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The Complexities of "Feminicide" on the Border

Rosa Linda Fregoso

The campaign to end the killing of women in Ciudad Juarez took the name "N una mas." Ni una mds en Ciudad judrez. Not one more murdered woman in Ciu• dad J ~arez. Mothers and grandmothers, women's rights and human rights groups, and friends from both sides of the border joined in a movement of denunciation,. demanding an end to the most sordid and barbarous series of gender killings in, Mexico's history. By mid-2002, there were 282 victims of feminicide1 ~n this city across the border from El Paso, Texas, and 450 disappeared womenJ2 Between, 1985 and 1992, by contrast, 37 women were murdered in CiudadJuarez. "Ni una mas" stages women's visibility and invisibility in the nation as well as a confronta­ tion with the historical and social trauma in the region.

The politics of gender extermination in this region took the form of the appar­ ently random yet seemingly systematic appearance of brutally murdered women's bodies and the equally horrific disappearance of many more. What is now under­ stood as various forms of feminicide started in 1993, a year after the signing of NAFT A. As the numbers grew, the state continued to turn a blind eye to the vio­ lence affiicting women.

Records of the identities of the assassinated and disappeared women are kept by the nongovernmental organization Grupo 8 de Marzo of Ciudad Juarez. 3 They were poor women, most were dark, and many of them had been mutilated, tor­ tured, and sexually violated. 4 Although there have been random appearances of dead bodies in public places throughout the city, most of the bodies were found near the outskirts of Juarez, in the desert, near poor colonias (shantytowns) like Anapra, Valle de Juarez, Lomas de Poleo, and Lore Bravo. Ranging in age from ~!even to fifty, the murdered and disappeared women shared humble origins and, in many instances, their migratory experience to these borderlands.

In a highly perceptive study, Julia Estela Monarrez suggests that the murder and disappearance of women in Juarez cannot be considered simply as the work of psychopaths. Rather than the aberration of a single individual or group, the murde~s of WQffi!;:.11 are "politically motivated sexual violence" rooted in a system of patnarchy. In fact the various feminicides in Mexico make evident the exercise ~f power across the social spectrum: the power of the state over civil society; the nch over the poor; the white elite over racialized people; the old over the young; me~ over.women. It is a novel kind of "dirty war," one waged by multiple forces against disposable female bodies. According to Franco, the women targeted in ~hese unprecedente_d border feminicides represent the "stigmatized bodies," those marked for death in drug wars and urban violence." Feminicide in Juarez makes

evident the reality of overlapping power relations on gendered and racialized bod-

rtw ( omplrMltlr\ of 'lt•mlnlcldl'" on ttw Bord1•r 131

lu ,1., 1n11lh as it darilil's the dq.\l'l'l' to which violl"ncl' against won1en has lll"C'll 11.11111.,ili1.cd as a llll'thod of social comrol.

r1111n Negation to Disaggregation . . . !11 1, ·.1.itc's l'arly n:sponse, negation, involved at first a de~1al th~t the ~·!ltngs ~l'l'l' ~ 1 ,1,. 11 1.it ic. 'l hen, when the state could no longer deny this re~luy, officials ~h1fteJ Iii• lil. 11 11l' onto the victims, committing further sacrilege agamst already violated 111od11·,. · l n many instances the state emphasized women's non normative behav­ lo ,1.,, .1nusi ng them of transgressing sexual norms, either of lesbianism or of lead­ lllt'. .1 rlohle vida (double life)-that is, engaging in respecta~le ';ork by ~ay _a~d se~ " .. ii, liy 11 ight-as though nontraditional sexual behavior 1ust1fied then killmgs.

1 lw discourse of negation thus tended to discredit the murdered women by , 11 11'hasizing their alleged transgressive sexual behavior: "She visited a place where lt11 111 rnl'xuals and lesbians gathered"; "she liked dating different men and was an .l\' 1.1 p;ttron of dance halls."6 Such expressions of nonnormative sexuality have been ., , 1 clrntless that the mother of murder victim Adriana Torres Marquez respo_!!ged 111 ol 1gnantly: "Don't they have anything else to in:ent? They have sa_id ~~e same in , ,,. 1 y case: that it's the way women dressed or then alleged double life. Nonnor- _ 111 ,11 ivc sexuality is central to the causal chain that goes from the transgression of 11.111 i a rchal norms to murder. . . , .

