Rectangular Sky: Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México, 2002

Writer’s statement

This creative nonfiction essay utilizes my experience as a full-time volunteer at a women’s and children’s shelter on the US-Mexico border to analyze freedom of movement and lack thereof as related to race, gender, nationality, age, and class. It addresses multiple layers of power and privilege from a fronteriza perspective and positions a critical self-analysis within larger considerations of anti–domestic violence work.

My Introduction to Women’s Studies class at Hamilton College provided me, at age nineteen, with both the tools to talk about my experience of family violence as well as the framework to understand that my experience was in fact part of much larger societal patterns that could be analyzed and challenged. My Women’s Studies education also helped me understand that even though I was disadvantaged in terms of socioeconomic class and gender, my skin color and US citizenship granted me great privilege. It is one thing to be able to name this, to study this, to try to understand the reach of this, and it is something else altogether finally to come face-to-face with it.

In college I also studied abroad, in Argentina, where I looked like most of the people around me. In fact, locals never knew that I was not Argentine until I opened my mouth. On the US-Mexico border a couple of years later, however, I was acutely aware for the first time of my skin color, of my clothing, of the US driver’s license in my wallet, of my choice to be on this border, of the fact that I had such a choice to begin with. Everything about me stood out, and I was called daily to account for such privileged dislocation. I was called to account by the women in the shelter asking why I had come to work in Juárez, by the men on the street proposing marriage and other acts, by the poverty and wealth commingling in the neighborhood where I lived, by the physical border that defined both Juárez and El Paso, and by my almost seamless movement across that border. From an academic perspective I could easily use words like nafta and globalization, the push-pull factors of immigration, the feminization of poverty, and misogyny and femicide to understand this new place where I chose to be. In living in Juárez, however, I quickly understood that I did not really know much of anything after all. As it turned out, my Women’s Studies education had not prepared me for any of it.

Annunciation House, the Catholic organization running the shelter where I worked, has done vital and unparalleled work in El Paso/Juárez since 1978. Their mission reads:

In a Gospel spirit of service and solidarity, we accompany the migrant, homeless, and economically vulnerable peoples of the border region through hospitality, advocacy, and education. We place ourselves among these poor so as to live our faith and transform our understanding of what constitutes more just relationships between peoples, countries, and economies.¹

Without Annunciation House, this particular border would be an even more hostile place, and the thousands and thousands of shelter guests with whom it has worked, both short and long term, would have received less welcome. While the organization politicized religion with the goal of social justice on multiple levels, such a crucial perspective did not completely prepare me for my role in this work: what of the power relations that brought mostly young, white, college-educated US citizens to staff (full-time and without pay) its shelters in the first place?

And nothing prepared me for the weight of the stories the women at the shelter would tell, each story an entire universe unto itself, each story similar or different from the other 250 or so I would hear while I worked there.

In elementary school I wrote fictional stories based on my spelling vocabulary each week. Since then, though, it has always been creative nonfiction. In middle school I wrote about the death of my grandfather. In high...