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

202 Pages·2010·1.437 MB·English

by  Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Ignacio Corona (eds.)

Edited by
Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba
and Ignacio Corona
Media Representation and Public Response
Edited by Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba and Ignacio Corona
The University of Arizona Press Tucson
Edited by
Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba
and Ignacio Corona
To the women of Ciudad Juárez
and to the memory of Jesús Tafoya
The University of Arizona Press
© 2010 The Arizona Board of Regents
All rights reserved
www.uapress.arizona.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gender violence at the U.S.-Mexico border : media representation
and public response / edited by Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba and
Ignacio Corona.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBn 978-0-8165-2712-0 (hard cover : acid-free paper)
1. Women—Crimes against—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez.
2. Gays—Crimes against—Mexico. 3. Transvestites—Crimes

against—Mexico. 4. Murder—Mexico. 5. Mass media and

crime—Mexico. I. Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Héctor, 1962–.

Corona, Ignacio, 1960– .
hv6250.4.w65g475 2010
362.88—dc22 2009039564
Publication of this book is made possible in part by an Arts &
Humanities Publication Subvention grant from The Ohio State
University and a grant from the Department of Spanish and
Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin.
Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free,
archival-quality paper containing a minimum of 30 percent
postconsumer waste and processed chlorine-free.
15 14 13 12 11 10 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Gender Violence: An Introduction
Ignacio Corona and Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba 1
Part I Oral Testimonies on Gender Violence
1 Violence and Transvestite/Transgender Sex Workers in Tijuana
Debra A. Castillo, María Gudelia Rangel Gómez, and
Armando Rosas Solís 14
2 We never Thought It Would Happen to Us: Approaches to
the Study of the Subjectivities of the Mothers of the Murdered
Women of Ciudad Juárez
Patricia Ravelo Blancas 35
Part II Audiovisual Representations of Gender Violence
3 Death on the Screen: Imagining Violence in Border Media
Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba 60
4 Representations of Femicide in Border Cinema
María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba 79
Part III Representations of Gender Violence in the
Print Media
5 Over Their Dead Bodies: Reading the newspapers on
Gender Violence
Ignacio Corona 104
6 Women in the Global Machine: Patrick Bard’s La frontera,
Carmen Galán Benitez’s Tierra marchita, and Alicia Gaspar
de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders
Miguel López-Lozano 128
Part IV The Legal Status of Femicides
7 ¡Alto a la Impunidad! Is There Legal Relief for the Murders
of Women in Ciudad Juárez?
James C. Harrington 154
References 177
About the Contributors 193
Index 197
Acknowledgments
As coeditors, we wish to thank our respective institutions, the University
of Texas at Austin and The Ohio State University, for their generous
support of this book. We also thank the contributors to the volume and
the following colleagues who, at one point or another, were part of the
academic discussions that led to this work: Susana Báez, Jorge Balderas-
Domínguez, Derek Petrey, Jennifer Rathburn, Ileana Rodríguez, César
Rossatto, and Jesús Tafoya (in memoriam). Without their intervention,
this book would not have been possible.
The authors would like to thank the editors of La Crónica and
Frontera.info for their authorization to reprint the articles cited in the
book.
We also would like to acknowledge many other colleagues, graduate
students, and friends from both sides of the border for their ideas, encour-
agement, and enthusiasm regarding this project. Finally, we thank Joseph
Pierce for his editorial assistance.
Gender Violence: An Introduction
ignacio corona and
héctor domínguez-ruvalcaba
In recent years the phenomenon of violence and its sociological and
cultural implications has emerged at the forefront of academic discus-
sions about the U.S.–Mexico border. And yet there are few serious studies

devoted to one of its most disturbing manifestations: gender violence.1
To address this specific issue, in April of 2005 we brought together a
group of scholars at an interdisciplinary symposium—Dialogues on the

U.S.–Mexico Border Violence—held at the University of Texas in Austin.

Participants examined the complex roles that place, gender, and ethnicity
have come to play in relation to the increasing violence along the border.
The conference focused specifically on violence inflicted upon women
and sexual minorities. The original triple concentration on place, gender,
and ethnicity expanded in several directions. new perspectives emerged
on various fronts, including the implications and connections between
gendered forms of violence and the persistent mechanisms of social vio-
lence; the microsocial effects of economic models; the asymmetries of
power in local, national, and transnational configurations; the particular
rhetoric, aesthetics, and ethics of discourses that represent violence; the
structural factors that perpetuate such discourses; and the economy and
culture of fear. In other words, the approaches to the problem were—and

we believe they must be—interdisciplinary.

