Cultural Representations of Feminicidio at the US-Mexico Border

Nuala Finnegan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351058810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the early 1990s, the repeated murders of women from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico have become something of a global cause célèbre. Cultural Representations of Feminicidio at the US-Mexico Border examines creative responses to these acts of violence. It reveals how theatre, art, film, fiction and other popular cultural forms seek to remember and mourn the female victims of violent death in the city at the same time as they interrogate the political, legal and societal structures that produce the crimes.

Different chapters examine the varying art forms to engage with Ciudad Juárez's feminicidal wave. Finnegan discusses Àlex Rigola's theatrical adaptation of Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666 by Teatre Lliure in Barcelona as well as painting about the victims of feminicidio by Irish painter Brian Maguire. There is analysis of documentary film about Ciudad Juárez, including Lourdes Portillo's acclaimed Señorita Extraviada (2001). The final chapter turns its attention to writing about feminicide and examines testimonial and crime fiction narratives like the mystery novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, among other examples.

By drawing on a range of artistic responses to the murders in Ciudad Juárez, Cultural Representations of Feminicidio at the US-Mexico Border shows how art, film, theatre and fiction can unsettle official narratives about the crimes and undo the static paradigms that are frequently used to interpret them.

1 Framing feminicidio

The spectral politics of death in Ciudad Juárez

Before commencing the study of a selection of cultural responses, and relying on the vast body of international scholarship available on the subject, this chapter will sketch the backdrop to the gender violence ongoing in Ciudad Juárez with a view to elucidating the conditions and circumstances that have enabled the crimes to continue. Following this outline of what might be termed the narrative arc of feminicidal discourse, I suggest a series of frames or viewing parameters through which the feminicidios in the border city have been conceptualized and narrativized since the early 1990s. These include the debate generated around globalization and the economic, political and symbolic association, in particular, between the feminicidal wave and the maquiladora industry in the region. Linked to this seam of scholarship is a debate about necropolitics as a framework through which the crimes against women might be evaluated. In concert with these two strands of thinking is the motif of Ciudad Juárez itself as a monstrous, tainted city, a motif sustained in the public imaginary that threads through most discussions of feminicidal violence. Finally, I turn to ideas that have circulated about gender roles and, in particular, about a version of femininity that is contaminated and suspect. Interwoven with societal anxiety about the enhanced presence of women in the local workforces, this construction of women in the public imaginary contributed to the emergence of a pronounced victim-blaming discourse. The section concludes by considering society’s social investment in a destructive and toxic model of masculinity. Fuelled by poverty, it is central to any understanding of the levels of violence against women in this northern border city.

The what and the when

Beyond the terrifyingly simple facts of violent death, it has become almost impossible to generalize about the feminicidal wave of violence in Ciudad Juárez from the early 1990s onwards. There is no single explanation for the murders committed in the city and any examination of the deaths must remain attentive to the specificities of the women’s stories as well as the diversity of the contexts involved. The date when the murders commence really depends on when you start to count: some studies start in 1992, others in 1993 and 1994, but 1993 is the date most frequently cited by activists and scholars as their starting point (Monárrez Fragoso 2000, 2002, 2005a, 2005b; Rojas 2005; Staudt 2008). Monárrez Fragoso, however, cautions us against picking a single date, and indeed it is important to signal that while the feminicidios are frequently conceptualized as a ‘new’ phenomenon and Ciudad Juárez as some sort of emergency zone, it can be forcefully argued that the crimes committed in Ciudad Juárez since the 1990s simply represent an intensified acceleration of a line of violence against women that has always existed. Of course, all violence has a history (Young cited in Critchley and Evans 2016),¹ and Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández’s work charts the trajectory of violence in the borderlands region (2011) to show how it is rooted in its history, culture and politics. Indeed, the multi-generational experience of violent death is prominent in many of the cultural responses explored in this book. In this regard then, any examination of the Juárez feminicidios must take a longitudinal approach that seeks to locate the violence in the past twenty-five years along a continuum of gender violence that has simply taken a terrifying new turn.

