JE#8

Prior to entering this class, I knew very little about the Juárez femicides. I first learned of the femicides in a graduate seminar in 2012, when someone brought up this issue during class discussion. My initial investigation into the murders left me feeling overwhelmed, shocked, mystified, and afraid to keep researching. Lubheid’s revelatory account of the U.S.’s long history of using the border as a site to exact violence against and control over women’s bodies spoke of various technologies of control employed by the U.S. and Mexican governments and Border Patrol. Chapter five, though, “Rape, Asylum, and the U.S. Border Patrol,” spoke most directly to those technologies of control that are used against poor, brown, fertile and young women on the border. I found Lubheid’s discussion of the “code of silence” to be specifically pertinent. Male officials abide by this code of silence to protect each other from being held responsibile for violence against women, just as the silence on the part of U.S. and Mexican governments about the Juárez murders drowns out the voices of the disappeared and their families. The monstrous face of the Shadow-Beast that Anzaldúa describes is also reflected in the femicides, since, as Profe has discussed in lecture, this side of the Shadow-Beast involves the divine feminine being viewed by society as an an unwanted monster threatening the patriarchical order -- she must be destroyed. I think that Desert Blood and Bordertown are each important texts that work to speak against the silence surrounding the Juárez murders. Both works depict the official corruption on both sides of the border that enables the murders to continue.