· l he patriarchal state's initial preoccupation with women~ mo_rality and • In ency is a form of institutional violence that makes women pnmanly respon­ ·.il ilc for the violence directed against them. Thus, those women who do not con­ lo 11 111 to the mother/wife model of womanhood (lesbians, working women, women who c.:xpress sexual desire, and so forth) are deemed "immor~l" and sui~ably pun- 1.,linl. In effect women are transformed into subjects of surveillance; their decency .111d ni:orality become the object of social control. What's more, shifting the blame 111ward the victims' moral character in effect naturalizes violence against women.

Negating the reality of widespread violence a?ainst p~or and dark women p1oved to be not just a transparent, but an obscene, interpretive strategy. To co~n- 1n the growing national and international movemen~ of outrage a_nd denu_ncia- 1 ion, the state transformed its narrative of interpretation from outnght denial to

disaggregation. . . . . The state shifted the discussion away from broader social issues by isolatmg

c.tch "case" from the more general and systemic phenomenon of violence against women. In other words, the state now conceded the fact of the murders, but it refused to accept their interconnection.

Globalism on the Borderlands It is important to recognize how under current con?itions of _capital'.~t ex pan­ , ion, Chomsky observes that transnational corporations funct10n as the mas­ ters of a 'new imperial age' ... spreading an inh~mane model ~f ~evel~pment .... with islands of enormous privilege in a sea of misery an,d despair. Ant1glo,~aliza:, tion perspectives provide valuable insight into how Juarez figures as the local embodiment of the wave of global neoliberalism (market-based development) under the coordination and direction of the G-8, the IMF, the WTO, and the

132 Color of Vloh•nct•

"_X-'orJd [~ank; of lhl' COnCl'IHra!ion of l'Cono111ic power in lransnational corpora• tlons; of the internationalization of social divisions; and of the subordination of ~ational economies to global forces. There is no doubt that global and transna­ t10nal dynamics implode into the geography of Ciudad Juarez.

This newly constituted global economic order impacts the most vulnerable communities-the bodies of the poor and Third World women, who are its dispos· able targets of labor exploitation. 8 And critical globalization theories have rightly noted the unevenness of development in Ciudad Juarez, the further exploitation of ~he poor, and the lack of infrastructural development-housing, sewage, electric­ ity, h~alth, and other basic services-to accommodate the many poor immigrants · recruued from southern Mexico and Central America by the maquiladora indus­ try. However, conflating the exploitation of gendered bodies with their extermina­ tion does not offer us the nuanced account of violence that feminicide demands.

Attributing the murders of women to processes of globalization has created the e~during myth of "maquiladora killings," where the killers allegedly target maqu1ladora workers.

9 Rather than targeting "actual" maquiladora workers, it is

much more accurate to say that the misogynist and racist killers are targeting · members of the urban reserve of wage labor of the maquiladora industry, namely . a pool of female workers migrating from southern Mexico and Central America and living in the poor surrounding colonias of Juarez.

Rethinking State Terrorism

Much of t~e problem with the discourse of globalism stems from its portrayal of sexual v10lence as primarily an effect of global capitalism without account­ ing ~or the ways in which global manifestations of power differ and also intensify earlier and more traditional forms of patriarchy within the nation-state. A more nuanced understanding of sexual violence in Juarez identifies the multiple sites where wome? experience violence, within domestic and public spaces that are local and national as well as global/transnational.

~t is important to recognize how violence-not only in Ciudad Juarez, but also m Mexico City-is not simply a problem for the state bur is in fact endemic to i~, a "state of exception" produced by an authoritarian government that has cultivated extreme forms of violence, corruption, and yes, even death, in order to cripple people's capacity to resist, to smother effective counterdiscourse and over­ power the revitalized democratic opposition.

As the uprising of the Zapatistas in Chiapas has reminded us, the Mexican government has been waging a "dirty war" of terror, violence, and extermination a?~inst all forms of dissidence, including poor women and indigenous commu­ nmes. We should consider feminicide in Ciudad Juarez a part of the scenario of state-sponsored terrorism because it is situated in what Taussig calls the "space of death," which "is important in the creation of meaning and consciousness nowhere more so than in societies where torture is endemic and where the culture of terror flourishes."