Any consideration of the phenomenon must also grapple with the numbers issue, and in this regard it goes without saying that the numbers of feminicidios actually committed in the city are continuously contested. By way of example, this can be seen in three contrasting sets of figures: in April 2009, the El Paso Times reported a figure of more than 600 girls and women since 1993, but this figure had risen to 1,000 by the end of 2010; the office of the Mexican Attorney General (Procuraduría General de la República) cites a figure of 379 between 1992 and 2005 (Fregoso and Bejarano 2010) while Amnesty International counted 370 in the decade 1993–2003 (Staudt 2008).² There are considerable methodological differences between the multiple studies: some sources include girls and women; some deal only with cases of ‘intentional homicide’; some include the numbers of disappeared; among many other variables. Perhaps scholars should heed Gaspar de Alba who reminds us that

any attempt at deciphering the mechanics of femicide on the U.S.-Mexico border must take the numbers game for what it is: a riddle intended to obfuscate the public as much as the authorities. To this day no one really knows the exact number of victims.

(2014: 148)³

Following this logic, it may be counter-productive to try and establish definitive statistics; however, it should also be acknowledged that the painstaking work of scholars in the region such as Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso in trying to get to the ‘truth’ of the figures has been critical, particularly given its wider impact in terms of mapping the geography of the crimes.

Critics signal different turning points in the feminicidal narratives and indeed there have been numerous attempts to order the patterns and arc of the crimes since the early 1990s. According to Nancy Piñeda-Madrid, 2001 marked a turning point with the discovery of Lilia Alejandra García Andrade’s body wrapped in a blanket in an empty lot next to the Centro Comercial Soriano.⁴ She had been strangled to death and her body displayed signs of torture and sexual violence including rape. Following this crime, her mother, Norma Andrade de García, along with the mothers of six other victims, founded the organization, Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, to demand justice. A few weeks after the discovery of Lilia Alejandra’s body, on International Women’s Day, 8 March 2001, several women from Ciudad Juárez and El Paso carried wooden crosses and life-size photos of the murdered girls and women with them as they marched to and stormed the office of the Special Prosecutor for the Investigation of the Homicide of Women. The different discoveries of multiple corpses at particular sites in the city including Valle de Juárez (2012),⁵ Lomas de Poleo (2005), Campo Algodonero (2001) and Lote Bravo (1995) have become for many the iconic sites of feminicide in Juárez, their cases generating media hysteria, public disquiet and international opprobium. The discovery of eight bodies in Campo Algodonero in particular prompted an international investigation by the Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (Inter-American Court of Human Rights) and the landmark judgement from this body in 2009 excoriated the negligence of the Mexican state in relation to the crimes.⁶ The Campo Algodonero cases also served as a catalyst for human rights groups and indeed the Ni Una Más campaign, the most publicly visible campaign of awareness during the history of the violence, dates from this time (Staudt 2008). Others would isolate as pivotal the heartbreaking murder of seven-year-old Airis Estrella in 2005 which united and mobilized the local community against feminicidio in new and effective ways.⁷ Several years later, the sentencing of perpetrators in the cases of Hotel Verde victims in 2015 would be seen as another historic turning point even when those cases were under-reported nationally because of the unprecedented focus on the fate of the forty-three missing Ayotzinapa students, disappeared in September 2014.

Alfredo and Myrna Limas Hernández (2016) provide a timeline of feminicidal crimes in Ciudad Juárez that is immensely useful. Their analysis identifies four discrete phases: what they term the emergence of feminicidal violence involving serial or multiple killings (1993–2001); the consolidation of a politics of impunity (2002–2007); an escalation of feminicide in the context of the so-called drug war including the case of the unmarked grave at Valle de Juárez (2008–2012); and the current phase from 2013 onwards during which time the crime of feminicidio continues to acquire presence and symbolic power in the community.⁸ This overview comprehensively dispels any notion that the violence against women in Ciudad Juárez is somehow over and that the problem has moved elsewhere. Indeed, a more nuanced reading of figures nationally would conclude that there is now a high visibility pertaining to the crime in Mexico.⁹ This visibility, while welcome of course, has not led to a cessation of the crime; rather, it has simply directed attention to the many other sites where that violence is being produced.

