Return to note 1 When I taught creative writing with both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking women at the Center for Nonviolence, I taught each class in the first language of the student-participants. Because English is my first language and my competency with Spanish is intermediate at best, I feel I have much more authority to make claims about my work with the English-speaking women than with the Spanish-speaking women. It is not my intent to make invisible the Spanish-speaking women’s endeavors to develop their literacies in Spanish and English, but rather to respect the complexities of those endeavors that I cannot yet articulate.
Return to note 2 Freire cites Álvaro Vieira Pinto, Consciencia e Realidade Nacional (Rio de Janeiro, 1961).
Return to note 3 I am not arguing that being a survivor requires leaving the abuser, only the abuse. Many in abusive relationships love their partners very much, want to live with them, and want to believe they have a chance to live without violence or abuse. More important and as I show later in the essay, abusive relationships rarely are divided into neat categories of abuser and victim, and those who leave abusive relationships without changing their behaviors and without developing and articulating awareness of how they participate in abusive behaviors may find themselves repeating abusive patterns in new relationships. If abusive behavior is learned (and the Center for Nonviolence argues that it is learned), new, not abusive behaviors must be learned to live without abuse and violence—an enormously complex and evolving educational arena.
Return to note 4 While I am very aware that perpetrators of domestic abuse and violence are both women and men, I argue with Gelles and Straus (1988) that the physical, economic, and socio-political advantages men as a group have over women as a group create more female victims of abuse and violence than male. However, because I believe there are few gender distinctions in the effects trauma—whether from domestic abuse, combat, manmade or natural disasters—on learning, I intend the results of my investigations to be seen as useful for both men and women.