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Murder in Juárez: Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Global Assembly Line

Author(s): Jessica Livingston

Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2004), pp. 59-76

Published by: University of Nebraska Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3347254

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Murder in Juairez

Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Global Assembly Line

JESSICA LIVINGSTON

On July 7, 1995, seventeen-year-old Silvia Morales left for school and disap- peared. Her body was found two months later. In February 1999 thirteen-year- old Irma Angelica Rosales was sent home from her factory job for having left her station. Later that day her body was found in a drainage canal. In Septem- ber 2001 nineteen-year-old Luna Guadalupe, a student in business adminis- tration, disappeared on the way to a friend's house on a Saturday afternoon. The next month twenty-year-old Claudia Gonzalez arrived to work four min-

utes late, and the doors of the maquiladora, or foreign-owned assembly plant, were locked. She never returned home. Both Luna and Claudia were found in

November in a shallow grave with six other women-all eight women had been raped and strangled.'

Since 1993 murdered bodies of young women and girls have haunted Ciudad Juirez, the border town that lies across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. By mid-2002 an estimated three hundred women had been murdered, and more

women are missing. Rosa Linda Fregoso states:

Mexican women have been brutally and systematically killed in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua.... Many [of the victims] have been tortured and sex-

ually violated: raped, strangled or gagged. Mutilated, with nipples and breasts cut off, buttocks lacerated like cattle, or penetrated with objects.2

After being dumped in desert gullies or vacant lots, their decomposed bodies are often unidentifiable. Almost a third of the cases seem to follow a pattern

suggesting they are the work of one or more serial killers. Most of these victims

are young, slender women with long dark hair; they are also poor. These mur- ders are the most extreme form of a general violence against women in the bor-

der city. In the first nine months of 1998 alone, women in Juirez reported eight

hundred cases of rape and over nine thousand cases of violence, including rape, kidnapping, and domestic violence.3

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Why have there been so many cases of mysogynic violence in the last decade

in Juirez? Chandra Talpade Mohanty argues in Women Workers and Capitalist

Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidar-

ity that because globalization has complicated class relations nationally and in- ternationally, "issues of spatial economy ... gain fundamental importance for

feminist analysis." She defines these issues of spatial economy as "the manner by which capital utilizes particular space for differential production and the accumulation of capital and, in the process, transforms these spaces and peo- ples."4 While ethnicity certainly plays a significant factor in selecting Juirez as

a production site, once the factories are operating, gender plays a significant role in both obscuring and maintaining class relations in the new international division of labor.

Within the context of globalization, it is necessary to investigate not just the

possible male perpetrators but also the export-processing zone and the city of Juirez itself. After recounting the story of the murdered women in Juirez as it

is being reported by U.S. and British Commonwealth journalists, I will place these murders in their socioeconomic and ideological context in order to an- alyze the gendering of production, the gendering of violence, and the relation-

ship between the two. The murders of the young women result from a displacement of economic frustration onto the bodies of the women who work

in the maquiladoras. The construction of working women as "cheap labor" and disposable within the system makes it possible, and perhaps acceptable, to kill them with impunity.

BIG-CITY DREAMS: MIGRATING FROM THE COUNTRY TO THE CITY

Most of the newspaper articles about the murders of women in Juirez refer to the victims as maquiladora workers. Molly Moore reports that factories have

"lured hundreds of thousands of women and girls from their confining homes and remote villages across Mexico, giving them greater financial and social in- dependence than perhaps any other single phenomenon in recent Mexican history."5 Although maquiladoras have operated in Mexico since 1965 under the Border Industrialization Program (BIP), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has helped to create 1.2 million jobs in Mexico since be- ing implemented on January 1, 1994. Over one quarter of these jobs are in Ciu- dad Juirez.6

Alma Vucovich, president of the Mexican Congress' Committee on Sexual Equality, complains about the investigation of murders in Juirez, "Authorities haven't cared because the victims are women and they're poor, and many times

they have no family in Juirez."7 The maquila (another name for a maquila- dora) workers usually come from small villages and rural areas, and move to

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Juirez in search of work. Many of the women have worked in family econo-

mies, including working on a farm, taking in laundry, or making and selling tortillas. Others have worked for wages in agriculture or as domestics, and some have taken up maquila piecework before migrating to Juirez. Often a de-

sire to escape the confines of poverty and domesticity motivates their decision to move to Juirez. Their migration creates "a new phenomenon of mobile, in-

dependent-and vulnerable-working women" living in the city.8 Many of these migrant women move to Juirez, a city on the U.S.-Mexico

border known for its maquiladoras, drug cartel, and pollution. Many of the residents of Juirez live on the outskirts of the city in colonias, or shantytowns,

in makeshift houses constructed from discarded wooden pallets, cardboard boxes, or cement, without running water or telephones. Some landlords ille-

gally provide electricity by tapping into city lines, which often causes power

surges that burn appliances. Each day factory workers have to walk through the

unlit dirt roads to the company buses that transport them to work. Some women pool their resources and live together, and other women move in with relatives or friends of their family.9

Despite the seeming harshness of life in Juirez, the young women keep com-

ing at the rate of forty to sixty thousand a year. They seek jobs in the maquila-

doras, which pay higher wages than elsewhere in Mexico. Women already living in Juirez also work because the income from the men in the household is insufficient to support the family.

