JE#8: Murder, Misogyny, and U.S. Immigration Policy

I grew up with a father that loved to read Alarma, a gruesome magazine that reported on recent murders (with police shots) on both sides of the border. I think it was this magazine that introduced me to the Juarez murders. I did not spend hours meditating on the mass murder of these women back then as I did now, but I remember my father recapping each atrocity he knew in regards to this mass femicide. We went to numerous vhs stores afterwords to search for a movie, with no avail.

Reading Desert Blood, Entry Denied, and watching Bordertown was a lot to take in one week. I felt myself slowly entering into a tumultuous unrest that culminated in my own emotional breakdown by the end of the week. "Looking Like A Lesbian," chapter 4 of Lubheid's book, especially gnawed at my bones. As I began reading, the story of Sara Harb Quirez and the idea of a unique 'lesbian look' that was punishable by exclusion from this nation was shocking. The restrictions and policies that existed to identify and exclude lesbian women, including medical exclusion certificates, biological 'lesbian traits', and investigations of suitcase contents, affirm the fact that women's sexual behavior really is controlled and manipulated at the border. Lubheid laid the political context for my understand of how and why the Juarez murders are of no concern to the US or Mexican government. As independent and fertile brown women, the US fears their migration into the US and their power of reproduction. However, the US and Mexico also see their value as pieces to a larger capitalist machine that can exploit them for their labor and then dispose of them and their ability to enter and repopulate in the US. 

The idea that these women can be used, abused, and discarded was harder to bear when reading Desert Blood and watching Bordertown. 

"The irony of it: An assembly worker disassembled in the desert." (Gaspar de Alba 255).

I don't think there was a specific chapter in Gaspar de Alba's book that caught my attention more than any other. It was the imagery, the images that now haunt my consciousness, the coyolxauhquis, the dismembered daughters, that torment me now. 

Bordertown was important to watch as well. Thursday was the day I finished Desert Blood and watched this film. That evening I could not unwind myself from the different statistics being thrown at me in the film, in the book, online, all different, all growing, and all numbering each woman. The fact that the film focused on one woman, Iva, and the book on Irene, made the stories, the many many specks of sand in the sandstorm of knowledge being shuffled in my brain, so much more personal.