 | |
| Author | Alicia Gaspar de Alba |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | mystery, thriller |
| Publisher | Arte Publico Press |
Publication date | 2005 (first edition) |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 346 p. |
| ISBN | 1558854460 |
| OCLC | 1298730962 |
Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders is a 2005 mystery thriller by author Alicia Gaspar de Alba based on the violence, kidnapping and femicides that occurred in Ciudad Juarez in 1998.
Ivon Villa, a lesbian professor living in Los Angeles, returns home to El Paso to adopt a baby girl from Cecilia, a Mexican maquiladora living across the border in Juarez, as well as attend a family reunion. But to her horror, Cecilia turns up dead in the desert, with the baby disemboweled, a victim of the epidemic of homicides of young women from southern Mexico emigrating to the north for better work. Things take a turn for the worse when Ivon's sixteen-year-old sister Irene gets kidnapped while attending a fair in Juarez. The search for her sister leads Ivon to discover a terrifying conspiracy that involves everyone from the Border Patrol to the corrupt judicales in Juarez. [1]
 | This section possibly contains original research .(December 2013) |
Several themes in the novel include poverty in Juarez, femicide, and especially the corruption of government institutions on both sides of the border, such as the INS, and the judicales. In her essay "Transfrontera Crimes: Representations of the Juárez Femicides in Recent Fictional and Non-Fictional Accounts," author Marietta Mesmer writes, "Like Rodriguez and Portillo, Gaspar de Alba also indicates that authorities on both sides of the border are actively and directly implicated in those crimes" [2] describing incidents in the book where the police burn victim's clothes, and discussing J.W.'s role in the pornography ring. Both sides benefit from the exploitation of Mexican women due to NAFTA: the US has them working in the factories as maquiladoras, while the Mexican side exploits them for prostitution.
In concurrence with this theme, Alba also touches on the indifference and silence of the media to report on the murders, with the American media failing to point out that victims are also young Mexican-American girls, wanting readers to believe that it is merely a Mexican problem.
Another theme in the novel is the conservative Mexican gender roles that are current throughout the novel, as the Mexican authorities blame the women for being victims, due to wearing makeup and looking promiscuous. Author Irene Mata observes that "Young women who work for the maquiladoras are often represented in the media as loose, immoral mujeres malas (bad women)." [3] In looking at the theoretical construct of femicide, Julia Monárrez Fragoso points out that the social phenomena of crimes against women and girls are “tied into the patriarchal system that predisposes, to a greater or lesser degree, that women be murdered." [4] This idea further extends to American girls as well, with authorities blaming Irene for being kidnapped in the first place. A recurring symbol in the novel is the phrase "So far from the Truth, So close to Jesus", suggesting a Mexico in sync with religion, yet too chaotic to figure out the madness of the murders.
The novel won the 2005 Lambda Literary Award for "Best Lesbian Mystery" and the 2006 Latino Book Award for Best English Language Mystery.
Numerous reviews were quite positive. [5] [ unreliable source? ] In a review for the San Antonio Current, Alejandro Perez wrote that "As Gaspar de Alba shows through her graphic, unsettling descriptions of the perpetrators' words and deeds, the climate that allows this intense verbal and physical violence against women pervades all aspects of society, in Mexico and the U.S. Parts of her novel are shocking and disturbing, but the tale should shock and disturb, like the real-life horror story it is, if only to underscore the conspiracy of silence surrounding the case." [6] Similarly, Darla Baker admired that "While it does not follow the traditional detective genre, with a happy final resolution linking all the facts, Desert Blood unearths several guilty parties and demonstrates the near-impossibility of making any one culprit pay. Thus are power relations understood: those who have power can get away with murder, and the poor have no recourse. But Gaspar de Alba holds; all members of modern society accountable." [7]
Ciudad Juárez, commonly referred to as just Juárez, is the most populous city in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. It was known until 1888 as El Paso del Norte. It is the seat of the Juárez Municipality with an estimated population of 2.5 million people. Juárez lies on the Rio Grande river, south of El Paso, Texas, United States. Together with the surrounding areas, the cities form El Paso–Juárez, the second largest binational metropolitan area on the Mexico–U.S. border, with a combined population of over 3.4 million people.
A maquiladora, or maquila, is a word that refers to factories that are largely duty free and tariff-free. These factories take raw materials and assemble, manufacture, or process them and export the finished product. These factories and systems are present throughout Latin America, including Mexico, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Maquiladoras date back to 1964, when the Mexican government introduced the Programa de Industrialización Fronteriza. Specific programs and laws have made Mexico's maquila industry grow rapidly.
More than 500 women were killed between 1993 and 2011 in Ciudad Juárez, a city in northern Mexico. The murders of women and girls received international attention primarily due to perceived government inaction in preventing the violence and bringing perpetrators to justice. A narcofosa containing the remains of women killed in 2011 and 2012 was found in Madera Municipality, Chihuahua, in December 2016.
Abdul Latif Sharif, first name also spelled Abdel, was an Egyptian-born Mexican chemist and chief suspect in the Juárez killings, a decade-long murder spree that began in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez in the early 1990s.
