Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization

Coda. “Too much of it”: Marjorie Agosín’s and Valerie Martínez’s Representations of Femicide in the Maquila Zone

215 Coda coda “Too much of it” Marjorie Agosín’s and Valerie Martínez’s Representations of Femicide in the Maquila Zone Every advance of the productive forces is a victory for both civilisation and barbarism. If it brings in its wake new possibilities of emancipation, it also arrives coated in blood. —Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (44–45) These crimes [ . . . ] did not occur where capitalism is lacking, rather where there is too much of it. —Eduardo Galeano, “To Be Like Them” (128) Let us turn the map until we see clearly: The border is what joins us, Not what separates us. —Alberto Ríos, from “Border Lines” Ciudad Juárez, the fourth largest city in Mexico, and El Paso, on the other side of the Rio Grande, dramatize North/South relations more acutely than any other urban agglomeration, border zone, or convergence of multinational capital formations in the hemisphere. As a stunning case of neoliberalism’s uneven geographic development and production of space through violent enclosures, Juárez and El Paso meet under the authority of the “Song of Money,” a ubiquitous muse. Nowhere is the border more “coated in blood.” Juárez’s abject violence does “not occur where capitalism is lacking” but “where there is too much of it.” At the scale of production of Juárez’s three-hundred-plus maquiladoras, the tax-free assembly factories of multinational corporations, Eduardo Galeano’s claim questioning the civilizing capacity of capitalism has particular resonance. In addition 216 • Coda to producing televisions and other consumer items, they produce “geographies of danger” that circulate capital and crime and restrict the mobility and power of labor, further augmenting North-South inequalities.1 Alberto Ríos’s “Border Lines” is an archetypal Chicano illustration of the border as an interface that “joins” rather than “separates” Juárez and El Paso and Mexico and the United States. His active, collective verb, “turn,” a cartographic version of “to break,” suggests that “joining” conceptually repairs “broken” subjectivities and fragmentations of class, ethnicity, and nation wrought by transnational free-trade agreements and national-level neoliberal reforms and their unintended consequences, including organized crime and “traffics,” Ileana Rodríguez’s umbrella term for the trade of drugs, arms, and bodies. Ríos’s poem exemplifies how location often determines writing about the border. Using the insights of Debra Castillo and María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba to critique cultural production about femicide, Steven S. Volk and Marian E. Schlotterbeck put this dynamic simply. Whereas Chicano cultural texts often use the border to emphasize commonalities between Mexicans and Chicanos, Mexican literary texts generally foreground the differences (124).2 Like the directive of hemispheric American studies dramatized in Cardenal’s “Room 5600,” connection and division underscore literary conceptions of the border at Juárez/ El Paso. In Ríos’s poem, connection predominates, as in the humanistic, aspirational figure of “turning.” “We seem to live in a world of maps,” he writes. “But in truth we live in a world made / Not of paper and ink but of people.” This echo of the character Wideload’s command to mind the “living, breathing, dreaming men, women and children” “under all this talk of Money and Markets” (77) critiques the money form, the measure of universal value printed on “paper and ink.” But it also connotes the tools, appearance, and material of literature. As such, Ríos’s lines can also be read as implications that much writing in “paper and ink” fails to mind the dreamers in Herrera’s “busted makeshift hotel[s]” along the border. As “the guiding metaphor of Latino Studies,” as Juan Flores posited in 2000 (212), the primary role of the border has been paid forward indefinitely with little scholarly dispute. Yet has “the guiding metaphor” shifted, multiplied, or dispersed, as Herrera suggests at the conclusion of chapter 2? Has it been displaced by individual psychological internalization, in the manner envisioned by Verdecchia? What’s at stake in maintaining the border as the metaphor of Latino studies? Any Latina/o imaginary requires border figures, including possibilities for their transgression and creative reinscription, but such questions are intellectually and politically pertinent. For its part, Broken Souths shifts the focus from the border to “Too much of it” • 217 multiple, variegated souths as spaces for critique, insight, and resistance, and as place-based interfaces from which to imagine “otherwises” to the neoliberal order. By...