JE #8

I didn’t know much about the Juarez femicides, before talking this course. I knew that they had something to go with females being targeted at the El Paso/Juarez border but I never grasped the severity of the violence and deaths which occurred. I recall over hearing my parents talk about the murders a couple of times, but it was never something they liked doing in front of me, I suppose they didn’t want me worrying that something like that would happen around us since the El Paso/Juarez border was so far away from us. Nevertheless, the topic never crossed my mind until we began discussing it and reading about it in class. In the book Entry Denied by Ethne Lubheid, she explains the history of women’s subjugation under misogynistic laws in the United States. In chapter one she opens up by discussing Page’s Law and how it is specifically targeted towards Chinese women because of the off chance that they were prostitutes. Another chapter that really stood out to me in this book was chapter 5 “Rape, Asylum, and the U.S. Border Patrol,” this chapter truly demonstrated the injustices women must face and the toll that their body must endure when crossing the border. Similarly in Desert Blood , we are able to learn how these incidence occur and how womens’ bodies are objectified and dominated. There were numerous incidents where I had trouble getting through the book because of how upset I was getting, an example would be when Ivon finds out what happened to Cecilia. And to think that Ivon didn’t know about the seriousness of the Juarez femicides until she was reading the article on the plane makes me believe that the government has a lot to do with what concealing the outbreak of national news.