The chance to have an independent social life also attracts many young women to the city and to work in the maquiladoras. They come because, like

Irma Angelica Rosales, they dream of adventures in the city and want to escape

"the tedium that enveloped daily life" in rural Mexico.1' Leslie Salzinger, a so- ciologist who worked in a maquiladora in Juirez, reports that many girls have told her that "they take maquila jobs not for survival but for independence: to

buy clothes with their own money and to get out of their houses and social- ize." I Many young women go out with their coworkers to dance clubs and women-only clubs that feature male dancers. Esther Chavez, director of Casa Amiga, the city's only shelter for abused women, says that maquila workers go to the dance clubs despite the crime and violence "to forget the mechanical, dehumanizing work they do."12

MAQUILADORAS AND LABOR EXPLOITATION:

REGULATING THE LIVES OF FEMALE EMPLOYEES

The maquiladoras primarily employ young women. The managers claim that women are better suited to factory work because of their manual dexterity and

their ability to tolerate tedious and repetitive work. Despite these "natural abil-

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ities," the maquiladoras use discriminatory job classifications to hire women

for "unskilled" positions and men for "skilled" labor.13

In addition to paying the female workers cheaply for long hours, Debbie Nathan reports that the maquiladoras also monitor their female employees more closely than male employees. Before hiring new female employees, man-

agers require medical exams and often inquire about their employees' sexual activities. Pregnancy tests are routinely administered. Mexican law requires social security coverage of pregnant women during the third trimester, and the

maquiladoras would have to pay. Therefore, any woman who is pregnant is dis-

missed or harassed until she quits. Birth control pills are plentiful at the facto-

ries while other health services are scarce. In addition to requiring pregnancy

tests, some supervisors even inspect employees' sanitary napkins to ensure that

they are not pregnant.14

In some maquiladoras a woman's appearance receives more attention than her work skills. Supervisors often hire based on a potential employee's attrac-

tiveness, and they say, "Girls, utilize your sexuality."5i Often employees wear

miniskirts, high heels, and makeup to work, especially on Fridays when the company buses drop off many of the workers after their shifts at the dance clubs. Supervisors often stalk the assembly lines, playing favorites and asking

for dates. The maquiladoras also encourage workers to participate in annual in-

dustry-wide "Sefiorita Maquiladora" beauty contests. Dance clubs host "Most Daring Bra" and "Wet String Bikini" contests with cash prizes that are more than an entire week's wages.16

Supporters of industrialization say that the industrial park and the maqui- ladoras within symbolize modernization for Mexico. One maquiladora man- ager compared globalization to the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, saying: "We are again transforming the world by bringing progress to all people, but especially to women." 17 Yet, working conditions in the maquilado- ras have deteriorated with NAFTA, and existing labor laws are not enforced.18

An average starting wage is thirty-five dollars a week.19 Maquiladoras discour-

age union organizing with dismissals and threats of blacklisting or moving the factory.20 Often workers' only recourse is to quit and look for a new job, but employees are easily replaced, and new jobs are usually not much better. Be- cause factories consider women to be short-term employees, there is no in- vestment in a stable workforce.

IF SHE WASN T A BAD GIRL": THE RESPONSE OF MEXICAN AUTHORITIES

When young women have disappeared, police have frequently suggested to family members that the missing woman left with a boyfriend or have

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suggested that the woman was at fault, saying, "If she wasn't a bad girl, then why did she leave?" State authorities have assumed that some of the vic- tims were prostitutes and moved slowly on investigations. In 1995, the state as-

sistant attorney general blamed the murders on the "double life" that many

young women lead-working by day and going out at night, or even taking up prostitution.21

Nathan reports that the Juirez mayor issued statements such as "Do you know where your daughter is tonight?" Some Juirez residents also adopted this attitude, believing that only prostitutes and factory women were at risk of

being murdered. Mexican feminists accused the first state appointed prose- cutor for the women's murders, Suly Ponce, as being more interested in the victims' reputation than in solving the crimes. Ponce herself admits to inves-

tigating the victims' backgrounds and stated, "We were studying the entire family [of the victims] and we couldn't reach any conclusions because many of them were good workers, many of them were students-good girls, clean girls." 22

Fregoso states:

[In 1998 the National Commission for Human Rights] issued a report charging gross irregularities and general negligence in state investiga- tions, including the misidentification of corpses, failure to obtain expert tests on forensic evidence, failure to conduct autopsies or obtain semen

analysis ... failure to file written reports, [and] incompetence in keeping records of the rising tide of women murders.23

Ponce was hired in late 1998 after this report was issued. On her first visit to a

crime scene, she witnessed photographers moving the body, police trampling evidence with footprints and tire tracks, and reporters and bystanders littering

the scene with cigarette butts and empty soda cans. Ponce began cordoning off crime scenes, but as recently as November 2001 family members of victims

have searched the areas and found evidence, often victims' clothing, where bodies were located after the police have supposedly combed the area.24

