The politics of participation - Rebuilding After Disasters: From Emergency to Sustainability - page 188

Gender relations
At the level of gender relations, this project integrated around fifteen single
mothers in a non-traditional female activity: house-building.
Gender has become an important policy element in post-disaster recon-
struction. 23 Various works show how women's needs and their vulnerability
are distinct from men's, but these should not be homogenized and nor should
we consider women as victims of their culture. 36 The writings of Bradshaw 6
and Cupples 19 on women's participation in post-Mitch reconstruction
in Nicaragua show interesting findings. In one of her studies, Bradshaw
explains that women's participation, and particularly that of single women,
did not necessarily entail an enhanced level of control of the process nor in
their community. 6 Cupples' fieldwork revealed that women's experiences in
reconstruction varied depending on the social context, i.e. on the degree of
solidarity and social mobilization in each community after the disaster. She
explains that in a locality named El Mirador, a 'community' created by a
housing project (as in the case for La Hermandad), no sense of communitar-
ian solidarity evolved but rather forms of personal interest and dependency
on aid. Here, women's participation reproduced normative gender roles that
marginalized them, because the division of labour assigned them to more
'gender appropriate' tasks (i.e. fetching water, sand and bricks). Compared
to other more successful community experiences studied by the author,
the case of El Mirador shows problems similar to those in my own case
study.
In La Hermandad, single mothers were assigned to two working groups,
one in charge of assembling the metal structures of the houses and the other
dedicated to the concrete compaction for the foundations (Figure 9.3).
These women were proud of their contribution. But their daily contact
with men on the site created a pervasive jealousy from other women whose
male partners were working on the site. This is an example showing how
identification with traditional and non-traditional gender roles may come
into conflict. Between these two micro-groups, tensions and suspicions arose,
accompanied by much gossiping that cannot be underestimated. As various
ethnographies on Central American peasant culture have explained, gossip
fills an important role of social control, as it expresses how a given behaviour
is socially sanctioned or not. 35
Friendship between sexes is not a customary 'cultural trait' of rural
Salvadorian society. In La Hermandad the population was mixed, of both
rural and urban origin. Many of the single mothers had lived in larger cit-
ies, working in maquiladoras (foreign-owned assembly plants in free-trade
zones), and they were not shy to interact with men or even flirt with
their co-workers on the site. And this was precisely the kind of behaviour
other women would have no patience for. I cannot emphasize enough the
divisive nature of all this talk, which endured for over a ten-month period
and seriously hindered the emergence of a 'community feeling'. The active