Femicide or feminicide is a term for the murdering of females, often because of their gender. In 1976, the feminist author Diana E. H. Russell first implicitly defined the term as a hate killing of females by males but then went on to redefine it as "the killing of females by males because they are female" in later years. Femicide can be perpetrated by either sex but is more often committed by men. This is most likely due to unequal power between men and women as well as harmful gender roles, stereotypes, or social norms.
Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa A.C. is a non-profit organization composed of mothers, family members, and friends of victims of the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez. The mothers claim that their cases have gone unsolved in some cases for over 12 years. Their hope is to get the murderers of their daughters arrested and hopefully convicted.
Bordertown is a 2007 American crime drama film written and directed by Gregory Nava, and starring Jennifer Lopez, Martin Sheen, Maya Zapata, Sônia Braga and Antonio Banderas. This is the second film which featured the collaboration between Nava and Lopez, following the 1997's biopic film Selena.
Human rights in Mexico refers to moral principles or norms that describe certain standards of human behaviour in Mexico, and are regularly protected as legal rights in municipal and international law. The problems include torture, extrajudicial killings and summary executions, police repression, sexual murder, and, more recently, news reporter assassinations.
"Invalid Litter Dept." is a song by American rock band At the Drive-In, released in 2001 as the third single from the album Relationship of Command. The CD release in March 2001 came in a variety of international formats, including the standard two CDs in the United Kingdom. The Australian release included the UK B-sides from the two CD releases. "Invalid Litter Dept." is the band's highest charting single in the UK, peaking at No. 50 on the UK Singles Chart and No. 47 on the Scottish Singles Chart.
Alicia Gaspar de Alba is an American scholar, cultural critic, novelist, and poet whose works include historical novels and scholarly studies on Chicana/o art, culture and sexuality.
2666 is the last novel by Roberto Bolaño. It was released in 2004 as a posthumous novel, a year after Bolaño's death. It is over 1100 pages long in its original Spanish format. It is divided into five parts. An English-language translation by Natasha Wimmer was published in the United States in 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in the United Kingdom in 2009 by Picador. It is a fragmentary novel.
Sergio González Rodríguez was a Mexican journalist and writer who was best known for his works on the femicides in Ciudad Juárez from the 1990s to the 2000s, such as Huesos en el desierto and The Femicide Machine. González Rodríguez was a writer who worked in many literary genres, producing literary journalism or crónicas[es], novels, essays, and screenplays for documentaries. His writing was recognized with several awards in Mexico and Spain.
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico.
Violence and Activism at the Border is a book by University of Texas professor Kathleen Staudt, in which the author discusses violence against women in the border city Ciudad Juarez in Mexico.
María Guillermina (Guille) Valdes Villalva was a Chicana scholar and activist born in El Paso, Texas. She was considered an "authority" and "pioneer" on researching United States-Mexico border issues and had a "lifelong commitment to social justice."
Violence against women in Mexico includes different forms of gender-based violence. It may consist of emotional, physical, sexual, and/or mental abuse. The United Nations (UN) has rated Mexico as one of the most violent countries for women in the world. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography in Mexico (INEGI), 66.1 percent of all women ages 15 and older have experienced some kind of violence in their lives. Forty-nine percent have suffered from emotional violence; 29 percent have suffered from emotional-patrimonial violence or discrimination; 34 percent from physical violence; and 41.3 percent of women have suffered from sexual violence. Of the women who were assaulted in some form from 2015 to 2018, 93.7 percent did not seek help or report their attacks to authorities.
The 1917 Bath Riots occurred in January 1917 at the Santa Fe Street Bridge between El Paso, Texas, United States, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. The riots are known to have been started by Carmelita Torres and lasted from January 28 to January 30 and were sparked by new immigration policies at the El Paso–Juárez Immigration and Naturalization Service office, requiring Mexicans crossing the border to take de-lousing baths and be vaccinated. Reports that nude photographs of women bathers and fear of potential fire from the kerosene baths, led Carmelita Torres to refuse to submit to the procedure. Denied a refund of her transport fare, she began yelling at the officials and convinced other riders to join her. After three days, the discontent subsided, but the disinfections of Mexicans at the U.S. border continued for forty years.
Pedro Padilla Flores, also known as The Rio Bravo Assassin among many other aliases, is a Mexican serial killer who was convicted of killing three women in Ciudad Juárez but is suspected of murdering up to 27 more, some of whom were underage. He was captured and sentenced to prison time for three murders in 1986, but he escaped in 1990 and, after remaining a fugitive from justice, was recaptured in New Mexico and deported back to Ciudad Juárez. On January 24, 2014, ICE agents delivered Padilla to agents from the Mexican Ministerial Police. Currently, he is one of the main suspects in the unsolved femicides in Ciudad Juárez. He was a disorganized, sedentary, hedonistic murderer motivated by sexual compulsion and predatory behaviour.
Emma Pérez is an American author and professor, known for her work in queer Chicana feminist studies.
Julián Cardona was a Mexican photojournalist who was known for documenting poverty and violence in the city of Ciudad Juárez.
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