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

I knew a little bit about the Juarez femicides before entering this class. I never learned about it at school but during a workshop series that I was helping put on called Womyns Collective. My friend knew about it and shared knowledge with the rest of us. Entry Denied helped provide a historical and social context to understand how gender and sexuality plays into systems of oppression and rape/abuse of women. The chapter in Entry Denied that most shocked me was chapter 5 "Rape, Asylum, and the U.S." I read about how the U.S. creates laws to make it difficult for women to get granted asylum or refuge in the u.S. even when their lives are in danger. This proved to me even more that the U.S. system as a whole needs to change because it is targeting people based on race, class, gender and sexuality. In Desert Blood the chapter that really stood out to me was chapter 34 because that was when Ivon was piecing together the way NAFTA is impacting the women of Juarez and how socially Juarez isn't ready for "liberated women" Both of these books reinforced the idea that people in high powered positions, abuse of their power, like the border patrol people talked about in Entry Denied and how they raped the women in exchange of letting them go. The Border Patrols in profes book also abused of their power both of them because they feel entitled to womens bodies and see them as property. 

Thinking to Gregory Nava's film Bordertown, I think it did a good job on making a story line for the main character as she discovered the borders she had internalized due to losing both of her parents and growing up in the U.S. society. But I don't think I liked how the issue of the murder of the women in Juarez was captured to seem as if it was a few men doing it when in reality thousands of women are dying and its a larger issue than capturing one person.