Gender Violence at the U.S.–Mexico Border: Media Representation and Public Response

Gender Violence: An Introduction

In recent years the phenomenon of violence and its sociological and cultural implications has emerged at the forefront of academic discussions about the U.S.–Mexico border. And yet there are few serious studies devoted to one of its most disturbing manifestations: gender violence.1 To address this specific issue, in April of 2005 we brought together a group of scholars at an interdisciplinary symposium—Dialogues on the U.S.–Mexico Border Violence—held at the University of Texas in Austin. Participants examined the complex roles that place, gender, and ethnicity have come to play in relation to the increasing violence along the border. The conference focused specifically on violence inflicted upon women and sexual minorities. The original triple concentration on place, gender, and ethnicity expanded in several directions. New perspectives emerged on various fronts, including the implications and connections between gendered forms of violence and the persistent mechanisms of social violence ; the microsocial effects of economic models; the asymmetries of power in local, national, and transnational configurations; the particular rhetoric, aesthetics, and ethics of discourses that represent violence; the structural factors that perpetuate such discourses; and the economy and culture of fear. In other words, the approaches to the problem were—and we believe they must be—interdisciplinary. As evidenced by the diverse perspectives included in this book, when we look at violence along the U.S.–Mexico border, we are not dealing simply with violence in the abstract. Rather, this book explores concrete instances of gender-based or gender-motivated violence, which requires interpretive and analytical strategies that draw on methods from a range of fields and disciplines. Political science, sociology, and anthropology appear as necessary in studying gender violence as do literary, cultural, Gender Violence: An Introduction ignacio corona and héctor domínguez-ruvalcaba 2 corona and Domínguez-Ruvalcaba and media studies. The conversations across disciplines that started at the 2005 symposium continue in this book as the contributors examine how such violence is the object of (re)presentation in a diversity of texts: oral narratives, newspaper reports, films and documentaries, novels, TV series, and legal discourse. Border Violence Even before the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992, but more vehemently after it came into force two years later, diverse groups of intellectuals, artists, academics, and social activists on both sides of the border have called attention to the subject of violence. They have found a correlation between regional economic transformations and the increase of all kinds of violence. A number of scholarly works have addressed border violence from different angles, including gangrelated issues, governmental coercive policies (from both Mexico and the United States), the dehumanizing effect of the maquiladora system, conflicts related to undocumented workers, organized crime, and drug smuggling.2 The U.S.–Mexico border has been studied as the space where the fluctuating booms and downturns of the global, regional, formal, and underground economies and markets have a direct impact on such fundamental issues as the preservation and reproduction of human life. Throughout this book the contributors have tried to resist the fascination of explanatory arguments that favor geographic exceptionalism . Systematic research has confirmed that social ills, such as gender violence, can hardly be contained by any given urban environment in exclusivity. Nonetheless, most of the chapters are responsive to the many strands of violence that concentrate on spatial conjunctures. Mexican border cities have come to represent a territorial manifestation of an overlapping of many different symbolic and material processes encompassed by globalization. From Matamoros to Tijuana, parallel to the increase in criminal activity, there has been an upsurge in gender violence. In response to the lingering question why Ciudad Juárez has become the central node of gender violence, the contributors have identified a number of circumstances. These include the characteristics of a gun-toting culture that is encouraged by the lethal mix of a corrupt judicial system and the social catalyst of impunity (Quinones, True Tales, 140). introduction 3 There are considerable levels of crime and drug trafficking in Ciudad Juárez (three of Mexico’s five most important drug cartels operate in the area), exacerbated by an ill-reputed and complicit local police. The city’s infrastructure has not kept up with the numbers of migrants who have arrived to cross the border or to stay indefinitely. In fact, not only in Chihuahua but in other Mexican border states as well, the...