Violence and Activism at the Border: Gender, Fear, and Everyday Life in Ciudad Juarez

205 Pages·2008·23.133 MB·English

by  Kathleen Staudt

violence and activism at the border
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inter-america series
Edited by Howard Campbell, Duncan Earle, and John Peterson
In the new “Inter-American” epoch to come, our borderland zones may
expand well past the confi nes of geopolitical lines. Social knowledge
of these dynamic interfaces offers rich insights into the pressing and
complex issues that affect both the borderlands and beyond. The Inter-
America Series comprises a wide interdisciplinary range of cutting-edge
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concepts, perspectives, and theories from the “borderland” vantage and
will be appropriate for the classroom, the library, and the wider reading
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Gender, Fear,
violence and activism
and Everyday
at the border
Life in Ciudad
Juárez
kathleen staudt
university of texas press
Austin
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Copyright © 2008 by the University of Texas Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2008
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should
be sent to:
Permissions
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P.O. Box 7819
Austin, TX 78713-7819.
www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of
ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Staudt, Kathleen A.
Violence and activism at the border : gender, fear, and everyday life
in Ciudad Juárez / Kathleen Staudt. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Inter-America series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-292-71670-4 (alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-292-71824-1
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Homicide—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez. 2. Women—Crimes
against—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez. 3. Sexual abuse victims—
Mexico—Cuidad Juárez. 4. Victims of violent crimes—Mexico—
Ciudad Juárez. 5. Women political activitists—Mexican-American
Border Region. 6. Human rights—Mexican-American Border Re-
gion. 7. Police misconduct—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez. 8. Migrant
labor—Mexican-American Border Region. I. Title.
hv6535.m43c588 2008
364.152'3097215—dc22
2007038705
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To the loves of my life:
Mosi and Asha,
my children, now grown, both leaders
in their own ways
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contents
preface and acknowledgments ix
Chapter 1 1
violence at the u.s.-mexico border:
framing p erspectives
Chapter 2 29
culture and globalization:
male backlash at the border
Chapter 3 51
women speak about violence and fear:
surveys and workshops
Appendix 3A 72
research design
Appendix 3B 74
brochures distributed to participants
Chapter 4 79
framing and mobilizing border activism:
from femicide to violence against women
Appendix 4A 110
fiction or nonfiction?
Appendix 4B 112
v-day 2004 proclamation, city of el paso
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viii contents
113 Chapter 5
government responses to violence against
women
143 Chapter 6
toward eradicating violence against women
at the border: conclusions
159 notes
161 bibliography
179 index
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preface and acknowledgments:
pathways into research and
action at the border
Throughout thirty years of teaching and research in political science,
my life passions have addressed government responsiveness to women
and gender inequalities. Searching beyond policy rhetoric, I focus on
policy implementation, or the lack thereof, and on change, drawing
on evidence-based research and collective action: women’s movements,
people’s organizations, and professionalism among civil servants for
enhanced democracy and good governance. A graduate school mentor,
the late Murray Edelman, immersed students like me in “politics as sym-
bolic action,” the title of one of his books.
After living in Kenya (1974–1975), where I studied agricultural policy
implementation, I analyzed international development policy in gen-
dered technical assistance agencies. I fi nally settled at the U.S.-Mexico
border, where the global and local meet in a comparative political region
of cultural mirrors yet economic and political institutional differences.
From graduate training in African studies, absorbing knowledge from
classics like Frantz Fanon on a dying colonialism, I have become en-
meshed in interdisciplinary border studies, to which I believe Fanon can
speak on technically dead colonialism but lingering neocolonialism and
neoliberal globalization. I have longed to draw on Fanon in my writing,
which I do in Chapter 2, but also to challenge his theories about violence
and his curious silence on women and masculinities.
In the late 1990s, people in the U.S.-Mexico border region began
to hear about horrifi c, gruesome murders of young women in Ciudad
Juárez. Their raped and mutilated bodies were left in the desert. Pat-
terns emerged: victims were young, on average ages eleven to twenty-
one; some had breasts cut off and others, carvings on their backs; some
were burned, evidently while still alive. Border residents worried about a
serial killer or perhaps copycat serial killers. Government offi cials’ pub-
lic comments soft-pedaled the murders and/or blamed the women for
the way they dressed or for being out at night. Victims’ mothers, dis-
traught and in mourning, sought justice for their daughters. Instead, the
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x preface and acknowledgments
police and investigative agencies treated them rudely, even threatening
some of them, rarely pursuing investigations. Locally, the problem was
named “femicide” and the murder victims las muertas, the dead women,
the assassinated.
Increasingly, mothers organized themselves and aligned with coali-
tions within and across the border, human rights and women’s activists
among them, to raise awareness, to get justice, and to stop the killings.
Activists in other parts of Mexico and the United States networked
around the murders, not only human rights groups, but university stu-
dents and faculty and especially people in performance: theater, music,
art, video, and fi lm. Eve Ensler, who wrote and performed The Vagina
Monologues and authorized its performance worldwide, added a mono-
logue on the J uárez murders and visited the border several times. Even-
tually politicians and business owners, concerned about cleansing the
image of the city, also took steps, all too many of them simply cosmetic.
In Mexico, Juárez became a symbol of what people struggle to change:
violence, limited democracy, police impunity.
By 2006, many people—especially anti-violence and human rights
activists—had become aware of the special stain on the international
map symbolized by Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico: the location
where more than 370 girls and women were murdered from 1993 to 2003
and approximately 30 more annually thereafter. Immediately contigu-
ous El Paso, Texas, shares the stain, yet it is consistently ranked as the
second- to third-safest big city in the United States. Juárez is a complex
big metropolitan area with many faces. It is home to several universities;
its industrial sector fl ourishes; its residents compose a broad mosaic of
people. Some residents behave with a graciousness long lost in most U.S.
cities. Mexico City residents sometimes think that norteños (northern
residents) have lost their cultural soul, with regional peculiarities more
similar to the United States; and Juárez itself has long been understood
as a “city of vice,” discussed in later chapters. The city is home to one of
the world’s largest drug cartels; the El Paso–Juárez region is a primary
gateway for drugs into the United States, with its huge demand for il-
legal drugs.
The border has been demonized in the world’s eyes, but this is not the
complete picture of the border in which I have lived and worked for more
than a quarter century. Juárez and El Paso are not as simple as the snap-
shot that journalists or academic tourists sometimes present. It is my
intention in this book to dig more deeply and comprehensively into the
big picture, the roots and the commonality of violence against women
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