JE #8

I had first began learning about the Juárez femicides about a year ago, which led me to do my Chican@ Studies 10B final on maquiladoras on the U.S.-Mexico border. I’ve said this many times in other posts but the week on the femicides was the hardest for me emotionally. I have a physical reaction now when I’m watching or reading something about the murders. Desert Blood by la Profe felt so very real to me. I was reading the book while walking across campus and I could not handle one of the scenes with Irene and had to sit down because I could not stop reading but I also could not handle what I was feeling. Desert Blood put the very real slut-shaming, victim blaming, misogynistic, racist social context to the murders that illustrated through a story what I had read about previously. Entry Denied by Eithne Luibhéid gave me the tools to historically and politically understand how misogyny works and is in the blood of the femicides. There exists rape culture and victim blaming within the asylum system that we read about in Luibhéid’s chapter “Rape, Asylum, and the U.S. Border Patrol.” There is so much focus on there necessitating a political reason to grant women asylum. “[Such] analysis appears predicated on the idea that there are ‘political’ reasons for beating wives, and there are ‘personal’ reasons for beating wives” (Luibhéid 112). Blaming the victims and letting off the perpetrators has been embedded in U.S. asylum laws as well as within many other facets of U.S. border law. I did not learn much new information from Gregory Nava’s Bordertown. But if the film was my first encounter with the femicides then it would definitely provoke me to seek out more information. The film also made the murders more real to me by being a visual to what I have learned.