultural standards weakened Julianna's body image. She had a perfect body by Dominican standards, what her friends called a "guitar body." Dominican men

liked beautiful legs and beautiful behinds. .. . Big and fat. Something you could notice from far away. . . . Women are not supposed to be skinny. Instead of bones, they are supposed to have some flesh. Men like that.

In the United States Julianna quickly learned that being thin was crucial for women, that the

value on appearance is so deeply ingrained in Anglo culture that it would be very hard to explain another way of seeing things. Many Hispanics, on the other hand, have been raised to understand beauty in a deeper way. That, in fact, is one of the strengths of Hispanic culture.

Julianna began to question her body size. Although she was slim, she began to think her body was fat. As Cynthia Bulik writes:

Given that all cultures do not emphasize slimness to the extent that American culture does, the discrepancy between the body of the immigrant and the American ideal can serve to increase the sense of alienation and not belonging to the new society.

When a close female family friend and classmates told Julianna to diet, she accepted their judgments. Her brother who grew up in the United States called her fat—although she was not —and told her to diet. Even her brother who had just immigrated quickly adopted the emphasis on thinness and began to tease Julianna. She fasted for entire days and eventually became so hungry that she binged. Eating that had begun as a way to cope with loneliness, boredom, and homesickness became coupled with eating that was a physiological response to fasting. She began to get up in the middle of the night to watch television and binge.

Julianna's change in eating patterns also was a reaction to her father's alcoholism. She was angry that he drank so much; when he didn't change, she started to refuse to eat traditional Dominican meals: "Sometimes I wouldn't eat [as a way] to hurt my father. I wouldn't eat in front of him. Morning, afternoon, and night I would make him suffer. I was mad at him because of his drinking." While she was refusing to eat with her family, she binged on junk food secretly. She ate so much that her "stomach couldn't take it" and then she threw up. Her loneliness and isolation are characteristic of many adult children of alcoholics, and in her case they were exacerbated by the isolation of a recent immigrant. She says, "I thought I was going crazy 'cause I didn't have anyone to talk to." The stigma of alcoholism, like the secrecy associated with sexual abuse, caused her to cope with her anger and pain alone and led her to blame herself when she couldn't make her father quit drinking. But stuffing herself upset her too: "I was doing something against my will. I was eating and I was full. My system didn't want to take it. Didn't want to accept it."

When Julianna began to regain the power she had lost by immigrating to the United States —as she learned English, made friends, learned about alcoholism, and met other women with eating problems—her eating problems subsided. To protect herself from her father's alcoholism, she began to pull away from her family, although this meant that she was diminishing her connection to Dominican culture. Her gestures of independence angered her family, and they were upset by her stepping out of traditional Latina sex roles. Her refusal to eat with the family, originally a way to punish her father, was a symptom not only of her eating problems but also of cultural conflicts. Going to college empowered her, but she still felt she had to distance herself from her family and cultural ties.

The challenges of Julianna's emerging bicultural identity were evident in her changing relationship to language. Oliva Espin writes that it is important to address the

affective and cognitive implications of bilingualism and language . . . [because] even for those Latinas who are fluent in English, or who have lost fluency in the use of their first language, Spanish remains the language of emotions because it was in Spanish that affective meanings were originally encoded.

At the end of the interview, I asked Julianna how the interview might have been different had it been in Spanish. She emphatically said it would have been harder, which baffled me at first. I had assumed that since her first language was Spanish and the interview involved personal issues and memories about a time in her life when she thought and felt exclusively in Spanish, she would have found speaking in English restrictive. But in Julianna's mind, English is a more liberal language than Spanish, a language she would dare to use when talking about eating problems, her anger toward her father, and her struggle for independence. She said that speaking English "makes you feel liberal. It is like a synonym: liberal and independent and women's rights and English. That is the way I think about it." Spanish is the language she spoke before she

learned how to speak for myself. . . . Spanish is the language I grew up with, and I never talked when I was growing up. ... It is like I

have two personalities, one in Spanish and one in English. When I speak in English, I think in English and I am American. When I come to my home, I speak Spanish.

Oliva Espin writes that

using the second language can act as a facilitator for the emergence and discussion of certain topics. Some of these may be taboo topics or words in Spanish while others may refer to the new components of the self acquired through the process of acculturation after English became the primary or most used language.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence that Julianna's eating problems were symptoms of the strain of acculturation is her unequivocal use of English when she thinks and talks about them.

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