Download or read book Gender Violence at the U S Mexico Border written by HŽctor Dom’nguez-Ruvalcaba and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S.ÐMexico border is frequently presented by contemporary media as a violent and dangerous place. But that is not a new perception. For decades the border has been constructed as a topographic metaphor for all forms of illegality, in which an ineffable link between space and violence is somehow assumed. The sociological and cultural implications of violence have recently emerged at the forefront of academic discussions about the border. And yet few studies have been devoted to one of its most disturbing manifestations: gender violence. This book analyzes this pervasive phenomenon, including the femicides in Ciudad Ju‡rez that have come to exemplify, at least for the media, its most extreme manifestation. Contributors to this volume propose that the study of gender-motivated violence requires interpretive and analytical strategies that draw on methods reaching across the divide between the social sciences and the humanities. Through such an interdisciplinary conversation, the book examines how such violence is (re)presented in oral narratives, newspaper reports, films and documentaries, novels, TV series, and legal discourse. It also examines the role that the media have played in this process, as well as the legal initiatives that might address this pressing social problem. Together these essays offer a new perspective on the implications of, and connections between, gendered forms of violence and topics such as mechanisms of social violence, the micro-social effects of economic models, the asymmetries of power in local, national, and transnational configurations, and the particular rhetoric, aesthetics, and ethics of discourses that represent violence.

Download or read book Human Rights along the U S Mexico Border written by Kathleen Staudt and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2009-11-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much political oratory has been devoted to safeguarding America’s boundary with Mexico, but policies that militarize the border and criminalize immigrants have overshadowed the region’s widespread violence against women, the increase in crossing deaths, and the lingering poverty that spurs people to set out on dangerous northward treks. This book addresses those concerns by focusing on gender-based violence, security, and human rights from the perspective of women who live with both violence and poverty. From the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, scholars from both sides of the 2,000-mile border reflect expertise in disciplines ranging from international relations to criminal justice, conveying a more complex picture of the region than that presented in other studies. Initial chapters offer an overview of routine sexual assaults on women migrants, the harassment of Central American immigrants at the hands of authorities and residents, corruption and counterfeiting along the border, and near-death experiences of border crossers. Subsequent chapters then connect analysis with solutions in the form of institutional change, social movement activism, policy reform, and the spread of international norms that respect human rights as well as good governance. These chapters show how all facets of the border situation—globalization, NAFTA, economic inequality, organized crime, political corruption, rampant patriarchy—promote gendered violence and other expressions of hyper-masculinity. They also show that U.S. immigration policy exacerbates the problems of border violence—in marked contrast to the border policies of European countries. By focusing on women’s everyday experiences in order to understand human security issues, these contributions offer broad-based alternative approaches and solutions that address everyday violence and inattention to public safety, inequalities, poverty, and human rights. And by presenting a social and democratic international feminist framework to address these issues, they offer the opportunity to transform today’s security debate in constructive ways.

Download or read book Gendered Violence Along and at the U S Mexico Border written by Kimberly Lis Valladares and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In search for economic prosperity or better living conditions, Mexican women often search for work in maquiladoras (factories) along the Mexico border or migrate across to the United States. During this pursuit, many are physically, emotionally, and psychologically violated by various actors and are criminalized for migrating. Considering this, I will provide an analysis that examines the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the responses from (or lack thereof) the U.S. and Mexico governments regarding the migration of Mexican immigrant women. It is evident that, through undocumented and underpaid labor that benefits the U.S., and remittances that can bolster Mexico's economy, both states directly benefit from migration-- regardless of the immigrants being authorized or unauthorized by the state. Subsequently, this paper will examine how the U.S. and Mexico is complicit in the gendered violence along and at the U.S.-Mexico border. Using existing scholarship, I contribute to emerging immigration literature that examines gendered violence Mexican immigrant women experiences as a continuous cycle that extends throughout their entire journey, and often, continues once they are in the United States. Unlike past scholarship, these women's migration should not be investigated in isolation, but rather, through a holistic examination as they live and cross the borderlands. I find that this phenomenon repeatedly occurs to Mexican immigrant women when working at maquiladoras, extending to their interactions at the actual border because the U.S. and Mexican governments fail to sufficiently redress the issue, thus their compliance in this violence.