Under governmental pressure to solve the murders, police have hurriedly arrested suspects and wrapped up cases, only to have the killings to continue.25 Originally, their investigations primarily focused on one man-Egyptian- born chemist Sharif Abdel Latif Sharif. Arrested in 1995 and convicted for one

murder, Sharif is now in jail, but the killings continue.26 In 1996 the police ar-

rested members from a gang, the Rebels, accusing them of committing mur-

ders under Sharif's orders. While on trial, the gang members claimed they were tortured while in custody and showed evidence of physical abuse. In 1999 a fourteen-year-old girl survived after being raped and left for dead in the desert. She identified her bus driver as the assailant. Again authorities at-

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tempted to link the murders to Sharif, arresting a ring of bus drivers and claiming that Sharif paid them twelve hundred dollars to kill two women a month to make him look innocent.27

Mexican authorities have also considered theories about a serial killer, espe-

cially since the murders appear to follow a pattern. Former FBI criminal profil-

ing expert Robert K. Ressler said in 1998 that several serial killers might be involved but that many of the murders appeared to be random crimes. In March 1999, an FBI team aiding Mexican authorities also said the murders do not appear to be related.28

Bus drivers were arrested in November 2001 for several murders. Mario

Escobedo, the lawyer of one of the drivers, put together a solid defense, "claim-

ing that the confessions were induced by torture and were internally contra- dictory." On the night of February 5, 2002, police officers in unmarked vehicles

pursued Escobedo, who crashed his car before the police shot and killed him. The police claim that they thought they were following a "dangerous fugitive," who shot at them first.29

Lourdes Portillo made a documentary investigating the murders and found a "web of complicity" between police and government officials.30 Feminist or-

ganizations that demanded better investigations into the murders have re- cently come under attack in ads published in local newspapers accusing them of "profiting from the pain" of victims and their families. The ads are "signed

by shadowy civic groups," which the women's groups believe are a front for the

state government.31 While police investigations have been inept at best and corrupt at worst, feminist organizations in Juirez believe that a "macho back- lash" is responsible for the murders. According to Esther Chavez, this "macho

backlash" might be a reaction against the maquiladoras for employing so many female workers.32 It is this connection between the maquiladoras, sexuality, and violence that I now want to discuss.

NEGOTIATING BORDERS IN JUaREZ: RURAL, URBAN, AND NATIONAL

In her work on globalization, Saskia Sassen emphasizes the importance of place and production in an analysis of economic globalization: "Many of the resources necessary for global economic activities are not hypermobile and are, indeed, deeply embedded in place, notably places such as global cities and export processing zones." She argues that globalization includes a "dynamic of

dispersal and of centralization." 33 Global capitalism requires the centralization of labor in global cities in the third and first worlds. Structural adjustment

policies in Mexico have forced migrations of laborers from rural areas to ex-

port processing zones.

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After a 1982 debt crisis, Mexico implemented structural adjustment pro- grams to stimulate the economy, including agricultural reforms in the late 1980s and 199os. Previously, the Mexican government had supported agrarian

programs that subsidized resources for farmers. However, structural reforms "based on the deregulation of markets, privatization of state enterprises, and trade liberalization" have increased unemployment in rural areas, causing high levels of male migration to the United States.34

In her study of the gendered economic history of rural households, Maria de los Angeles Crummett analyzes how these structural adjustments affected women's economic roles. She states that women left behind to maintain land

rights had to take greater economic responsibility for the household and en- gage in income-earning activities, such as maquila piecework. Daughters, who also assist with income-earning activities, did not necessarily remain in the household. Rather, once in their twenties, these daughters form the largest group of female migrants moving from the subsistence sector to urban areas.35

Because industry policy maintains low wages and causes a high turnover rate,

the maquiladoras continually have to recruit young female workers from rural areas and have even begun hiring older women with greater familial obliga- tions as well.36

Despite the claim that these export-processing zones would stimulate eco- nomic growth in Mexico, the economy has been frustrated in the past few de- cades. Male unemployment has been particularly high, and workingmen are often underemployed. NAFTA promised jobs and prosperity, but in 1995 Mex- ico lost more than a million jobs, and the peso devaluation cut the standard of

living in half for most workers. While real wages decrease, the cost of living continues to rise. Over the past twenty years, income of Mexican workers has fallen to twenty-five percent of its previous purchasing power."

While Mexico has export processing zones along the border and now even in its interior, Judirez remains the largest. Particularly successful at recruiting

multinational corporations, JuArez has developed industrially on a larger and more rapid scale than other cities.38 In particular, it has attracted many U.S. corporations; historian Emma Perez reports that 80 percent of the maquila- doras in Ju~rez are U.S.-owned.39 Because Ju~rez is a border city, American managers can live in El Paso and commute across the bridge to work. Ju~rez residents can see the El Paso skyline-a poor city by American standards but wealthy in comparison to Ju~rez. Living on the border next to the United States makes costs higher while wages remain low. The poverty of the colonias and the desolation of the desert surround the industrial park in Juirez.

