(In this Look On! post, Part 2 of a 2-part series, guest blogger Regina Austin reviews documentaries concerning the epidemic of violence known as the Juárez femicides. The series' 1st post, by guest blogger Caroline Bettinger-López, is here.)As detailed in yesterday's post, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ruled against Mexico in a gender discrimination case involving three young women whose bodies were found in a field across the street from the Association of Maquiladoras in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Their stories as told by their mothers would be familiar to anyone who has seen the most noteworthy documentaries made about the scores of young women who have disappeared or been murdered
in Juárez since 1993.These documentaries are invaluable for illuminating the context surrounding the so-called Juárez femicides. I examine the films in depth in "Women's Unequal Citizenship at the Border: Lessons from Three Nonfiction Films about the Women of Juárez," a chapter in Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship (Linda McClain & Joanna L. Grossman eds., 2009) that's available online here and here. As I describe in that chapter, the films take viewers back to the beginning, as it were, back to the time when:
► Social and economic upheaval made the young women of Juárez especially vulnerable to deadly violence;
► Criminal investigations of their murders were botched because of incompetence and corruption at every level of government, without regard to which party was in power; and
► Female relatives of those who had been kidnapped and killed were forced to become human rights activists and civic leaders in the effort to assure that the victims got due respect.
Early on, it was assumed that the victims were targeted because they were workers in the maquiladoras, and that the murders were a response to the upheaval in social and economic relations that globalization and immigration were bringing to the border between the United States and Mexico. Foreign-owned factories were magnets for single young mestizo women from the south of the country. As a result, Juárez experienced tremendous unplanned growth. Housing without adequate municipal services sprang up in the desert. The lack of reliable transportation proved particularly dangerous for young women who went to work early and came home late. While manufactured goods traveled legally from south to north, people did not. Juarez became a staging area for illegal immigration to the United States. As gender relations changed along with the population, bars and clubs catering to the female workers brought them into contact with transients and criminals willing to take advantage of the women's social, economic, and political weaknesses.
This scenario is reflected in Performing the Border (1999), directed by the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann (below right), which
offers a postmodern take on the physical and metaphysical boundary between Texas and Juárez, Mexico. (credit for above left still from this film) However, the explanatory power of globalism and the exploitative fragmentation of the female body that the director found reflected in factory work and the work of a serial killer does not fully account for the hateful mass violence of the Juárez femicides.Narcotrafficking and police corruption were most likely the sinister forces at the heart of the waves of murders. The Texas-Mexican border is important in this chronicle of death because it is a gateway to the largest illegal drug market in the world. Americans' insatiable taste for illegal narcotics and the violence and governmental corruption it breeds compromised the rights of women in Mexico and others whose interests were allied with them. This story of the Juárez femicides is complicated in a way that is ideal for documentaries to tell, given their ability to move visually between micro and macro explanations of social phenomena.
Thus, in the hands of Chicana Lourdes Portillo (below left), director of Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman) (2001), the dead and disappeared young women cease to be anonymous and fungible victims of not only misogyny but also xenophobia, racism, and classism, at the same time that
their female relatives are transformed from mothers, aunts, and sisters into committed civic leaders and political activists before our eyes.Finally, La Batalla De Las Cruces (Battle of the Crosses) (2005), which is directed by Mexican social scientists Patricio Ravelo Blancas and Rafael Bonilla Pedroza, attempts to list or catalogue the myriad complex intersecting sets of public and private actors who, with massive amounts of private money and political power at their disposal, managed to directly or indirectly violate the human rights of scores of young Mexican women, their families and defenders, falsely accused defendants, their murdered lawyers, and journalists without anyone being held accountable.