Download or read book Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas written by Michelle Téllez and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security. Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region—a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor. Téllez shows that in creating the community of Maclovio Rojas, residents have challenged prescriptive notions of nation and belonging. Through women’s active participation and leadership, a women’s political subjectivity has emerged—Maclovianas. These border women both contest and invoke their citizenship as they struggle to have their land rights recognized, and they transform traditional political roles into that of agency and responsibility. This book highlights the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a space of resistance, conviviality, agency, and creative community building where transformative politics can take place. It shows hope, struggle, and possibility in the context of gendered violences of racial capitalism on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Download or read book Violence and Activism at the Border written by Kathleen Staudt and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-06-03 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1993 and 2003, more than 370 girls and women were murdered and their often-mutilated bodies dumped outside Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua, Mexico. The murders have continued at a rate of approximately thirty per year, yet law enforcement officials have made no breakthroughs in finding the perpetrator(s). Drawing on in-depth surveys, workshops, and interviews of Juárez women and border activists, Violence and Activism at the Border provides crucial links between these disturbing crimes and a broader history of violence against women in Mexico. In addition, the ways in which local feminist activists used the Juárez murders to create international publicity and expose police impunity provides a unique case study of social movements in the borderlands, especially as statistics reveal that the rates of femicide in Juárez are actually similar to other regions of Mexico. Also examining how non-governmental organizations have responded in the face of Mexican law enforcement's "normalization" of domestic violence, Staudt's study is a landmark development in the realm of global human rights.

Download or read book Women and Change at the U S Mexico Border written by Doreen J. Mattingly and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There’s no denying that the U.S.–Mexico border region has changed in the past twenty years. With the emergence of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the curtailment of welfare programs, and more aggressive efforts by the United States to seal the border against undocumented migrants, the prospect of seeking a livelihood—particularly for women—has become more tenuous in the twenty-first century. In the face of the ironic juxtaposition of free trade and limited mobility, this book takes a new look at women on both sides of the border to portray them as active participants in the changing structures of life, often engaging in political struggles. The contributions—including several chapters by Mexican as well as U.S. scholars—examine environmental and socioeconomic conditions on the border as they shape and are shaped by both daily life at the local level and the global economy. The contributors focus on issues related to migration, both short- and long-term; empowerment, especially reflecting shifts in women’s consciousness in the workplace; and political and social activism in border communities. The chapters consider a broad range of topics, such as the changing gender composition of the maquiladora work force over the past decade and border women’s non-governmental organizations and political activism. In most of the studies, both sides of the border are considered to provide insights into differences created by an international boundary and similarities produced by cross-border interactions. Together, these chapters show the border region to be a dynamic social, economic, cultural, and political context in which women face both obstacles and opportunities for change—and make clear the vital role that women play in shaping the border region and their own lives. This collection builds on Susan Tiano and Vicki Ruiz’s groundbreaking volume Women on the U.S.–Mexico Border by continuing to show the human face of changes wrought by manufacturing and militarization. By illustrating the current state of social science research on gender and women’s lives in the region, it offers fresh perspectives on the material reality of women’s daily lives in this culturally and historically rich region.

Download or read book Women and Migration in the U S Mexico Borderlands written by Denise A. Segura and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminal essays on how women adapt to the structural transformations caused by the large migration from Mexico to the U.S.A., how they create or contest representations of their identities in light of their marginality, and give voice to their own agency.