While some call Juirez the gateway to U.S. prosperity, in actuality, it is the

U.S. gateway to cheap labor. Ju~irez and other border cities operate as the first

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stage of migration for many immigrants, which benefits U.S. businesses and residents who hire them.40 Multinational corporations who relocate their

factories to Juirez also profit tremendously from the cheap labor, and this la-

bor pool is often the most important factor in the decision to relocate labor- intensive industries to these export processing zones.41 However, Mexicans resent both the multinationals who profit and the women who work for them.

Sociologist Pablo Vila says that margins connote "pollution and endanger- ment," and that Mexico's northern border is a particularly symbolic margin

because it is where Mexico meets "the country that for many years was con-

sidered the historical enemy, the country that, according to Mexican narrative, stole half of the national territories." He claims that maquiladora workers, like

prostitutes who service foreign men, represent "the openness of the border to the needs of the 'other,"' which threatens Mexico's sovereignty. One particular

woman interviewed by Vila, Margarita, views maquila work as more corrupt

than prostitution, "The maquilas are purely pinche puteadero [fucking pros-

titution], purely pinche corruption. I think that a chingada [fucking] cantina is cleaner than maquilas." 42 In "Globalizing Social Violence: Race, Gender, and the Spatial Politics of Crisis," Tryon P. Woods claims, "The maquiladoras, rep-

resenting the commodity exchange relationship of capitalism, come to sym- bolize prostitution."43 In this association between maquiladora workers and corruption, the women bear the resentment for the United States once again infiltrating Mexico's borders.

MASCULINE AUTHORITY AND OWNERSHIP". IMPUNITY IN CASES OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE

In their study of prostitution in Tijuana, Debra A. Castillo, Maria Gudelia Rangel G6mez, and Bonnie Delgado interviewed a woman who, prior to en- gaging in prostitution, had been raped by her employer. The researchers claim this is a "more violent form of the many stories of sexual harassment in the

workplace." They state that the women interviewees "describe a societal struc- ture based on male dominance in the workplace and male rights to women who are perceived as stepping out of their traditional roles, whether by re-

maining unattached to a male protector or by attempting to enter the realm of

paid labor."44 In fact, the Chihuahua legislature had attempted to enact a law that reduced the minimum sentencing for rape from four years to one year if

the defendant could prove that the victim had provoked the attack. Only un- der threat of intervention from Mexico's Congress did the Chihuahua legisla-

ture overturn the law in September 2001.45

Mexico's judicial system provides little recourse for women who are victims

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of male violence, particularly if it is domestic. Fregoso states: "Mexico's regu- latory and judicial system, strengthened by traditional cultural values, sup- ports 'the idea of masculine authority and ownership' over the lives of women

and grants males impunity in the exercise of violence against women."46 A woman in Mexico cannot file domestic abuse charges unless her injuries take longer than fifteen days to heal. The courts rarely interfere in the private do-

mestic sphere. Maria Luisa Carsoli was killed by her husband Ricardo Medina while she was at Casa Amiga, the only shelter for abused women in Ciudad Juirez. Before he murdered his wife, he had even boasted that he would not be

held accountable by the justice system. Even though eyewitnesses have identi-

fied him as the killer, he is not in jail.47 The maquiladoras draw on local patri-

archal practices, discourse, and tolerance of sexual violence against women, and thus violence against women has intensified.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF CHEAP LABOR:

WOMEN WORKING IN THE MAQUILADORAS

Nathan reports that "many coalition activists attribute high sexual assault sta-

tistics to gender inequality, and some mention the maquila industry's com- plicity in fostering it." 48 The maquilas are more than complicit in maintaining gender inequality; they are invested in it. Susan Tiano states: "For capitalism to benefit maximally from women's participation in both the capitalistic and

domestic modes of production, the gender-based division of labor and the patriarchal relations that support it must be maintained."49 Central to this gender-based division of labor is the construction of women as cheap labor. Freeman argues that third-world women are neither "naturally" docile nor cheap labor to be tapped. Rather, the multinational corporations "actually cre-

ate ideal workers" for certain types of production." The maquiladoras in Judirez engage in complex negotiations with ideologies of gender to construct and maintain this category of cheap labor.

Women working in the maquila industry challenge the ideal of Mexican womanhood, "which holds women to an ideal of femininity symbolized by the Virgin of Guadalupe, the virgin mother." I' According to this ideology, Mexi- can women have been expected to center their lives on their children and not

engage in waged employment. However, motherhood is being reformulated to include economic support of children as a responsibility. While women are not

choosing between the identities of mother and worker but combining them, many still hold motherhood (without waged work) as the ideal. Thus, they feel ambivalent about their roles as wageworkers, which helps to support the gen- der division of labor.52

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However, the factories do not want workers to also be mothers because they

do not want to pay maternity benefits and because "a child implies a lowering of productivity."53 By refusing to hire pregnant women and often harassing

women who become pregnant to quit, they are discouraging women from per- forming their traditional roles as mothers. Yet, at the same time, the factories do not want their female employees to assume an identity as permanent work- ers. Central to this construction of a female workforce is the notion that these

laborers are temporary, which justifies their low wages. Factories justify not

training female employees for skilled tasks because they are imagined to be short-term workers who will eventually quit to have a family. In a maquiladora in Juirez, Melissa W. Wright observes that "in order to preserve the represen- tation of Mexican women as the cheap opposition who outlined the limits of masculine value, [the managers] did not train their new female employees suf-

ficiently for their jobs." 54 Thus, factories use the potential role of motherhood

to devalue women's worth as workers while maximizing productivity.

