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

Before entering this class, I was only vaguely familiar with the Juarez femicides.  The extent of my knowledge wasn’t expansive, I knew there was an epidemic of dying women, mostly young maquiladora workers who were targeted and left for dead.  I also knew that the estimated number of women hovered somewhere in the hundreds though the suspected  number is much higher.  However, this class gave me a much better historical, geographical, and political understanding of the Juarez killings.  Ethne Lubheid’s examination of the historical regulation of America’s borders in part explains why there is such minimal cultural disturbance over what is happening on the other side of the border, e.g. the women dying fit the ‘undesirable subject’ border policies have long tried to keep out of this country.  In this context,  I feel like I can draw parallels between the killings and Entry Denied’s “A Blueprint for Exclusion”, through focusing on the deployment and construction of American rhetoric of undesirability.  For example, the ideologies that constructed single poor Chinese women as prostitutes who carried venereal disease and threatened white heteropatriarchal structured families shaped and reinforced the policies and treatment of these women in and outside the U.S.  In a similar fashion, these killings facilitate the rejection of brown bodies; the border patrol does not have to worry about the movement of undesirable dead bodies, nor do they care.  Desert Blood was the most eye opening book for me as it demonstrated the extreme and brutal dehumanization these women suffer through rape, mutilation, and institutional negligence of femicide.  Additionally, it also challenged my thinking concerning the accountability of Mexico and the glaring problem of femicide.  It demonstrated the collusion between the U.S. and Mexico in ignoring the alarming number of deaths near the border.  Although, I do wish we could have further explored the economic exploitation of these women and exhumed the relationship between NAFTA’s neo-liberal dehumanization of the maquiladora workers and economic prosperity and death.  Bordertown raised my consciousness in that it demonstrated the obstacles women endure in attempting to bring their perpetrators to justice as well as the extensive network of NAFTA beneficiaries in both United States and Mexico and the aggressive ploys to diminish the visibility of the deaths of Juarez women.  Ultimately, Entry Denied, Desert Blood, and Bordertown collectively helped to bring me a historical, political, geographical, economic, and humanistic awareness of the epidemic of dying women of Juarez I had not possessed before.