The fact that all of the victims were members of the most vulnerable and oppressed group in Mexican society-dark-skinned women-underscores the extent to which in Mexico women's relationship to the state is racialized and eth-

!hr< 11111plr•lllr" 11l "I Prni11icldP"o11 tlw Bordl'r 111

11 1, 11 nl. ( )nl' way co politil ill" vioil'1ll'l' against wollll'll of intl'l'Sl'l'lin~ _idl'nticks i., Iii liq.,ldigluing thl' role of il1r pa1riarchal statl'. in crt:ating thl' co11d111011s of pm ,ii ,ti 11 I' l(ir 1 hl' proliferation of gt:ndt:r violence. . .

1\ 1101 hn way ro politicize violence is to think about it 111 lm~adt:r ll'rrrn .. 1101 111 ., 1 ·" imlatt:d or personal in nature, bur as a form of state-.sanct1<.mt:d tl'IToris1~1, .1 111111 of political repression sanctioned by an undemocrattc patriarchal slall' 111 11 " , 111 .,adc against poor and racialized citizens. In the words of a 1995. Hu 111a 11 H 1 .1 11., Watch report, "the choice of particular women as targets of rapt: 1s al1110.s1 111,';·i1.ihly determined by their identities ... [as] members of an ethnic group, racl' 111 \ l,t..,,S."

· 1 hl' murders of poor and dark women in Ciudad Juarez, situated as tht:y an· 111 .1 lll'xus of violence that spans from the state to the home, are thus connt:ctl'd 10 111 , 1,11 lcr questions of power and gender inequality within a patriarchal state.

11.insnational Activism on the Border 111 March 1999, the crosses started appearing. Black crosses on pink backgrou1~ds, 1'· 11111 cd in protest on electrical poles thr?~ghout Juarez, by Voces sin Eco ~Vo1~c.s 1111 itout Echo), a grassroots group of families of the murdered women. Ee~ily h,11- 1,.11 crosses, silent witnesses to symbolic and experiential instances of v10lencc, ., 111 .,gcstive of what local poet Micaela Solis calls. "the_ lan~1~age of t~e abyss: .. rl~l" , 1 ws for help we never heard/the screams of thelf v01ces. The fus10n of _t1.1d1- 11, ,11;il secular and religious iconography-pink for women; cross for mourn_mg-. , ., 111 ravenes against epistemic and real violence. Women are the protagomsts of iJ 1j, grassroots movement.n Crosses speaking for justice for eyes that can~ot sec, 1111 women who can no longer speak, crosses marking the threshold of_ex_1sten~c. 111 painting the crosses in public spaces, Voces sin Eco forged a n~w publtc 1denrny 1111 women, claiming public space for them as citizens of the nation.

Although the women have been targeted for their gender, perh~p~ eve~ _more "1 , 11 i ficant are the racial and class hierarchies that constituted thelf identities as w'.;men. As one of the mothers, Mrs. Gonzalez, so aptly phrased it: "For the poor 1 line's no justice. If they'd murder a rich person's girl, they'd kill half the work! 1., find the murderer. But since they've only murdered poor people, they treat us Ii kc dirr." 12

By early 2002, a new coalition of feminist activists from hundreds of orga- 11 izations came together under the campaign Ni Una Mas. In D~cem~er 2001, i ltirty thousand protesters from both sides of the border gathered m Juarez. ~ml j 11 March 2002, hundreds of women dressed in black (elderly women, campesz~as, housewives, factory workers, students, and professionals) marched for 370 kil_o­ meters, from Chihuahua City to the Juarez-El Paso border, in the Exodus for L1fo

,ampaign. . d d d · I Horrific forms of violence against women have had an unmten e. an spHa_-

ing effect. In the wake of feminicide in Juarez, this emerging form~tlo? of femt~ 11 ist and cross-border activism is part of the movement for global JUStlce, of the challenges to global capitalism, neoliberal state policies, and the ris~ o~ the glo~;'.I police state. This transnational borderlands movement for w~men s n?hts ~os~s 1111 ique challenges. For example, is it possible to locate womens oppress10n w1th111

