JE #8

Long time before this seminar began, I have had constant and substantial knowledge about the femicides in Ciudad Juarez. But, my extensive contact with the murderous phenomenon against brown women at the border was not a deliberative decision. My knowledge about the women of Juarez was not an attempt to be an amateur journalist or a feminist activist, but necessary facts that aided and informed my border navigation as a woman. Although the women-targeted genocide mostly affects brown, working-class, non-border dwelling ( i.e. internal migrants from south central and eastern Mexico) maquiladora-working women at the border; it does not mean that the women who fail to satisfy the latter characteristics are immune. Femicide is femicide, which is, it is the murdering of women due to a gender-based bias. While growing-up at the U.S.-Mexico border these dangers were real, present and eminent, and unfortunately, not some distant folk-tale or a case of women's rights violations occurring on the other side of the globe. The cobwebs knitted by organized crime influenced the border spaces I could and could not enter; the people I could, should or would talk to; my border-life. Yet, as a U.S. documented, light-skinned, middle-classed woman from the border, it would be naïve (and disrespectful) to parallel my border experiences with those of the Señoritas Extraviadas en Ciudad Juárez. 

I make the latter statement in relation to the technologies of power, such as rape and sexual harassment against undocumented, brown, working-class women at the U.S.-Mexico border, which Luibheid so thoroughly explains in chapter 5 of Entry Denied.  But Luibheid poses the question, "in an era of increased globalization, what role does rape play in reconstructing borders?" (128). Like Desert Blood and Bordertown show-case, the rape of women at the border, Luibheid explains, is a technology for (re) producing racial and ethnic differences" (129), which in turn reproduces a hierarchical social relationship within U.S. borders. Rape reconstructs internal borders. That is, that "[t]hese borders are not reducible to the nation's territorial borders... [i]nstead, they involve social, economic, political, psychological, and symbolic borders within the United States that connect sexuality, gender, race, and class inequalities" (129-130). 

And what better metaphor to represent the Anglo-American and Mexican cultural tyranny against brown, working-class, disposable women at the border, than the Anzalduan "Shadow Beast"?! As Luibheid, Gaspar de Alba and Nava so strongly protest and demand: the violence against the women of Juarez is a transnationally orquestrated compulsory mechanism instituting heteropatriarchy at the U.S.-Mexico divide. Specifically, Nava and Gaspar de Alba, delineate the in their cultural renderings of the horrid femicidal acts, delineate the complicity of both the United States and Mexico as co-conspirators of this transnational criminal web. In terms of creating awareness, I can only imagine (because, then again, my engagement with these cases has been regional, personal, long and thorough) that Nava and Gaspar de Alba's interpretations are effective in the sense that they bring to the forefront of the American mainstream audience a phenomenon that should affect not only Mexican audiences (like myself) but international awareness too.