Download or read book Birth in Times of Despair written by Carina Heckert and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2024-10-29 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores forms of maternal harm stemming from US policies on the US-Mexico border In El Paso, Texas, the racist undertones of anti-immigrant sentiment have contributed to various forms of violence in the region, including the 2019 mass shooting that was the deadliest attack on Latinos in US history. As the community continued to mourn this tragedy, the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed yet another set of economic, social, and public health catastrophes that were disproportionately felt within the border region. In Birth in Times of Despair, Carina Heckert traces women’s emotional experiences of pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period in the midst of a series of longstanding and ongoing crises in the US-Mexico border region. Drawing from interviews, surveys, and medical records of women who gave birth during an intense period of sociopolitical crisis, she examines how limited access to health care, inhumane immigration policies, and exposure to an array of harmful social environmental circumstances serve as sources of intense harm for pregnant and recently pregnant women. In so doing, Heckert reveals how these experiences serve as a profound critique of policies that continue to fail to protect women and their families. She concludes with suggestions for practical, humane, and urgent policy changes to alleviate the needless suffering of this vulnerable group. With its comprehensive portrait of the abysmal physical and mental health outcomes pregnant women face within the border region, Birth in Times of Despair expands our understanding of how obstetric violence is enhanced by the structural violence of the state, and unveils the urgency to ameliorate the harm caused by current immigration policies.

Download or read book Violence and Hope in a U S Mexico Border Town written by Jody Glittenberg and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Cultural Representations of Feminicidio at the US Mexico Border written by Nuala Finnegan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-18 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1990s, the repeated murders of women from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico have become something of a global cause célèbre. Cultural Representations of Feminicidio at the US-Mexico Border examines creative responses to these acts of violence. It reveals how theatre, art, film, fiction and other popular cultural forms seek to remember and mourn the female victims of violent death in the city at the same time as they interrogate the political, legal and societal structures that produce the crimes. Different chapters examine the varying art forms to engage with Ciudad Juárez’s feminicidal wave. Finnegan discusses Àlex Rigola’s theatrical adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 by Teatre Lliure in Barcelona as well as painting about the victims of feminicidio by Irish painter Brian Maguire. There is analysis of documentary film about Ciudad Juárez, including Lourdes Portillo’s acclaimed Señorita Extraviada (2001). The final chapter turns its attention to writing about feminicide and examines testimonial and crime fiction narratives like the mystery novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, among other examples. By drawing on a range of artistic responses to the murders in Ciudad Juárez, Cultural Representations of Feminicidio at the US-Mexico Border shows how art, film, theatre and fiction can unsettle official narratives about the crimes and undo the static paradigms that are frequently used to interpret them.

Download or read book Women On The U S Mexico Border written by Vicki Ruiz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book illuminates the reality of border women's lives and challenges the conventional notion that women need not work for wages because they are economically supported by men. It offers insight into the lives of undocumented women.

Download or read book Social Justice in the U S Mexico Border Region written by Mark Lusk and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S.-Mexico Border Region is among the poorest geographical areas in the United States. The region has been long characterized by dual development, poor infrastructure, weak schools, health disparities and low-wage employment. More recently, the region has been affected by the violence associated with a drug and crime war in Mexico. The premise of this book is that the U.S.-Mexico Border Region is subject to systematic oppression and that the so-called social pathologies that we see in the region are by-products of social and economic injustice in the form of labor exploitation, environmental racism, immigration militarism, institutional sexism and discrimination, health inequities, a political economy based on low-wage labor, and the globalization of labor and capital. The chapters address a variety of examples of injustice in the areas of environment, health disparity, migration unemployment, citizenship, women and gender violence, mental health, and drug violence. The book proposes a pathway to development.

Download or read book Border Bodies written by Bernadine Marie Hernández and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-03-10 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of sex, gender, sexual violence, and power along the border, Bernadine Marie Hernandez brings to light under-heard stories of women who lived in a critical era of American history. Elaborating on the concept of sexual capital, she uses little-known newspapers and periodicals, letters, testimonios, court cases, short stories, and photographs to reveal how sex, violence, and capital conspired to govern not only women's bodies but their role in the changing American Southwest. Hernandez focuses on a time when the borderlands saw a rapid influx of white settlers who encountered elite landholding Californios, Hispanos, and Tejanos. Sex was inseparable from power in the borderlands, and women were integral to the stabilization of that power. In drawing these stories from the archive, Hernandez illuminates contemporary ideas of sexuality through the lens of the borderland's history of expansionist, violent, and gendered conquest. By extension, Hernandez argues that Mexicana, Nuevomexicana, Californiana, and Tejana women were key actors in the formation of the western United States, even as they are too often erased from the region's story.