134 ._ _ -----~~Jor_of Vlol!'nce

:~~ehtL01111ankrights frarll<:~ork Jcvclopcd by 1e~:1inists in~~c hrst World?,-~ itf->::: evo ea transnat10nal sub· ·J, · · I . · ·

writings of Third~ Id f; .. Ject I ~nt1ty w1t.1111 a planetary civil society? '!he . . . or emm1sts provide a cautionary tale.

diffe~:~:1:!:nsmgular transnational identity for women ignores the profound

localities. Grassn~o7so:;i~i:~;~~ t~ globe, bu\~specially within specific national ing a human rights framework uar~z arel we aware of the limitations of bas- G 'l . on a smgu ar transnational identit F M ge~~~; :~~-::~n~~~s, it is their inters_ection~l identities as specific J~ss~~a::, a~~ cide and st~te terror~!:u~akes women m MexJCo particularly vulnerable to femini-

tion'~: ~~~~~~on:i~ level, the_ s~ate conti~ues _to ~roduce the very "state of excep- .

eliminating viol~ncec:~~~:b:~!~~~~:1~;:~~ m~c~ion and nonintervention in of fear continues in Chih h S . d is wntmg, the cultural elaboration violence in the lives of ex~~ :ad ~_too o;.s th~ strug_gle to eradicate all forms of. chal state, women indigeno~s e e~1t;ze~s, k isen ranch1sed subjects of the patriar­ rural poor, and children H p P_ eh, ar ~n.d poor women, gays, the urban and . . f f . : uman ng ts activists on the borderlands hold

v1s10n o a uture 111 which no " . onto a retribution." person can rape or kill a woman without fear of

6 INS Raids and How Immigrant

Women are Fighting Back Renee Saucedo

I , an't tell you how proud I feel to be at this conference put on by, and for, women 111 color. I think for many of us it is like coming home. It is very affirming, inspir- 111g, it is that breath of fresh air we all need in our day-to-day work. What I've l 1n:n asked to address today is how immigrant women are faced with INS enforcc­ lllL'nt. I'm not going to focus so much on the border,, because I could go on and on .iliout what happens at the Mexico-US border. Instead, I'm going to focus on what I NS enforcement looks like inland, and how it impacts women.

l' d like to describe to you what INS raids look like because they're secret. And 1 hen most importantly I would like to talk about how immigrant women are orga- 11 i1.i ng to resist the repression by the INS.

Generally, INS raids, arrests, and detentions are characterized by abuse, phys- 11 al violence, and humiliation. These are all the things that immigrant women h.1ve to face and are terrorized by almost every day. Even if they are not personally victimized by INS raids, thousands and thousands of immigrant women wake up <'very day, wondering, is today the day when I will be caught by the INS, is today 1 he day when I walk my children to school, or take my kids to the health center, • •r go talk to my social worker, is today the day when someone will betray me and I will be reported, and, ultimately, deported?

So let me tell you what happens to those women who unfortunately do see the 1 laws of the INS. The first way the INS raids happen are at people's homes. INS <'nforcement officers, generally arrive at people's homes without warrants, without 1 he necessary probable cause or suspicion that people living inside are undocu­ mented. They usually arrive at four or five in the morning, pounding on the door. I ypically it is an official who speaks perfect Spanish in plain clothes. And the Lt1nilies open the door; why shouldn't we? We're not committing anything illegal. But that's not how we're treated.

Take what happened at 305 Chestnut in Redwood City, California, in the fall of 1999. Redwood City police officers, collaborating with INS agents, stormed .1bout six apartments where families were sleeping and paraded them in the hall­ way before they were sequestered in one family's apartment. They would not allow

Speech delivered at Color of Violence at UC Santa Cruz, April 17, 2000. Editor's note: Since this speech was delivered significant changes have taken place with regard to the INS (Immigration and Narurali1.a­ t ion Services). The "War on Terrorism" has unleashed increased attacks, including raids, against immi­ ~rants and created the new Department of Homeland Security where the entity formerly known as the I NS, now the US Citizenship and Immigration Services is housed. For additional analysis on the danger these changes pose for immigrants, please refer to the National Network for Immigrant Rights' report

"Human Rights and Human Security at Risk: The Consequences of Placing Immigration Enforcement .ind Services in the Department of Homeland Security" at www.nnirr.org.