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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. [1]
The book was generally well-received within academic and border-activist circles, [2] with one review commending the interdisciplinary and intersectional framework that Staudt took in her analysis. [3]
In the introduction of the book, Staudt states that the book “contains conceptual, empirical and strategic analyses of interest to multiple audiences concerned with violence, borders, activism, and women and gender.” [4]
She does this by composing a review on existing knowledge of violence to women in Ciudad Juarez, showing data surveys from the survivors of violence in the city, looking at who exactly are the victims, how they reacted, their reasoning to how the violence happened and how much do they fear for their safety in their home.
Chapter Four is more concerned to how activism from local and transnational feminist organizations spread awareness to the violent situation in the border city with its biggest protest in 2004 bringing in approximately 5,000 to 8,000 people to protest against femicide (the murders of women being unsolved and ignored by local law enforcement). This was the peak of the movement but it did bring necessary change as law enforcement in Ciudad Juarez did step up to the concerns of the community and the activists of human rights groups. [5]
Chapter Five is where Staudt looks at the changes and provides an analysis if it is just weak attempts to try and calm activists and community members of their concerns. There has been better enforcement than before but the situation is still very much a depressing one for the safety of women in Ciudad Juarez. [6]
One conclusion that Staudt makes in her book is how neoliberal economic policy has created an environment beside the United States where there are large maquiladoras that provide massive employment but with only 25-50 dollars a week being paid to these workers, putting many in the city into poverty. Violence is more likely in poverty since there is lack of control and added stress of being in poverty. This is why there's greater numbers of violence below the poverty line. Add that with the law enforcement in Ciudad Juarez not being concerned about the well-being of women in the city, having a culture of violence to women being the norm.
With activism having put more pressure towards the government, Staudt shows the changes the government has made could be much better but many Mexican politicians and bureaucrats have been timid in making too much changes in fear of angering the male population in, making the changes for women's safety in Mexico to be slow but steady.
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. The crimes have featured in many dramas, songs, and books.
Femicide or feminicide is a term for the killing of females because of their sex. 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.
Gendercide is the systematic killing of members of a specific gender. The term is related to the general concepts of assault and murder against victims due to their gender, with violence against men and women being problems dealt with by human rights efforts. Gendercide shares similarities with the term 'genocide' in inflicting mass murders; however, gendercide targets solely one gender, being men or women. Politico-military frameworks have historically inflicted militant-governed divisions between femicide and androcide; gender-selective policies increase violence on gendered populations due to their socioeconomic significance. Certain cultural and religious sentiments have also contributed to multiple instances of gendercide across the globe.
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.
Violence against women in Guatemala reached severe levels during the long-running Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996), and the continuing impact of that conflict has contributed to the present high levels of violence against women in that nation. During the armed conflict, rape was used as a weapon of war.
Frontera Women's Foundation (FWF) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization operating in El Paso, Texas, United States, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Frontera Women's Foundation states its goal is "promoting positive social change for women and girls along the border" and focuses its campaign on community service and issues of women's rights at the family, community, and organizational level. The FWF supports grassroots organizations on the U.S.–Mexico border. The region extends from Southern New Mexico, through El Paso County, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, to Brownsville, Texas. The Frontera Women's Foundation supports these organizations by providing grants to groups that support women and girls struggling with issues such as low socio-economic status, gender bias, and ethnic bias.
Feminism in Mexico is the philosophy and activity aimed at creating, defining, and protecting political, economic, cultural, and social equality in women's rights and opportunities for Mexican women. Rooted in liberal thought, the term feminism came into use in late nineteenth-century Mexico and in common parlance among elites in the early twentieth century. The history of feminism in Mexico can be divided chronologically into a number of periods with issues. For the conquest and colonial eras, some figures have been re-evaluated in the modern era and can be considered part of the history of feminism in Mexico. At the time of independence in the early nineteenth century, there were demands that women be defined as citizens. The late nineteenth century saw the explicit development of feminism as an ideology. Liberalism advocated secular education for both girls and boys as part of a modernizing project, and women entered the workforce as teachers. Those women were at the forefront of feminism, forming groups that critiqued existing treatment of women in the realms of legal status, access to education, and economic and political power. More scholarly attention is focused on the Revolutionary period (1915–1925), although women's citizenship and legal equality were not explicitly issues for which the revolution was fought. The Second Wave and the post-1990 period have also received considerable scholarly attention. Feminism has advocated for the equality of men and women, but middle-class women took the lead in the formation of feminist groups, the founding of journals to disseminate feminist thought, and other forms of activism. Working-class women in the modern era could advocate within their unions or political parties. The participants in the Mexico 68 clashes who went on to form that generation's feminist movement were predominantly students and educators. The advisers who established themselves within the unions after the 1985 earthquakes were educated women who understood the legal and political aspects of organized labor. What they realized was that to form a sustained movement and attract working-class women to what was a largely middle-class movement, they needed to utilize workers' expertise and knowledge of their jobs to meld a practical, working system. In the 1990s, women's rights in indigenous communities became an issue, particularly in the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Reproductive rights remain an ongoing issue, particularly since 1991, when the Catholic Church in Mexico was no longer constitutionally restricted from being involved in politics.
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.
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.
Kathleen Staudt is a former professor of political science at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she held an endowed professorship for western hemispheric trade policy studies. Her courses focused on topics such as public policy, borders, democracy, leadership and civic engagement, and women and politics. After retiring on September 1, 2017, she became Professor Emerita.
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 of them did not seek help or report their attacks to authorities.
Ni una menos is a Latin American fourth-wave grassroots feminist movement, which started in Argentina and has spread across several Latin American countries, that campaigns against gender-based violence. This mass mobilization comes as a response to various systemic issues that proliferate violence against women. In its official website, Ni una menos defines itself as a "collective scream against machista violence." The campaign was started by a collective of Argentine female artists, journalists and academics, and has grown into "a continental alliance of feminist forces". Social media was an essential factor in the propagation of the Ni Una Menos movement to other countries and regions. The movement regularly holds protests against femicides, but has also touched on topics such as gender roles, sexual harassment, gender pay gap, sexual objectification, legality of abortion, sex workers' rights and transgender rights.
Julián Cardona was a Mexican photojournalist who was known for documenting poverty and violence in the city of Ciudad Juárez.
María del Carmen Gayón Córdova is a Mexican artist. Her work is primarily focussed on engraving, however she also explores other techniques, such as relief, book illustration and wire sculptures. Together with Nunik Sauret, she was one of the few people dedicated to the production of bookplates in the eighties in Mexico, a stamp particular owners to mark their books as property which is part of a Mexican tradition linked to bibliophiles and collectors. This link between printmaking, art and books reveals another aspect of her work linked to both historical research and publication design.
Femicide, broadly defined as the murder of a woman motivated by gender, is a prevalent issue in Latin America. In 2016, 14 of the top 25 nations with the highest global femicide rates were Latin American or Caribbean states. In 2021, 4,445 women were recorded victims of femicide in the region, translating to the gender-based murder of about one woman every two hours in Latin America.
An antimonumenta was installed in front of the Palace of Fine Arts, in Mexico City on 8 March 2019, the date commemorating International Women's Day, during the annual march of women protesting against gender violence.
Mexico has one of the world's highest femicide rates, with as many as 3% of murder victims being classified as femicides. In 2021, approximately 1,000 femicides took place, out of 34,000 total murder victims. Ciudad Juárez, in Chihuahua, has one of the highest rates of femicide within the country.
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