Besides the ‘numbers game’, the other element essential to any consideration of the crimes is the sustained construction of myths and stereotypes surrounding the victims, the perpetrators, the methods and indeed the causes. The murders, as the result perhaps of intense media scrutiny, often became portrayed in reductive and simplistic terms and certain myths pertaining to the victims and to the nature of the crime, began to circulate widely. These myths asserted that the victims were young factory workers, poor, of a certain build and colouring and that the crimes were characterized by high levels of sexual torture as well as mutilation. In contrast to these prevailing myths, it is well established in the literature that the profile of victims is wide-ranging and diverse and includes Mexican and non-Mexican citizens from the Netherlands,¹⁰ US and Central America, to name just a few of the locations of origin. Of the Mexican victims, they include Ciudad Juárez natives, as well as women from other states within Mexico and members of indigenous communities. Indeed one of the media tag lines in reporting the crimes was of las inditas del sur [the little Indian girls from the South], and the racialized as well as the gendered nature of the crime was clear from an early point. Again, this myth is also dispelled by the evidence which points to the majority of the victims being from Chihuahua (Monárrez Fragoso 2005b: 358);¹¹ however, this did not prevent images and stories circulating, in which it was inferred that the ethnicity and the ‘brownness’ of the women’s skin became a factor in their demise.

Furthermore, while the crimes became synonymous with the maquilas or the multinational assembly plants that proliferate along the border particularly in the first decade (1993–2003), according to some studies as few as 10% of the victims overall worked in these factories (Monárrez Fragoso 2005b). This contrasts starkly with their representation from the outset as directly relating to the maquilas and copper-fastened in 2001 with the discovery of eight corpses found in the Campo Algodonero (Cotton Fields) directly opposite the maquila headquarters. This discovery underscored – in symbolic terms at least – the association in the public’s mind between the maquilas and the murders of the young women.¹² Indeed for many years, the feminicides were frequently referred to as the maquila/maquiladora murders (Quiñones 1998).¹³ The other myth relating to the sexual nature of the feminicidal violence has also not withstood detailed scrutiny and while many of the murder victims did display signs of sexual mutilation, many others did not. Instead, if a single determining factor were to be identified in the cases reported, it is likely that poverty would be the primary contender. According to Staudt, approximately one-third of the murders involved the rape and mutilation of victims who were disproportionately poor and young. Monárrez Fragoso’s work (2000, 2002, 2009), has been important too in drawing attention to this aspect. Indeed, the recognition of poverty as a primary shared factor in the profile of the victims is central also to research that links the maquilas with the rise in feminicidal violence and, perhaps more critically, the links with impunity. As the following question which appeared in an open letter from the Chihuahua based non-governmental organization (NGO), Justicia para Nuestras Hijas [Justice for our daughters] baldly puts it: ‘¿Por qué no hay atención, personal y recursos para investigar la desaparición de nuestras hijas? Lo sabemos muy bien, porque todas las desaparecidas y muertas son pobres’ [Why is there no attention, no staff or no resources to investigate the disappearance of our daughters? We know only too well that it is because the disappeared and the dead are poor] (Justicia para Nuestras Hijas 2003).¹⁴

Feminicide in Ciudad Juárez: action and resistance

It is no surprise given the scale of the violence against women experienced in Ciudad Juárez from 1993 onwards that there has been a complex, wide-ranging set of responses from the spheres of media, academia, human rights and art. The role of human rights agencies, NGOs and grassroots organizations, working locally, nationally and internationally has been crucial. There have been responses from the communications media including the print media, radio and television as well as national and international news programmes that have covered the issue from various perspectives. Journalists worthy of particular mention in terms of their contribution to the dissemination of information around feminicidio in Juárez include Diana Washington Valdez, whose investigative journalism resulted in an award-winning series titled ‘Death Stalks the Border’, published by the El Paso Times in 2002.¹⁵ The work of Sergio González Rodríguez was also critically important in the Mexican and Spanish-speaking world, and his groundbreaking hybrid text, Huesos en el desierto (2002), provided the base for Roberto Bolaño’s literary approach to the crimes in the novel, 2666.¹⁶

The role played by NGOs has also been of critical importance providing ‘legal, psychological, and economic s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: no nos cabe tanta muerte [unbearable deaths]
• 1 Framing feminicidio: the spectral politics of death in Ciudad Juárez
• 2 Sacrificial screams: excess in Àlex Rigola’s stage adaptation of 2666
• 3 Remember them: ethics and witnessing in artistic responses to feminicide
• 4 Resilience and renewal in documentary film about feminicidio in Ciudad Juárez
• 5 Toward an activist poetics: fiction responds to feminicidio in Ciudad Juárez
• Conclusion: notes towards the possible
• Appendix
• Index