As evidenced by the diverse perspectives included in this book, when
we look at violence along the U.S.–Mexico border, we are not dealing

simply with violence in the abstract. Rather, this book explores concrete
instances of gender-based or gender-motivated violence, which requires
interpretive and analytical strategies that draw on methods from a range
of fields and disciplines. Political science, sociology, and anthropology
appear as necessary in studying gender violence as do literary, cultural,
2 corona and Domínguez-Ruvalcaba
and media studies. The conversations across disciplines that started at
the 2005 symposium continue in this book as the contributors examine
how such violence is the object of (re)presentation in a diversity of texts:
oral narratives, newspaper reports, films and documentaries, novels, TV
series, and legal discourse.
Border Violence
Even before the signing of the north American Free Trade Agreement
(nAFTA) in 1992, but more vehemently after it came into force two years
later, diverse groups of intellectuals, artists, academics, and social activists
on both sides of the border have called attention to the subject of violence.
They have found a correlation between regional economic transforma-
tions and the increase of all kinds of violence. A number of scholarly works
have addressed border violence from different angles, including gang-
related issues, governmental coercive policies (from both Mexico and
the United States), the dehumanizing effect of the maquiladora system,
conflicts related to undocumented workers, organized crime, and drug
smuggling.2 The U.S.–Mexico border has been studied as the space where

the fluctuating booms and downturns of the global, regional, formal, and
underground economies and markets have a direct impact on such funda-
mental issues as the preservation and reproduction of human life.
Throughout this book the contributors have tried to resist the fas-
cination of explanatory arguments that favor geographic exceptional-
ism. Systematic research has confirmed that social ills, such as gender
violence, can hardly be contained by any given urban environment in
exclusivity. nonetheless, most of the chapters are responsive to the many
strands of violence that concentrate on spatial conjunctures. Mexican
border cities have come to represent a territorial manifestation of an over-
lapping of many different symbolic and material processes encompassed
by globalization. From Matamoros to Tijuana, parallel to the increase
in criminal activity, there has been an upsurge in gender violence. In
response to the lingering question why Ciudad Juárez has become the
central node of gender violence, the contributors have identified a num-
ber of circumstances. These include the characteristics of a gun-toting
culture that is encouraged by the lethal mix of a corrupt judicial system
and the social catalyst of impunity (Quinones, True Tales, 140).
introduction 3
There are considerable levels of crime and drug trafficking in Ciudad
Juárez (three of Mexico’s five most important drug cartels operate in
the area), exacerbated by an ill-reputed and complicit local police. The
city’s infrastructure has not kept up with the numbers of migrants who
have arrived to cross the border or to stay indefinitely. In fact, not only
in Chihuahua but in other Mexican border states as well, the population
has doubled in the past decade to 16.5 million (Laufer, 14). Across the
border from Ciudad Juárez is El Paso, Texas, a city known in the past as
the world’s blue jeans capital. The per capita income in El Paso is one
of the lowest in the nation ($20,129), despite being a metropolitan area
(Blumenthal, 20). Although purely quantitative indexes may not show
the border region to be one of the most critical areas among major urban
settlements in the Western hemisphere, a condensation of multiple types
of violence makes this region different from many urban areas that deal
with high rates of criminality.
At the literal contact zone between the so-called First and Third
Worlds, multiple and polymorphous processes of physical, economic,
ecological, symbolical, and psychological violence seem to be amplified:
violence exerted by the legal system and its deadly toll on scores of undoc-
umented border crossers; economic violence perpetrated against different
populations and its effects on the displacement of people; ethnic violence
against migrants; industrial violence against the environment and the bor-
der populations; violence between criminal organizations that not only
affects the members of the mafias, but also society at large; and gender
violence and its ever growing number of casualties. By a tropological
substitution, “border” and “violence” appear now inextricably associated
in the media. The “border” acquires ipso facto an ethical and political
meaning, equally relevant to its representational deployment and study.
The fact that the border has appeared as a place of violence by a myriad
of narratives compels us to reflect on the concept of violence in relation
to notions of place, ethics, international law, and even aesthetics. This
reality also urges us to address processes of social class and gender iden-
tity–formation. As the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo (635) has claimed,

interpreting the border “involves the simultaneous analysis of the theater
and its symbolic dimensions, as well as the actual violence.” The core
problem of representing border violence is then immersing oneself in
conflicting representations and a diversity of proposed significations.