Download or read book Frontera Madre hood written by Cynthia Bejarano and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting on the concept of frontera madre(hood) as both a methodological and theoretical framework, this collection embodies the challenges and resiliency of mothering along both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. More than thirty contributors examine how mothering is shaped by the geopolitics of border zones, which also transcends biological, sociological, or cultural and gendered tropes regarding ideas of motherhood, who can mother, and what mothering personifies.

Download or read book Sociocultural Consequences of Free Trade written by Elvia R Arriola and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claudia Ivette-González might still be alive if her employers had not turned her away. The 20-year-old resident of Ciudad Juárez - the Mexican city abutting El Paso, Texas - arrived at her assembly plant job four minutes late one day in October 2001. After management refused to let her into the factory, she started home on foot. A month later, her corpse was discovered buried in a field near a busy Juárez intersection. Next to her lay the bodies of seven other young women. [FN2] The “maquiladora murders” have become a popular subject for writing and activism by feminists, as well as the inspiration for numerous forms of art, [FN3] literary fiction [FN4] and commentaries, [FN5] international conferences, [FN6] movies, [FN7] and marches [FN8] on both sides of the border. A 2004 conference held at the University of California-Los Angeles entitled “Maquiladora Murders” [FN9] drew worldwide attention [FN10] to the cases of hundreds of young Mexican women who worked in maquiladoras - American-owned transnational factories - and met untimely, often brutal deaths. Who killed them is still a mystery. [FN11] What is not a mystery is that incidents of domestic violence and femicide [FN12] in Ciudad Juárez [FN13] have risen in the wake of heavy industrialization along the border; that industrialization was a result of the signing of the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

Download or read book More or Less Dead written by Alice Driver and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, people disappear, their bodies dumped in deserted city lots or jettisoned in the unforgiving desert. All too many of them are women. More or Less Dead analyzes how such violence against women has been represented in news media, books, films, photography, and art. Alice Driver argues that the various cultural reports often express anxiety or criticism about how women traverse and inhabit the geography of Ciudad Juárez and further the idea of the public female body as hypersexualized. Rather than searching for justice, the various media—art, photography, and even graffiti—often reuse victimized bodies in sensationalist, attention-grabbing ways. In order to counteract such views, local activists mark the city with graffiti and memorials that create a living memory of the violence and try to humanize the victims of these crimes. The phrase “more or less dead” was coined by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in his novel 2666, a penetrating fictional study of Juárez. Driver explains that victims are “more or less dead” because their bodies are never found or aren’t properly identified, leaving families with an uncertainty lasting for decades—or forever. The author’s clear, precise journalistic style tackles the ethics of representing feminicide victims in Ciudad Juárez. Making a distinction between the words “femicide” (the murder of girls or women) and “feminicide” (murder as a gender-driven event), one of her interviewees says, “Women are killed for being women, and they are victims of masculine violence because they are women. It is a crime of hate against the female gender. These are crimes of power.”

Download or read book Border Identifications written by Pablo Vila and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-06-03 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From poets to sociologists, many people who write about life on the U.S.-Mexico border use terms such as "border crossing" and "hybridity" which suggest that a unified culture—neither Mexican nor American, but an amalgamation of both—has arisen in the borderlands. But talking to people who actually live on either side of the border reveals no single commonly shared sense of identity, as Pablo Vila demonstrated in his book Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Instead, people living near the border, like people everywhere, base their sense of identity on a constellation of interacting factors that includes regional identity, but also nationality, ethnicity, and race. In this book, Vila continues the exploration of identities he began in Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders by looking at how religion, gender, and class also affect people's identifications of self and "others" among Mexican nationals, Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, Anglos, and African Americans in the Cuidad Juárez-El Paso area. Among the many fascinating issues he raises are how the perception that "all Mexicans are Catholic" affects Mexican Protestants and Pentecostals; how the discourse about proper gender roles may feed the violence against women that has made Juárez the "women's murder capital of the world"; and why class consciousness is paradoxically absent in a region with great disparities of wealth. His research underscores the complexity of the process of social identification and confirms that the idealized notion of "hybridity" is only partially adequate to define people's identity on the U.S.-Mexico border.