However, if motherhood is not used to distinguish female from male work-

ers, women might begin to expect opportunities for training and advancement equal to men. Thus, the factories must differentiate the women in some way.

By encouraging female employees to dress fashionably, to participate in beauty contests, and to go dancing in the clubs, managers are able to feminize, sexu- alize, and trivialize them as workers. Not only do these sexualized practices dis-

tinguish female from male workers, but they also encourage women to become consumers and purchase clothing, cosmetics, jewelry, and entertainment. Consumerism is presented as an appropriately feminine role as opposed to production.

In contrast to the sexualized atmosphere of the maquiladoras, the traditional

ideology of femininity requires chastity, particularly of young, unmarried women. The Virgin of Guadalupe's "monstrous double" is Malintzin, con- quistador Hernan Cortez's Indian mistress and interpreter. Malintzin also has additional names, including La Chingada, which "refers to a woman who is both 'fucked over,' that is, taken advantage of, and one who is literally, 'fucked,' or entered sexually."55 During the 1980s several scholars, including Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, Gay Young, Annette Fuentes, and Barbara Ehrenreich, commented on the stigma attached to women working in the maquiladoras.56 More recently Wright has described the "managerial narrative of the female Mexican employee," which connects women's dress with prosti- tution. She states that in her interviews, the "message that you cannot tell the difference between a prostitute and a female maquiladora worker was com- mon." 57 Maquila managers are complicit with the narrative that equates fac- tory work and prostitution; and they benefit from this connotation, which

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characterizes not just female labor but female workers themselves as worthless

and disposable.

FUELING RESENTMENT: MEN WORKING IN THE MAQUILADORAS

Being the breadwinner is a central component of patriarchal manhood. How- ever, unemployment and low wages compromise this masculinity. Further- more, global capitalism undermines men as workers by defining women as the ideal workers. When rapid growth led to labor shortages in the 198os, maquila-

doras began employing more men to work in the assembly lines. Estimates of the current number of male workers in the maquiladoras range from 35 to 50 percent.58 Despite or because men are working in the maquiladoras, they perceive their masculinity as threatened. The maquiladoras are the national and patriarchal extension of the United States into Mexico; in these spaces Mexican masculinity is considered inferior to American masculinity.59

While assembly line jobs are no longer exclusively female, the popular nar- rative still speaks as if they are in order to maintain the category of cheap la- bor. The factories make no pretense of a family wage, and they pay men the

same low wages as women. Thus Salzinger argues that the Mexican and Amer- ican managers are:

reluctant to diverge from the public framework that defines women as ap-

propriate maquila workers, even in the face of their overwhelmingly male

workforce.... Faced with the choice between questioning maquila pay practices or the manliness of maquila workers, managers choose to ques- tion their subordinates.60

Salzinger describes two very different work environments at plants in Juirez where the experiences for men differ, but in both she notes, the "amount of

work dedicated to the creation of appropriately gendered workers."'' In the type of maquiladora more typically known, the assembly line, is predomi- nantly female, and the physically-segregated men are standing rather than sit- ting. Sometimes different colored smocks also differentiate between male and female workers. Discriminatory classifications of jobs into categories of"light" tasks and heavier work also help to maintain gender difference. Supervisors interact and flirt with the women workers, who are objectified. The women workers and the supervisors ignore the men working on the assembly line. In this atmosphere, class and gender intertwine, stripping the male workers of

their masculinity.62 When disciplined, the male workers have to work among the women, further feminizing them. It is likely that the men in these plants find their work both demeaning and emasculating.

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In an auto parts assembly plant, the managers, who claim a preference for female workers, are unable to attract enough women workers, making men the

majority. This plant focuses on finding rather than making good workers, and thus the managerial presence on the floor is conspicuously absent. Men and women wear the same color smocks and frequently interact with each other.

In this managerial absence, men constitute masculinity through "activity and

aggressiveness vis-a-vis women workers-both in the sphere of sexuality and the sphere of work." While the women construct a femininity that allows them

to be both sexually receptive and capable workers, the men sexualize the women through catcalling and disparaging their ability to do the work. This aggressiveness seems rooted in a resentment of the presence of the women workers who transform what would otherwise be to them a masculine atmo-

sphere. Through their sexual aggressiveness, the male workers attempt to put women in their (traditional) place.63

RESTRUCTURING OF LABOR:

THE EFFECTS ON RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN

Although limited, the restructuring of the labor market does contain possibil- ities for improving women's autonomy and empowerment.64 Only a few de-

cades ago, women could not socialize with men unchaperoned, and their parents often selected their marriage partners. However, the discourse on the

