The Art of Witness

There are 268 nails encircling the Ni una más crucifix. Two-hundred-sixty-eight nails in memory of women and girls murdered in Ciudad Juárez. After crossing the Paso del Norte International Bridge, we spot it immediately, the large wooden memory-cross on the Mexican side of the border, facing traffic that passes into El Paso. It is attached to a twelve-foot metal panel and bears a placard etched with the "¡Ni una más!" ("Not one more!") slogan, in remembrance of the women and girls.

Figure 1.

Memory-cross at Juárez toll booth as cars approach Paso del Norte bridge to El Paso, Texas, 2007. Photo by Angela Fregoso. Courtesy: Rosa-Linda Fregoso.

I've stood before this memory-cross on many occasions. This time, my sister Angela accompanies me and we are both grief-stricken by its scale, the throng of six-inch spikes that once held tags with the names of the deceased women. It is a haunting sight to behold. Two-hundred-sixty-eight iron spikes. I try to count as I walk closer, wrap my fingers around one's surface, cold and raspy to the touch, close my eyes, and try to conjure up the lives the Ni una más crucifix mourns.

I

"Acompáñenos" is how Paula Flores phrases her plea, looking at us with dark, pensive eyes. In May of 2007, I am sitting next to my research collaborator, Cynthia, at a gender violence conference sponsored by Stanford University when Paula asks the audience to accompany the mothers of women and girls who were murdered and disappeared in Ciudad Juárez, for monthly protests against the government.¹

I could not refuse. As a mother, I connected deeply with Paula, who has survived a mother's most unfathomable fear: the brutal and unresolved murder of her teenage daughter, Sagrario González, in 1998.

Sagrario left home on the morning of April 16 and never returned. She was not accustomed to traveling alone to work at CAPCOM, a maquiladora or assembly plant located twelve miles away from her home on the outskirts of Juárez, but recently her shift changed from the one she shared with her father and sister, Guillermina. To get to work on time, Sagrario caught the bus at four in the morning.

The morning shift ended at three in the afternoon and by ten, she had not returned home. Her father and sister first sought help from the municipal police, who hinted she may have eloped with her boyfriend, Andres. Yet he was still working the late shift at the plant. The special prosecutor's office charged with investigating crimes against women proved equally dismissive, forcing the Gonzalezes to wait seventy-two hours before filing a missing person's report.

For days the family searched frantically, visiting area hospitals and clinics, interviewing friends, retracing Sagrario's habitual routes. Joined by friends and neighbors, the family organized rastreos or combings of the desert area, where other female bodies had been found.

Two weeks after Sagrario disappeared, police recovered a young woman's body in the desert area known as Loma Blanca. "I took my son, Chuy, with me to the police station and we identified the body," says Paula. "It was Sagrario. She was still wearing the company smock with her name embroidered on it." Sagrario had been stabbed five times and strangled. The body was too decomposed to determine evidence of sexual violence.

Despite the pain and anguish inscribed on her face, Paula remains a dauntless activist-mother, survivor of death threats and multiple assaults on her family, extortion attempts, menacing intimidations by incompetent and corrupt police authorities, all aimed at ending her unyielding campaign for justice on behalf of her daughter and hundreds of women who have suffered similar fates in the border city of Ciudad Juárez.

By 2007, over 450 women and girls had been murdered and hundreds disappeared in the border state of Chihuahua alone, and still the gender crimes remain unsolved and largely uninvestigated. The widespread disregard for the...