Content area
Full Text
On July 7, 1995, seventeen-year-old Silvia Morales left for school and disappeared. Her body was found two months later. In February 1999 thirteen-year-old Irma Angelica Resales was sent home from her factory job for having left her station. Later that day her body was found in a drainage canal. In September 2001 nineteen-year-old Luna Guadalupe, a student in business administration, disappeared on the way to a friend s house on a Saturday afternoon. The next month twenty-year-old Claudia Gonzalez arrived to work four minutes late, and the doors of the maquiladora, or foreign-owned assembly plant, were locked. She never returned home. Both Luna and Claudia were found in November in a shallow grave with six other women-all eight women had been raped and strangled.1
Since 1993 murdered bodies of young women and girls have haunted Ciudad Juarez, the border town that lies across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. By mid-2002 an estimated three hundred women had been murdered, and more women are missing. Rosa Linda Fregoso states:
Mexican women have been brutally and systematically killed in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. . . . Many [of the victims] have been tortured and sexually violated: raped, strangled or gagged. Mutilated, with nipples and breasts cut off, buttocks lacerated like cattle, or penetrated with objects.2
After being dumped in desert gullies or vacant lots, their decomposed bodies are often unidentifiable. Almost a third of the cases seem to follow a pattern suggesting they are the work of one or more serial killers. Most of these victims are young, slender women with long dark hair; they are also poor. These murders are the most extreme form of a general violence against women in the border city. In the first nine months of 1998 alone, women in Juarez reported eight hundred cases of rape and over nine thousand cases of violence, including rape, kidnapping, and domestic violence.3
Why have there been so many cases of mysogynic violence in the last decade in Juarez? Chandra Talpade Mohanty argues in Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity that because globalization has complicated class relations nationally and internationally, "issues of spatial economy . . . gain fundamental importance for feminist analysis." She defines these...