"new maquila woman" defines unchaperoned socializing between young men and women at work and in the dance halls as appropriate.65 Through economic

contribution to their household, women have more say over budgeting and domestic decisions. Some women also succeed in requesting help from men in domestic chores.66 A growing number of working women head their own household; 20 to 30 percent of women workers were household heads by 1984.67 In addition, women also participate more in the public sphere.68 However, women's participation in the public sphere makes them more vis-

ible, whether going to work, to the store, or to bars. The presence of so many female factory workers has altered the city. As Chavez states, "Women are oc-

cupying the space of men in a culture of absolute dominance of men over women. This has to provoke misogyny." 69 This misogyny motivates a macho backlash, often expressed through violence. Although the economic contributions of wives and daughters to the house-

hold are essential, women are commonly perceived as competitors for jobs. Even though global capitalism relies upon and reinforces patriarchy, men feel threatened when their wives and daughters earn more money. Fernandez-

Kelly says that it is assumed that as women spend more time working in the

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factories, men will have to spend more time helping with domestic work, "with deleterious effects upon their sense of manhood."70 Sassen notes that women "gain greater personal autonomy and independence while men lose ground."'71

However, women and men in Juirez most likely could adjust to restructur-

ing of the labor market if it did not undermine men as workers by construct- ing women in the workplace as cheap labor. Fuentes and Ehrenreich cite "male

resentment and hostility" as a factor in the stigmatization of maquiladora women; they are also factors in the increased violence against women.72 Cur- rently, Juirez has the highest rate of domestic violence in Mexico, and it has in-

creased dramatically since 1993.73 If this male resentment and hostility was not

tolerated by Mexican authorities, and if it could also be reduced with more egalitarian and better-paying working conditions, perhaps the murdering of women in Juirez would also cease.

RETURNING TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

Although the police investigations have been handled poorly, forensic evi- dence alone will neither solve nor stop these murders. By analyzing the crime scene, one can deduce that the sexualized murder suggests anger at the in- creasing sexual independence of young women in Mexico. The mutilated breasts suggest anger at women's use of their bodies for more than mothering

and nurturing. The victims are primarily working women, suggesting resent- ment at women's increasing economic independence. Abandonment of their bodies in the desert like garbage reveals that these women are considered cheap and disposable. What is not apparent at the crime scene is the class hierar- chy-embedded in global capitalism and expressed through gender-that plays an integral part in these murders.

Economic restructuring in the last two decades has created a new interna- tional division of labor that particularly exploits women in third world coun- tries. Necessary to this division has been the construction of female labor as cheap and disposable when, paradoxically, global capitalism depends upon these women to assemble its commodities. While multinational corporations profit from the maquiladoras in Juarez, the murdered women and their fami-

lies bear the cost of global capitalism.

NOTES

i. Paul de la Garza, "Series of Slayings Baffles City on Mexican Border" (Morales

murder), Arizona Republic, November 27, 1998, in LexisNexis: News: 2 (database on-

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line), available from Reed Elsevier Publishers, Dayton, Ohio; Sam Dillon, "Feminist

stokes outcry at brutal string of killings" (Rosales murder), The Gazette (Montreal),

March 1, 1999, Bi in LexisNexis: News: 2; Jo Tuckman, "Women: Deadly Frontier"

(Guadalupe murder), The Guardian, March 25, 2002, G2, in LexisNexis: News: parag.

4 and 11; and Kris Axtman, "Border Mystery: 274 Murders in Nine Years" (Gonzalez

murder), Christian Science Monitor, May 2, 2002, in LexisNexis: News: parag. 31.

2. Rosa Linda Fregoso, "Voices Without Echo: The Global Gendered Apartheid,"

Emergences, 10:1 (2000): 137.

3. Tuckman, "Women: Deadly Frontier" (murder total), parag. 1; Molly Moore,

"Young Women Follow Journeys of Hope to Factories-and Then to Violence; Bright

Lights, Dark City," The Washington Post, June 25, 2000, final ed., Aol, in LexisNexis:

News: 3; Tuckman, "Women: Deadly Frontier" (serial killer theory), parag. 1; Mary

Beth Sheridan, "The Death that Haunts Juirez," Los Angeles Times, May 12, 1999, home

ed., Ai, in LexisNexis: News: 2; and Ricardo Sandoval, "Serial Killings Haunting Mex-

ico; 120 Young Women Slain Since 1993" (statistics of violence), Times-Picayune (New

Orleans), November 21, 1998, Ai, in LexisNexis: News: 2.

4. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies

of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity," Feminist Genealo-

gies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Tal-

pade Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997), 5.

5. Moore, "Young Women Follow Journeys of Hope," 6.

6. Moore, "Young Women Follow Journeys of Hope," 2.

7. Almoa Vucovich quoted in Sheridan, "The Death that Haunts Juarez," 2.

8. For Mexican women's work histories see Norma Iglesias Prieto, Beautiful Flowers

of the Maquiladora: Life Histories of Women Workers in Tijuana, trans. Michael Stone

with Gabrielle Winkler (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997): 46 -73. Also see Maria

de los Angeles Crummett, "A Gendered Economic History of Rural Households: Calvillo, Aguascalientes, Mexico, 1982-1991," Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies

22:1 (2001): 105-25; and Moore, "Young Women Follow Journeys of Hope," 3.

