The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Conclusion

Conclusion Democracy’s Graveyard: Dead Citizenship and the Latino Body Body Parts From its inauguration on January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) allowed for the development of “free trade contact zones” along the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border and with it an expendable labor force: not just the poor but the destitute of Mexico’s southern provinces, mostly women in search of work. The assembly plants and factories along the border found fertile ground and unprecedented growth in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, across from El Paso, Texas. From its inception, the NAFTA experiment in North American “free trade” made Ciudad Juárez what Charles Bowden called the globalized “laboratory of our future.”1 In a disarming piece first published in 1996 by Harper’s magazine, Bowden noted how the NAFTA boom had made Juárez not only the largest industrial zone in Mexico but also the killing field of the new world order. This experiment in the flow of commodity capital and globalization had, and still has, an unrepresentable side. Bowden reported in words and, for the first time to an audience in the United States, photographs that documented the slaughter of Mexican border bodies that were being found in the Rio Grande, which separates the two countries, and in the desert surrounding Juárez. The killings have come to be known as “los femicidios de Juárez,” the Juárez femicides, or simply the Juárez murders. 163 The “Juárez murders” refers to the killing and often ritualized dismemberment of mostly female workers from the interior of Mexico who come looking for work in the transnational maquiladoras. Though the estimates surrounding the deaths are not dependable (the law-enforcement agencies are said to be implicated in the killings), they range from more than four hundred documented cases of murdered women since 1993 (when the pattern of killings was first reported), a figure that does not include the women who have been “disappeared.”2 Bowden writes of the underside of NAFTA that had not yet registered in the public sphere at the time of his initial report: The cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Texas, constitute the largest border community on earth, but hardly anyone seems to admit that the Mexican side exists. Within this forgotten urban maze stalk some of the boldest photographers still roaming the streets with 35-mm cameras. Over the past two years I have become a student of their work, because I think they are capturing something: the look of the future. . . . We have these models in our heads about growth, development, infrastructure . Juárez doesn’t look like any of these images, and so our ability to see this city comes and goes, mainly goes. (44) The stark contrast between the promise of globalization (“growth, development , infrastructure”) and its lived realities make this laboratory of postNAFTA “free-trade” a dystopian space where industrial growth generates poverty at a much faster pace than it distributes wealth (ibid.). It is the literal image of Juárez, however, as reproduced and printed by the photographer -stalkers, that allows this dystopian image to counter the theoretical storehouse of “models we have in our heads about growth, development, infrastructure,” the belief in the benevolence of the United States’ economic model as a sustainable reality anywhere in the world. If the maquiladoras had to comply with the same working conditions, job security, and pay in Juárez as across the border in El Paso, there would, of course, be no need to have these factories on the Mexican side of the divide. Bowden’s sharp critique of NAFTA’s failed promise registers its counterpoint in the images that speak to another side of reality in Mexico’s laboratory of the future, the darker side the neoliberal moment. Politicians and economists may speculate about a global economy fueled by free trade, but these speculations are not necessary because in Juárez the future has already arrived. And this dystopian future in our midst is making the subalCONCLUSION 164 tern body an expendable commodity in the new economic world order: “Most of the workers are women and most of the women are young. By the late twenties or early thirties the body slows and cannot keep up the pace of work. Then, like any used-up thing, the people are junked” (ibid., 48). What made Bowden’s piece in Harper...