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

6. Women in the Global Machine: Patrick Bard’s La frontera, Carmen Galán Benitez’s Tierra marchita, and Alicia Gasparde Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders

Introduction to Chapter 6 In this chapter Miguel López-Lozano analyzes three novels that deal with the femicides of Ciudad Juárez. He points to the precarious value of women in globalized industrial capitalism and argues that the maquiladora industry is at the core of a process of dehumanization of women that has culminated in the femicides. The novels show a foreign perspective on border violence, which rather than seeming unauthorized and exogenous , underscores the global implications of the local tragedy. What the French, Mexican, and Chicana authors have in common is that they consider external economic factors—that is, multinational interests—to be the source of new forms of exploitation and killing. Based on an ethical questioning of capitalism, López articulates a sort of post-Marxist economic critique of the structural causes of femicides. Global politics is a recurring theme in this book—from the women interviewed in chapter 2 (by Patricia Ravelo Blancas), who see international solidarity as the main source of support for local organizations, to the Tijuana transvestites in chapter 1 (by Debra A. Castillo, María Gudelia Rangel Gómez, and Armando Rosas Solís), who see international asylum as their last hope for salvation, to chapter 3 (by Héctor DomínguezRuvalcaba ) and chapter 7 (by James C. Harrington) that reiterate this transnational perspective in their attempt to understand border contexts and the development of activism against violence. The novels studied by López continue this theme and connect it to another major axis in the volume: the media. The protagonists of the three novels investigate femicide not as members of the security forces but as journalists and human rights activists. This is important because the activist and the journalist have an ethical responsibility that is not attached to the state (as is the case of the police). Rather, they are committed to a universalist sense of justice. Accordingly, López calls for a transnational humanism that can lead to a better understanding of the causes and the ways to reduce the violence manifested throughout the border region. For more than a decade the disappearance and murder of hundreds of young women, among them many maquiladora employees, in Ciudad Juárez has brought international attention to the question of how gender interacts with the political, socioeconomic, and cultural dimensions of globalization. In this context Ciudad Juárez has become emblematic of a contemporary dystopia geared toward global production encouraged by such programs as the National Border Program (the Programa Nacional de Fronteras, PRONAF) and the Border Industrialization Program (the Programa de Industrialización Fronteriza, PIF) and enhanced by the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992. The femicides and the lack of official response have not escaped the literary imagination across Mexico, the United States, and Europe. Since the 1990s, a large number of book-length reports, some of them fictional, have been published that describe the femicides, often in sensationalistic terms.1 See, for example, Simon Whitechapel’s Crossing to Kill (1998), which investigates the alleged origins of the recent violence in the human sacrifices of the Aztecs, as well as Charles Bowden’s Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (1998) and Víctor Ronquillo’s Las muertas de Juárez: Crónica de una larga pesadilla (1999). These texts have presented a graphic portrayal of border violence with the purpose of creating awareness of the femicides while pointing the finger at official corruption and the impact of savage capitalism in the border region. Although they are well intentioned, their narrative generally represents the point of view of the morally superior subject of Western civilization. Implicitly, the inhabitants of the Borderlands, as those of the chapter 6 Women in the Global Machine Patrick Bard’s La frontera, Carmen Galán Benítez’s Tierra marchita, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders miguel lópez-lozano 130 miguel lópez-lozano developing world as a whole, are accused of moral and political corruption and backwardness. At the same time they are denied the possibility of being agents of their own historical self-construction. The Maquiladora Stage One of the earliest and most influential means of disseminating information about the femicides is Lourdes Portillo’s documentary Señorita extraviada, Missing Young Woman (2001), which has been followed by an important series of documentaries from both sides of the border, such...