9. Moore, "Young Women Follow Journeys of Hope," 6.

10. Moore, "Young Women Follow Journeys of Hope," 4.

11. Leslie Salzinger quoted in Debbie Nathan, "Death Comes to the Maquilas: a Bor-

der Story," Nation, January 13, 1997, in Infotrac Web: Expanded Academic: parag. 7

(database online), available from Thomson Corp., Stamford, Conn.

12. Esther Chavez quoted in Mark Stevenson, "American Prosperity Trickles Over

Border; Signs of U.S. Business Influence Abound in Fast-Growing Judirez," Arizona Re-

public, September 26, 1999, A34, in LexisNexis: News: 4.

13. Nathan, "Death Comes to the Maquilas," parag. 11.

14. Nathan, "Death Comes to the Maquilas," parag. 10.

15. Prieto, Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladora, 76.

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16. Nathan, "Death Comes to the Maquilas," parag. 12-14.

17. Maria Patricia Fernindez-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 134.

18. Jim Sessions, "Cross-Border Blues," Forum for Applied Research and Public Pol-

icy, 14:1 (1999): 58, in InfoTrac Web: Expanded Academic: parag. 2 and 51.

19. Stevenson, "American Prosperity Trickles Over Border," 1.

20. Prieto, Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladora, 96.

21. de la Garza, "Series of Slayings Baffles City on Mexican Border," 2; Sheridan, "The Death that Haunts Juarez," 5; and Howard La Franchi, "Girls Who Find New

Roles in Mexico Also Face Danger," Christian Science Monitor, June 4, 1997, in Ebsco-

host: Expanded Academic Premier: 2, (database online), available from EBSCO Pub-

lishing, Ipswich, Mass.

22. Debbie Nathan, "Work, Sex, and Danger in Ciudad Juirez," North American Congress on Latin America Report on the Americas 33:3 (1999): 24, in Infotrac Web:

Expanded Academic: parag. 10; Tuckman, "Women: Deadly Frontier," parag. 11; Tuckman, "Murder Case Solved," 1; and Moore, "Young Women Follow Journeys of

Hope to Factories," 4.

23. Fregoso, "Voices Without Echo," 138.

24. Moore, "Young Women Follow Journeys of Hope to Factories," 3; and "Brutal

Juirez Slayings Demand Investigation," Albuquerque Journal, March 1, 2002: A14, in LexisNexis: News.

25. In Juirez the National Action Party (PAN) came to power in 1992. The previous

long-ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was quick to charge

PAN's inability to protect the women in the city. Thus the city faced pressure to catch the

supposed serial killer after the elections (Nathan, "Work, Sex and Danger," parag. 7).

26. Ellen Nieves reports that although Sharif's murder conviction was overturned

in 2000 due to false evidence, he remains in custody pending further appeals (Ellen

Nieves, "To Work and Die in Juarez," Mother Jones, May/June 2002: 54).

27. Sheridan, "The Death that Haunts Juarez," 5.

28. Sheridan, "The Death that Haunts Juarez," 4; and Nieves, "To Work and Die in

Juarez," 54.

29. Tuckman, "Women: Deadly Frontier," parag. 2.

30. Edward Guthmann, "The Disappeared; Lourdes Portillo's Wrenching Docu-

mentary on the Killings of Young Mexican Women in Juirez Exposes Government

Incompetence," San Francisco Chronicle, August 17, 2002: Di, in LexisNexis: News:

parag. 5.

31. "Women's Groups Pressing for Investigation of Border Murders Complain of

Official Attacks," Associated Press State & Local Wire, January 23, 2002, in LexisNexis:

News: parag. 3.

32. Sam Dillon, "Rape and Murder Stalk Women in Northern Mexico," New York

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Times, April 18, 1998, A3, in LexisNexis: News: 1. Sheridan, "The Death that Haunts Juarez," 5.

33. Saskia Sassen, "The Global City: Strategic Site/New Frontier," American Studies 41:2/3 (2000): 79-80.

34. Crummet, "A Gendered Economic History of Rural Households," 105-6.

35. Crummet, "A Gendered Economic History of Rural Households," 120.

36. Robert D. Manning and Anita Christina Butera, "Global Restructuring and

U.S.-Mexican Economic Integration: Rhetoric and Reality of Mexican Immigration Five Years after NAFTA," American Studies 41:2/3 (2000): 18.

37. David Bacon, "We Are Not at the End of History," Communication for a Sus-

tainable Future: Labor Research and Action Project Discussion Archive, October 29,

2001, available from the World Wide Web: http://csf.colorad.edu/forums/labor-rap/

current-discussion/msgoo814.html (sec. 4-5).

38. Susan Tiano, Patriarchy on the Line: Labor, Gender and Ideology in the Mexican

Maquila Industry (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 7.

39. Emma Perez quoted in Nieves, "To Work and Die in Juirez," 55.

40. Women who have worked in the maquiladoras in Juirez often cross the border in search of work as domestics or nannies in El Paso. While wages for such jobs are

higher than in Juirez, they can be as low as fifty dollars a week plus room and board.

