I’m a member of a solidarity group (Sydney Action for
Juárez) which formed several years ago when Mexican feminists called
for international action about the extreme form of violence against women that
had developed in Ciudad Juárez on Mexico’s northern border. In October 2012, together with a
colleague from SAfJ, I had the opportunity to pay a short visit to the city and
talk with activists and researchers there. I was speaking at the annual conference of AMEGH, the Mexican
association for men’s studies.
The city reminds me of outback towns at home, but
bigger. We flew over some sandy desert on the way from Mexico City; the immediate area is arid, what
Australians would call scrub country, with few trees. I can imagine it very hot in summer.
There is money in the city. From the aeroplane you can see some areas with larger houses
and backyard swimming pools. The maquila export factories that have
driven the city’s recent growth require capital to set
up and keep running, and a middle class of managers and technical experts. A
city of over a million people needs services, so there is a university, a
school system, hospitals, public sector administrators.
Some of the money flows to the workers; that is, after all, why people migrate in. Their wages
sustain the city’s night life, restaurants, transport and supermarkets. But it’s far from a workers’
paradise. The urban sprawl seems
to have few amenities, the small houses are closely packed, and you couldn’t
grow your own vegetables in this country. The city is newly expanded and some
of it feels raw. Wages in the factories are low - the reason foreign capital is attracted here.
The town was founded centuries ago by the Spanish
conquerors when they expanded north.
It became an important border post after the United States in turn
grabbed what had been the northern half of independent Mexico in the 1840s. Juárez City played a significant role in
the revolution, Pancho Villa was based in the region. It became a main site of US/Mexico trade
through the 20th century, and there is still tremendous truck
traffic. We felt a touch of the
tradition when the conference organizers took us to lunch in a Mexican
restaurant, complete with guitar group in costume who came in from the street -
and went out again because nobody wanted to listen.
The city grew very fast very recently, with the advent of
the maquilas and the inflow of labour
from the south. Swathes of
factories are visible from the air, surrounded by trucks. We were told the industry is in slight
decline and the city population with it.
It’s still twice the size of El Paso across the US border.
My colleague and I had two meetings with the peak
organization of women’s politics in the city, the Red Mesa de Mujeres (Women’s
Round Table, website here). It’s
clear that there has been a major local organizing effort recently. The Red and the action groups and NGOs
represented in it show impressive political and fundraising capability. We know women’s organizing has been
difficult in the past, given the level of intimidation from violent men, and
hostility from the authorities. The
publicity about femicide, including a major human rights investigation, has
produced some change in the political equation, but most of the credit goes to
local activists.
We talked with the Red’s organizers about the forms of
international solidarity that could be locally useful, especially helping to
develop educational programmes around gender equality.
We also visited the centre named for Esther
Chavez, the brave woman who first denounced the femicide in public. Casa Amiga (website here) is a
remarkable support centre in one of the working-class districts, combining
medical, legal, counselling and child care services, and more. We met the director who showed us over
the centre, and at the end of the day had a companionable meal with the staff,
and a photo-op out the front. Casa
Amiga struck me as a practical group with feet firmly on the ground. They spoke of episodes of intimidation
they had to weather. They seemed to have strong community connections, providing services that were badly
needed – for children and men as well as for adult women. The have also produced some terrific posters - one is shown in the photo.
The congress was held at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a
public-sector research institute concerned with social issues in the frontier
region, which has branches in several cities. The conference theme was “men and the politics of violence”;
I gave the keynote address on our second morning in the city. I'm most grateful to the conference organizers for the opportunity to be there. There were papers on a good range of
issues which can be seen on the conference website here. We held a workshop on research methods
in studies of men and masculinity, which was well attended and very keenly
engaged. The congress ended with a
panel discussion about men’s work for gender equality, in Mexico and
internationally. I was sorry my
Spanish is so fragmentary, as I think there is a lot to learn from Mexican
experience.
The great Mexican festival of the Day of the Dead was coming
up – there were fireworks already, and decorative altars were being built. The congress had its own Day of the
Dead altar, with a sign remembering 9500 killings in the region in the last five
years. (The last few years have
seen “wars” among the drug cartels, and between them and the Mexican
government.) The only other sign
of the violence we saw was a truckload of Policía Federal, in black like a
commando detachment, sitting with their sub-machine guns and helmets ready for
instant deployment. We were told that most of the federal police had been
withdrawn from the city and the rate of killings had gone down this year. We
were very carefully looked after by local colleagues during the visit; I
confess I was still scared.
We were not making a research visit, but still tried to
understand why this city became a site of femicide. So much social upheaval, and so much violence among men, must be relevant. The presence of
armed groups including the police and cartels (which are basically private
armies built from unemployed young men) must be part of the explanation. Guns are easily available (the
incredible US gun industry is just across the border), and Mexican national
statistics show most murdered women are killed with guns. There is a vulnerable workforce in the maquilas, with their preference for
un-unionized women, uprooted by migration and short of social support or
community protection. There is a
raw, tough environment. Two of the
main sources of wealth are both male-dominated and unstable – long-distance
transport, and the drug trade.
There is also the border itself, which has become
increasingly militarized. This
isn’t just post-9/11; a toxic anti-latino politics already existed in the US
south-west and west. I’ve read
some interesting sociological work about the kind of society that has grown up
on the Mexican side of the border.
Most people are not trying to infiltrate across to the land of the
free. But the constant presence of
the securitized, armed barrier across the land must add some craziness to the
local scene.
The femicide, it seems to me, doesn’t grow out of
“traditional” machismo here, because this isn’t a traditional community. It’s a profoundly modern city,
transformed by neoliberalism. (The North American Free Trade Agreement is part of this, but the violence
was happening before NAFTA came into force.) The femicide is certainly a brutal assertion of male
dominance, but this looks more like the building of a new patriarchy than the
reproduction of an old one. If
that is right, the Juárez City story is even more alarming, because it shows violence
against women need not go away even if old patriarchal traditions have gone. De
te Fabula narratur.
