This is the third of three profiles of local residents who share their stories and perspectives for Hispanic Heritage Month.
Noemi Sanchez is both an effortlessly welcoming and disarming individual.
A warm smile and candid manner of speaking quickly dispatch any awkwardness, even as she narrates an equally tragic and inspiring story of a life in activism.
Sanchez, 53, is originally from Mexico. She came to the United States 29 years ago, arriving in Florida before following her then-husband to Riverhead with her three daughters.
“I never thought that it was violence, because he didn’t hit me,” Sanchez said of her former husband, “but he mistreated me emotionally.”
According to a survey from the CDC, Sanchez joins nearly half of all women in the United States in experiencing psychological aggression from an intimate partner.
Sanchez didn’t feel like she could leave the marriage, despite her husband’s abusive tendencies, use of drugs and alcohol and doing stints in jail.
“Culturally, they don’t teach us [that you can leave your partner],” Sanchez said. “If a man marries you, you have to live with him for the rest of your life.”
So she did her best to keep him out of legal trouble, and did not report him to the police.
This ended when, before returning to jail, he spread a rumor that she was cheating on him. “That was when I made the decision to say: ‘no more,’” Sanchez said.
He continued to try to make her feel culpable for his return to prison, because he was arrested while living with her when he was not supposed to. “But in this course of time, I was learning to value myself, and that my daughters should not be living this type of life,” Sanchez said.
Verbal abuse is an important predictor of future physical violence from an intimate partner, according to a study from the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
“They let him leave [jail] in October, and he tried to kill me in February [2011].”
“The reason was because I didn’t want to continue our relationship,” Sanchez said. “He did it in front of my three daughters.”
She described her ex-husband’s attempt to kill her, where she was shot with a BB gun, stabbed and beaten. “My middle daughter, who was 16, saved me when she got her father off of me,” Sanchez said.
What followed was a six-year legal procedure. While in the court proceedings, she found an organization called i-tri, which seeks to empower young girls and help them with their self-esteem.
Someone from i-tri also connected Sanchez with SEPA Mujer, a civic justice organization for Latina women and girls. “Everything that I have learned now, I learned in the SEPA Mujer organization,” Sanchez said. She volunteers with the group to this day.
“After the court proceedings had passed…I discovered that I have a mission in life, which is to help other women survive what I lived through,” Sanchez said. “Because often, a woman won’t talk about what she is living through, because she is in love, because of culture, because of beliefs, or because of what she has been taught or because society keeps her in a place where she is not treated well.”
Though realizing her mission, she was intimidated by offers from Rural & Migrant Ministry, a nonprofit that provides assistance to workers in rural areas of New York, to join their organization. She was most anxious about her perceived lack of qualifications. “I didn’t even finish high school,” she said.
But, she was uniquely poised to reach out to other women and victims of domestic abuse. She could relate to these people in a way that the nonprofit simply could not before. There could be other women who were undereducated and experiencing domestic abuse, and she could help them find their voice.
Sanchez now works as the organization’s Long Island Regional Coordinator at its Riverhead office.
When reflecting on retelling the story of her early life, she said “every time that I discuss this, for me it has been healing.” Sanchez said that she learned that she can forgive the person who hurt her, and she tries to teach the same to others.
“You don’t have to live with the resentment and make yourself bitter,” she said. “But it took me many years to understand that.”
Sanchez spoke to the particulars of abuse experienced by Latina women. She explained that, although the broader community also experiences domestic abuse, Latina women may be less likely to report it for a variety of reasons. They may be afraid of speaking to police, or unable to cross the language barrier to communicate with authorities, for instance.
She said she tries to help women experiencing abuse get in touch with authorities.
These days, Sanchez tries to communicate with other abuse victims, survivors and other women going through a difficult time through art. She runs her classes through Mujeres de Esperanza (Women of Hope), a part of Rural & Migrant Ministries that hosts a variety of empowerment and educational programs for women.”
She invites women who may not be able to say how they are feeling in words to do so via painting, while trying to teach them the visual and verbal language to express themselves.
Sanchez said that she sees many programs to help Latina women, but that often they simply give them information, and don’t help these women find their own voice.
So, she focuses on having people express themselves via painting in monthly meetings.
Sanchez talked about a notable example in some detail.
A participant painted a house, with two flowers, a tree and an encircling wire around the outside. The outside was bright and clean, but the inside was empty. According to Sanchez, the woman said that the house was empty because that was how she felt, the flowers were her daughters, the tree was her husband and the wire was because she felt tangled by her situation. The participant felt empty, Sanchez said, but she keeps the house cheerful and clean for her daughters.
This painting and others inspired Sanchez to start a course so that women like the artist above can “really paint their emotions,” because at times they are reluctant to speak them.
Sanchez has been doing community outreach like this for years, and shows little sign of stopping.
Sanchez told a fable to explain her perspective on solidarity among community members:
“A rat lives in a field, but he sees that the owner of the field is going to buy a trap or a poison to kill him. This scares him thoroughly, so he says… to all the animals in the field, that the owner bought a trap, but nobody listens. They tell him to worry about himself.
“So, in the night, the owner’s wife hears the trap go off, and goes to investigate… What happens is that there is a viper in the trap, who bites her.
“So, the owner kills the chicken first, to make his wife a soup while she is recovering. But, she does not recover, and she dies. So, the owner kills the cow to serve people during the burial.”
Sanchez explained that this fable is an argument that everyone in the community is affected by things that happen to even one person.
“I always say: we live in the same place, we should be concerned for everybody,” Sanchez said. “Because in the end, the rat didn’t die, but the chicken and cow died.”
When asked for her message to the broader Latin American community, Sanchez said that they should “involve themselves in whatever organization” they can, to whatever degree they can.
“We are already a part of this country,” Sanchez said. “We live here, so it is important that they involve themselves, so they know what is happening, what their rights are, what should happen and what they should do.”
“If we don’t involve ourselves, nobody will see us,” she added. “We don’t want to open conversations that, realistically, we need to open.”
October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Resources and help are available at the National Domestic Violence Hotline’s website. En Español.
More in this series:
Trailblazing Riverhead cop reflects on police work, family, Hispanic heritage
Young Riverhead entrepreneur credits his parents, Hispanic heritage for motivation and work ethic
Editor’s note: This story has been amended to correct a misstatement about Mujeres de Esperanza (Women of Hope). It is a program of Rural Migrant Ministries, not a separate nonprofit.
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