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  • FeminicideTheorizing Border Violence
  • Martha Idalia Chew Sánchez
Gender Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border: Media Representation and Public Response. Edited by Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba and Ignacio Corona. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010. Pp. 200. $50.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780816527120.
Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas. Edited by Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Pp. xxviii + 382. $94.95 cloth. $25.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822346814.
Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera. Edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba with Georgina Guzman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Pp. x + 314. $55.00 cloth. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780292723177.
Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries. By Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. xviii + 374. $94.95 cloth. $25.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822350750.
Cities and Citizenship at the U.S.-Mexico Border: The Paso del Norte Metropolitan Region. Edited by Kathleen Staudt, César M. Fuentes, and Julia E. Monárrez Fragoso. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp. xxi + 250. $95.00 cloth. $31.00 paper. ISBN: 9780230100329.

Publication of four edited volumes that examine femicide in the Mexico-US border region adds immensely to our understanding of that phenomenon, particularly when they are read through the lens of Nicole M. Guidottie-Hernández’s Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries, which traces violence in the borderlands from the nineteenth century to the present and demonstrates how violence has shaped people’s identities in the border area. These books tap many of the foremost authors on femicide, who bring to their analyses a wide array of disciplinary approaches and touch upon a host of related themes.

Guidottie-Hernández’s work is informed by Chicano studies, borderland history, transnational feminism, and Latino studies. Guidottie-Hernández theorizes on the continuous mutation and situationality of national membership, rights, and birthrights. She explains some of the ways that exclusionary practices of membership, made manifest in policing racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects, have obscured the physical and psychological pain and trauma inflicted on such communities. She successfully demonstrates how competing understandings of [End Page 263] racial projects have worked in tandem to “produce proper subjects in the borderlands” (8).

Guidottie-Hernández traces physical and discursive violence to explain shifting notions of citizenship linked to the expansion of capitalism in the borderlands. In her reading, full citizens tend to maintain a “sense of bodily and physical integrity” (7). The moments and markers of differentiations in citizenship are inscribed through violence and denial of access to justice, land, resources, and control of the body, and through vigorous policing. For Guidottie-Hernández what is important about such notions of citizenship are the alliances that existed at various points in time between the Mexican and US nation-states in the persecution and terrorization of Yaquis, the collusion of the Mexican elite and some Papago Indians in the grand massacre of Apache and other nomadic Indians, and the elitist Mexican-American interpretation of racial dynamics in Texas.

Guidottie-Hernández makes a major theoretical contribution to border theory and Chicano studies in that she problematizes the concept of mestizaje, which essentializes and dehistoricizes Indian identity in the borderlands. Throughout her book, the author demonstrates how the mestizaje concept masks inequalities, disruptions, and heterogeneities within indigenous groups and indeed all racial groups in Mexico. She is also critical, and rightly so, of privileging the Aztec heritage, as most Chicano studies works tend to do. In particular, she interrogates the construction of Aztecs as a single indigenous group of common cultural, spiritual, and ethnic heritage for Chicanos and Mexicans, and the resulting lack of integration in the Chicano consciousness of the Apaches, Comanches, Havasupais, Hopi, Jemezes, Kiowa Apaches, Lipans, Papagos, and Pimas, to mention some other groups. Guidottie-Hernández calls to mind the forgotten pain inflicted on the Yaquis and Apaches during Mexican- and US-sponsored terrorizing wars. Further, she exposes the historically unacknowledged periodic active alliances of some indigenous and Mexican groups with Anglo-American elites in such endeavors.

Building upon research on histories of violence and displacement of racialized and sexualized bodies...

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