Grace Chang argues that structural adjustment programs in connection with the dis-

mantling of social services in the U.S. "force migrant women into low-wage labor in

the U.S." (Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global

Economy [Cambridge: South End Press, 2000], 125). Sassen calls these cross-border mi-

grations "counter-geographies of globalization," which are also part of the dynamic of

centralization (Saskia Sassen, "Women's Burden: Counter-Geographies of Globaliza-

tion and the Feminization of Survival," Journal of International Affairs 53:2 [2000]: 503,

in Ebscohost: Academic Search Premier: parag. 1 and 2).

41. Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work,

and Pink-CollarlIndustries in the Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 104.

42. Pablo Vila quoted in Nathan, "Work, Sex, and Danger," parag. 24, 26, and 27.

Vila spent more than six years interviewing residents in the El Paso-Ciudad Juirez area

beginning in the early 1990s.

43. Tryon P. Woods, "Globalizing Social Violence: Race, Gender, and the Spatial Politics of Crisis," American Studies 42:1 (2002): 142.

44. Debra A. Castillo, Maria Gudelia Rangel G6mez, and Bonnie Delagado, "Bor-

der Lives: Prostitute Women in Tijuana," Signs 24:2 (1999): 404.

45. Julie Watson, "Mexican Lawmakers Revoke Law Reducing Penalties for Rapists

'Provoked' by Women," The Associated Press State and Local Wire, September 19, 2001,

in LexisNexis: News. parag. 2 and 5.

46. Fregoso, "Voices Without Echo,"143.

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47. "Murders of 'Invisible Women' Grow at Mexican Border," New Zealand Press

Association, March 5, 2002, in LexisNexis: News. parag. 21-22.

48. Nathan, "Death Comes to the Maquilas," parag. 23.

49. Tiano, Patriarchy on the Line, 44.

50. Freeman, High Tech and High Heels, 103.

51. Susan Tiano and Carolina Ladino, "Dating, Mating, and Motherhood: Identity

Construction Among Mexican Maquila Workers," Environment and Planning A 31:2 (1999): 307.

52. Tiano, Patriarchy on the Line, 44.

53. Prieto, Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladora, 39.

54. Melissa W. Wright, "The Politics of Relocation: Gender, Nationality, and Value

in a Mexican Maquiladora," Environment and Planning A 31:9 (1999): 16o8.

55. Nathan, "Work, Sex, and Danger," parag. 28.

56. Fernandez-Kelly, For We Are Sold, 135; Gay Young, "Gender Identification and

Working-Class Solidarity among Maquila Workers in Ciudad Juirez: Stereotypes and

Realities," Women on the U.S.-Mexico Border: Responses to Change, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz

and Susan Tiano (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987): 11o; and Annette Fuentes and Bar-

bara Ehrenreich, Women in the Global Factory (Boston: South End Press, 1983), 33.

57. Melissa Wright, " 'Maquiladora Mestizas' and a Feminist Border Politics: Re-

visiting Anzaldtia," Hypatia, 13:3 (1998): 114, in Infotrac Web: Expanded Academic: parag. 19-21.

58. Tiano and Ladino provide the lower estimate and Leslie Salzinger the higher es-

timate. See Tiano and Ladino, "Dating, Mating, and Motherhood," 309 and Leslie

Salzinger, "From High Heels to Swathed Bodies: Gendered Meanings Under Produc-

tion in Mexico's Export Processing Industry," Feminist Studies 23:3 (1997): 549, in Info-

Trac Web: Expanded Academic: parag. 6.

59. Wright states that "when an American and Mexican employee share the same

title, such as the rank of production supervisor, the American supervisor receives, at a

minimum, one third more in wages and also supervises the Mexican supervisor

(Wright, "The Politics of Relocation," 1606).

6o. Salzinger, "From High Heels to Swathed Bodies," parag. 34.

61. Salzinger, "From High Heels to Swathed Bodies," parag. 13. Salzinger also de-

scribes a third maquiladora where the women and men work side by side. The atmo-

sphere is more egalitarian, and there is no single line on gender.

62. Salzinger, "From High Heels to Swathed Bodies," parag. 23.

63. Salzinger, "From High Heels to Swathed Bodies," parag. 42.

64. Sassen, "The Global City," 87.

65. Tiano and Ladino, "Dating, Mating, and Motherhood," 312.

66. Sassen, "The Global City," 87.

67. Fuentes and Ehrenreich, Women of the Global Factory, 32.

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68. Sassen, "The Global City," 87.

69. Chavez quoted in Sheridan, "The Death that Haunts Juirez," 6. 70. Fernandez-Kelly, For We Are Sold, 134. Sam Dillon reports that local activist Es-

ther Chavez believes that in Juirez most women continue to perform all of the domes-

tic work. She says, "Women are not liberated, they just have a double workload," (Sam

Dillon, "Rape and Murder Stalk Women in Northern Mexico," New York Times, April 18, 1998, A3, in LexisNexis News: 3).

71. Sassen, "The Global City," 87.

72. Fuentes and Ehrenreich, Women of the Global Factory, 33.

73. Nathan, "Work, Sex, and Danger," parag. 34.

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